Lupe was the first to move, she lunged forwards and used one hand to shove the landlord into Oz’s arms, while simultaneously summoning an inky shadow dagger to strike the Jinn. It was an efficient decision, and one that saved the larger man’s life. For the once businessman next to him had grotesquely transformed into some kind of bipedal lizard. Its spine arching and lengthening as pale scales forced their way through split skin, the jaw dislocating into something avian shaped.

  The transformation was unfinished, clumsy, but Lupe did not wait for it to complete; her blade was already buried at its throat, sawing through flesh that resisted like wet leather.

  They grappled for a moment, with Lupe trying to deliver as much damage as she could while it forced her off, eventually the young woman was pushed away but not before she had inflicted a strong gash against the white, scaly skin on the Jinn’s neck. The Jinn seemed angry enough to glare at her, but also smart enough to keep its distance from her while they sized each other up.

  “Likely Grade 2.” Said Lupe aloud, “Intelligent enough to pass for a human, but not strong enough to surpass one.”

  She turned to face her supervisor, not afraid of showing her back to the enemy. “I’ll kill it now, if you’re happy to babysit the doughball?”

  Oz nodded, as always he was happy to avoid fighting and let Lupe handle the grunt work. She doubted he was scared, after all he’s a Senior Agent, so it was more likely that the old man was just lazy. Or he enjoyed watching her get into fights, and possible end up hurt, either way he sucked as a supervisor. Lupe Shadoll would have preferred Nevaeh, Primrose or even that other one she hadn’t met yet. Anything would be better than this apathetic caveman.

  Attempting to seize the initiative, the now fully transformed bird-snake hybrid threw itself at the woman's turned back, it’s beak impossibly agape ready to snatch Lupe’s head from her shoulders. Still facing Oz, the Shadoll princess drove a shadowy knife through the creature's eyes without looking... Well, that wasn’t technically true, she had used the Jinn’s shadow on the floor as reference, but it seemed to have the intended effect.

  Oz and the landlord looked at her in amazement as she pivoted, dropped to the floor and swept the monsters feet from underneath it even while it was still reeling from the stiletto embedded within its head.

  If she had to use her hidden ace against the rank 4 from the car dealership and activate Tenebrism when dealing with the rank 3 at the warehouse, then she didn’t need to use anything to deal with this one... Besides from the passive effect of summoning shadow weapons that came from Tenebrism.

  The creature hit the floor hard, but it did not stay there. Its chest expanded grotesquely as its ribs flexed outward beneath the scales, the beak snapping wider still as if its skull had forgotten the limits of bone. Then the sound came. A piercing, metallic shriek tore through the room, not loud in the conventional sense but violently sharp, like a blade dragged across glass. The snakeskin walls quivered in response, and Lupe felt the vibration stab straight through her skull. Her body stiffened involuntarily as the noise punched through her balance, forcing her to stagger back a single step. The world lurched sideways. For a moment all she could hear was a high ringing whine drowning out everything else.

  The Jinn seized the opening immediately. Its taloned feet slammed against the floor as it surged forward, wings of stretched membrane snapping outward for balance while its elongated neck speared toward her like a striking serpent. Half-blind and disoriented, Lupe barely caught the blur of motion in her peripheral vision. The creature’s claws raked toward her midsection while the ruined eye socket bled darkly down its scaled face, the stiletto still lodged deep inside. It fought like something that understood pain but simply did not care about it.

  Lupe cursed under her breath as she stumbled another half step, forcing herself to steady her footing while the ringing in her ears refused to fade. Showing off had been stupid. Turning her back, making the joke, acting like the fight was already finished. She could practically feel Oz watching from behind her while she tried to recover her senses. Idiot. The thought snapped through her mind with sharp irritation. Grade 2 or not, a Jinn was still a Jinn. She clenched her jaw and forced the dizziness aside with stubborn focus.

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  Something shifted across the left side of her face.

  The skin along her cheek parted like an opening seam, and a third eye slowly unfolded within the split flesh. Its sclera entirely black, and the pupil seemingly replaced with a nuclear green circle containing three dots.

  Lupe’s body snapped forward the instant the new eye opened, the momentary disorientation vanishing beneath a surge of precise clarity. The creature’s shadow stretched across the floor toward her feet, every twitch of its limbs mapped perfectly in the green-lit vision blooming across the side of her face. She stepped inside the strike rather than away from it, letting the talons scrape uselessly across the air where she had just been. Her right hand straightened into a rigid spear as the inky shadow around her forearm condensed into a thin, needle-like sheath. Then she drove it upward in a single brutal thrust. The reinforced hand punched through the soft underside of the creature’s beak, pierced the roof of its skull, and burst out through the crown of its head in a spray of dark blood and shattered bone. The Jinn’s body seized mid-lunge, momentum carrying it half a step further before the strength drained from its limbs and the massive frame collapsed sideways onto the snakeskin floor, the last rasp of its broken throat fading into silence.

