The door opened onto a narrow corridor, then a stairwell, then a fire door that pushed out onto a side street. The evening air hit me first.

I stopped.

London smelled like it was rotting. Exhaust fumes and damp stone and something underneath that, organic and sour, the accumulated breath of eight million people crammed onto a riverbank and calling it civilization. Thirty days in Hell and my sinuses had recalibrated entirely. The sulphur at least had the decency to smell like something that made sense.

Miriam had handed us clothes before we left. Practical things, civilian things: jeans, plain tops, coats that sat stiff on the shoulder from being folded in a storage box. Mine was dark green and too long in the sleeve.

Aria held the hem of her oversized grey jumper away from her body with both hands and stared at it.

“They can’t be serious,” she said.

“They’re serious,” I said.

“There’s no shape to it. I could be anything under here. I could be a coat rack under here.”

“That,” Isabella said, adjusting her collar with two fingers, “is probably the intention.”

Aria let the fabric drop. She pulled it tight at the waist with one hand, examining the result, then let it go again with an expression of genuine mourning.

The street was narrow, residential at one end and commercial at the other, the kind of London block that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. Amber light from the street lamps. A bus passing at the far end, the diesel rumble of it arriving a second before it appeared. Aria tracked it with her eyes, and then a black cab turned the corner behind it, and she grabbed my arm.

“It moved by itself.”

“I see it.”

“There’s no horse. There’s no—what’s pulling it?”

“Aria.” Isabella’s voice was measured, a half-step below actually sharp. “You look like you’ve never seen a city before.”

“I haven’t seen this city before.”

“You look like you’ve never seen a city.”

Aria shut her mouth. She watched the cab complete the turn and disappear, and her expression settled into something that was trying very hard to be casual and not quite getting there. Her tail would have been doing something expressive. Under the coat, I had no way to know.

“Self-propelled carriages,” she said, at a more reasonable volume. “Using what, enchanted mechanisms?”

“Combustion engines, mostly.” I stopped.

They were both looking at me.

“What?” I said.

“How,” Aria said slowly, “do you know what’s in a mortal carriage.”

The pause lasted about a quarter-second too long. I felt it go by.

“I was an engineer,” I said. “Mortal life. Remember? I told you.”

Aria’s eyes narrowed, not suspiciously, just recalibrating. Then she groaned and turned back toward the street. “I keep forgetting you were a boring mortal.”

“Mechanical knowledge is not boring,” Isabella said, and she almost sounded like she meant it.

“So.” Aria spun on her heel to face me. “What do we actually do? We have until tomorrow night. That’s hours, Lily. Hours of mortal London.”

“We could split up,” I said. “Cover more ground, work out what’s where. Meet somewhere in a few hours.”

“I know what I want to do.” She pointed down toward the commercial end of the street, where shop fronts were still lit. “Clothes. Real ones. Ones that acknowledge I have a body.”

“You don’t have local currency.”

She looked at me as if I’d said something embarrassing.

“Lily.” She put a hand on my arm with the patient gravity of someone explaining something fundamental. “We’re succubi. Mortals will empty their pouches for the chance to become our next meal. The currency works itself out.”

“She’s right,” Isabella said. “It’s honestly quite sad how reliably it works.”

I thought about pointing out the ethical dimension of that and then didn’t, because I knew what I’d thought when I’d looked at Charles. Something steady. Even. The kind that sat warm.

“Fine,” I said. “But we split first. Figure out what’s around us, get a sense of the area.”

“And then?” Aria asked.

“Then we meet.” I looked at Isabella.

She had already been scanning the street, cataloguing. She named a junction two blocks east, a place with enough foot traffic to locate each other without standing in the open. “Two hours,” she said. “And I should not have to say this, but the wisps will not work here. If you are late, I am not looking for you.”

Aria raised her hand like she had a question.

“I won’t look for you either,” Isabella added.

“I wasn’t going to ask that.” She paused. “I was going to ask if I could keep the phone thing.”

* * *

The street I needed was ten minutes south, and I walked it without looking at anything I didn’t have to.

The city was doing what cities do at this hour on a Saturday, which meant groups spilling out of pubs, someone’s takeaway bag rustling in a bin, a couple arguing in front of a newsagent with the door still open. None of it required attention. I’d walked this exact route enough times that my feet found the turns before I consciously decided to make them.

That was its own kind of unsettling.

The building looked the same. Of course it did. Twenty-nine days in Hell and the brickwork hadn’t shifted, the intercom panel still had the same smudge across unit seven, the skip someone had parked half on the pavement three weeks before I left was gone but everything else remained in its place. I stopped on the pavement and looked up at the seventh floor.

Dark. Which meant nothing, either way.

The front entrance needed a fob I didn’t have. I waited forty seconds until a woman I vaguely recognised from the second floor came out with a buggy, and I caught the door and smiled at her and she smiled back and didn’t think twice about it, because people don’t, and because this face produces a particular kind of response in people that I’ve mostly stopped noticing.

The lift. I took the stairs because the lift had a camera and I didn’t know if anyone was actively watching the building. Probably not. A missing person after a month, no sign of foul play, the kind of case that sits in a folder while something more urgent takes priority. Still. Stairs were quieter.

Seven flights, and I didn’t breathe hard at the top, which was another thing I’d stopped noticing.

The corridor was empty. My door was at the far end, plain as it had always been, and I walked to it and stood in front of it and looked at the frame.

The spare key had always lived at the top, pressed flat into a gap where a strip of decorative wood had split away from the frame years ago and never been repaired. I’d tucked a spare in there the week after moving in, on the basis that future-me might need it. Though I hadn’t anticipated which future that would turn out to be.

The gap was about thirty centimetres above where my hands were.

I looked at it. I looked at my hands.

As Liam I could have reached it with my arm above my head, no thought required. I was not dramatically short, I knew that, but the couple of centimetres I’d lost were apparently exactly the centimetres that mattered. I stretched. My fingers found smooth paintwork two inches below the gap.

I jumped for it.

Missed.

Jumped again, caught the frame with my fingertips, felt the split wood, no key.

It was still there. I could feel the edge of it. I got my fingers properly around the gap on the third attempt and dragged the key out, and it dropped, and I caught it before it hit the carpet, which was at least one thing that went correctly.

The key fit. It turned. The lock gave with the same slightly stiff resistance I’d been meaning to fix for two years.

I stood in the doorway.

The air inside was stale in the way apartments go stale when nobody’s opened a window in a month. The curtains were the way I’d left them. The grey sofa, the media unit, the bookshelf in the corner with the engineering textbooks sitting exactly where I’d put them.

My flat.

I stepped inside.

* * *

I closed the door behind me and stood there for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness.

Nothing looked disturbed. The kitchen counter was clear, the grey sofa sat exactly where it always had, the bookshelf still held the same engineering texts I’d accumulated during university. Even the remote sat on the arm of the sofa where I’d left it.

Except it didn’t feel lived in.

I walked to the window and checked the sill. No dust. I ran a finger along the top of the media unit. Clean.

Someone had been here.

I moved to the desk where my computer setup had been. The monitor cables were still there, snaking down behind the unit. The tower was gone. Police, probably. Standard procedure for a missing person case—check the digital footprint, see if there was anything to explain where I’d gone or what I’d been doing.

The fridge next. I pulled it open and the interior light came on, revealing empty shelves. Someone had cleared out everything perishable. The seal released without the faint smell of rot I’d expected. I closed it and checked the cupboards. Pasta, rice, tinned soup, all still there. Everything that would keep.

Daniel, maybe. He had a spare key. Or Faith, though that raised more questions than it answered.

Why would she come back here? We’d broken up. She’d made it clear she didn’t want to see me again. And yet she had my phone now, which meant someone had given it to her, or she’d taken it herself. Neither option made sense.

I crouched by the sofa and reached underneath, feeling for the tear in the fabric near the back corner. My fingers found the split, worked inside, pulled out the small plastic bag I’d taped to the frame years ago. Five hundred pounds in twenties, emergency money I’d kept on the basis that banks were sometimes closed when you needed them.