  Lortum stepped forward, passing the trembling landlord into the corner before crouching beside the corpse. He pressed two fingers into the split skull where Lupe’s strike had burst through. Instead of resistance, the blade-slit bone crumbled slightly under the pressure. Beneath the fractured shell there was almost nothing. No brain matter. No proper tissue. Only dry, fibrous strands clinging to the inside like the remains of a cocoon.

  “Ah,” he said quietly.

  Lupe glanced over her shoulder. “Don’t tell me that thing’s getting back up.”

  “It won’t.” Lortum withdrew his hand, examining the flakes of scale that had broken loose onto his glove. “Because this was never the creature in the first place.”

  The landlord made a choked sound from the wall. “What the hell does that mean?”

  Lortum rose slowly, brushing the fragments of scale from his glove as he regarded the corpse with mild disappointment. “It means,” he said evenly, “that what you rented this room to was not the creature we just killed. It was something growing one.” He nudged the shattered skull with the toe of Oz’s shoe, exposing more of the hollow interior. Dry fibres peeled away like old insulation. “When the transformation completed, it discarded the body. What attacked us was the residue… a defensive husk.”

  Lupe stared down at the carcass, unimpressed. “So, we fought its trash.”

  “In essence,” Lortum replied. “Though the trash still had teeth, a brain and a soul of some kind.”

  The landlord made another weak noise from the corner, glancing between the body and the walls as if they might suddenly animate. “You’re telling me… that thing was living here? Growing here?”

  “Not living,” Lortum corrected, walking slowly along the perimeter of the room. His fingers brushed the snakeskin lining again, this time with more scrutiny. “More like... a sentry I suppose?” Several of the skins had begun to sag now that the husk was dead, the adhesive or resin holding them to the walls loosening. One strip peeled free entirely and slid down to the floor with a soft, papery rasp. Beneath it the plaster was scored with deep gouges, as though something had repeatedly scraped its way out of a confined shell.

  Lupe crouched beside the corpse and yanked the stiletto from its ruined eye socket with a wet crunch. “Grade two my ass,” she muttered, wiping the blade on the creature’s scales before letting the shadow weapon dissolve. “If the real one’s spawning these things, it’ll be at the level of a grade 4.”

  “Possibly,” Lortum said, though his tone suggested the thought did not concern him as much as it should have. He paused beside the far wall where several layers of snakeskin had begun sloughing away together. With a short tug he pulled them down, revealing a dark oval opening carved directly into the plaster behind them. The hole led upward into the ceiling cavity, its edges worn smooth by repeated passage.

  The landlord followed the direction of Lortum’s gaze and went pale. “That wasn’t there before.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” Lupe saiddryly. “You’d have charged it extra rent.”

  Lortum leaned closer to the opening, inhaling faintly as if scent alone might offer an answer. For the first time since entering the room he felt a trace of spiritual residue returning to the air, thin and distant like smoke after a fire had already burned out. The Grudge was flowing back into the space now that the nest had been abandoned. It carried with it the faintest directional pull.

  “Two weeks,” he murmured.

  Lupe looked up. “What?”

  “You said the tenant disappeared two weeks ago,” Lortum continued, glancing briefly toward the landlord. “Which means the moulting completed around that time. The creature left shortly afterward.” He gestured toward the hole in the ceiling. “Whatever it became… it did not remain here.”

  Lupe pushed herself to her feet with a faint sigh, rolling her shoulders as the last of the ringing faded from her ears. “Great. So, in short, we showed up just in time to kill the leftovers.” She jerked her chin toward the opening above them. “You want me to chase it?”

  Lortum’s eyes lingered on the dark tunnel for a moment longer before he shook his head. “No. If it matured two weeks ago, we would not find it crawling through the rafters.” He glanced toward the ajar door on the far side of the room, where the lights of New Europe flickered. “Creatures that go to such lengths to prepare a nest rarely remain near it; this was probably a last gift to its child slash moult. The real one is going to be building a new home for itself.”

  Lupe followed his gaze toward the city skyline, the faint irritation on her face sharpening into something more focused. “Then where would it go?”

  Lortum smiled faintly, as though the question amused him. “Well, if I was a Jinn, my nest would be somewhere with people.”