The ring flashed as I opened it mentally and the bundle disappeared. The backup phone from the bedroom drawer followed it thirty seconds later, the old model I’d kept in case my main one broke or got stolen.

I stood and looked around again.

No letters piled by the door. No forwarded mail sitting on the counter. Someone had dealt with that too, which meant they’d been here recently, and more than once.

But there was nothing that told me where my body had gone. No sign of what had happened after I collapsed. The police would have processed the scene if they’d found anything suspicious, and clearly they had, or my computer wouldn’t be missing. But there was no tape, no evidence markers, nothing that suggested they’d found answers.

It was as if I’d just vanished.

Which I had, technically.

I moved through the apartment methodically. The bedroom was untouched. The bathroom still had my toothbrush in the cup by the sink, the shower gel on the shelf. The wardrobe held clothes that wouldn’t fit this body anymore, cut for a frame several centimetres taller and differently proportioned. I didn’t open it.

Back in the living area, I checked the bookshelf. The TTRPG rulebooks were still there, the sci-fi novels, the technical manuals. Everything exactly as I’d left it.

Except for the empty spaces.

I could see them now, the gaps on the shelf where Faith’s things had been. The ceramic mug she’d kept here. The book she’d been reading. The framed photo of the two of us that had sat on the second shelf.

She’d taken them when we broke up. That made sense.

But coming back after? Cleaning the fridge, dealing with the mail?

That didn’t.

I was still trying to work through the logic when I heard the sound.

A key in the lock.

* * *

The key scraped against the lock. Back and forth, the way you check a door you’re not certain you actually left secured.

I moved before I finished the thought, through the hallway and into the bedroom, pressing myself against the wall beside the wardrobe. The front door swung open. I heard her step across the threshold, heard the quiet click of her heel on the laminate, and then a pause.

“Thought I locked it last time.”

Muttered to herself. Low, almost nothing.

Then the quality of the silence changed. I could feel it from the bedroom, the shift in her breathing, the way her weight redistributed. She’d noticed something. The air, maybe. The fact that the place smelled less stale than it should.

“Liam?”

There it was. Hope sitting in one syllable, doing its best not to show.

I stepped out into the hallway.

Faith’s eyes found me immediately, and her body did something I’d never seen it do when I was the one looking out of it. Her weight dropped half an inch. Her right foot shifted back and out, her shoulders squared, and her hands came to neutral positions at her sides that weren’t quite relaxed. The whole thing took less than a second, and she probably wasn’t aware she’d done it.

I was aware. This body catalogued it without being asked.

She was better than me. Better than Liam, anyway. Whatever training she’d had, it was real, and it was deep enough to be automatic.

“Who are you?”

I stood there for a second longer than I should have, running through the options. The truth was available. It was also roughly as credible as anything I might reasonably invent, which put it at a disadvantage.

“I’m a friend of Liam’s,” I said.

Faith’s chin lifted, just slightly. Then something else moved across her face.

“Wait.” She studied me. “I know that voice.”

I kept very still.

“You’re the one who called from Japan.”

“Yes.” No point in anything else. “You said he was missing, so when I got back I thought I’d check the flat. See if there was anything useful that got overlooked.”

“Useful,” she repeated.

“Something that might indicate where he went.”

She looked at me the way I used to look at engineering problems that almost worked. Patient. Methodical. Like she had time.

“Why would a colleague care enough to break in?”

“I didn’t break in.” I kept my voice even. “There was a key. And I don’t think I need to justify myself to you. What I do want to know is what you’re doing here. You two broke up.”

The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile.

“Touché.” She glanced past me into the flat, then back. “We did. But he still matters. So I come by sometimes. Take turns with his friend keeping the place from going to ruin.” A beat. “Your turn.”

Something turned over in my chest, slow and uncomfortable. She was still here. Still coming back. Still taking care of a flat belonging to someone she’d left, for reasons she hadn’t explained.

She hadn’t stopped caring.

I could tell her. I ran the calculation again, faster this time. She clearly knew the world wasn’t just traffic and office buildings. She was standing in my flat with combat training she’d hidden from me for nearly two years.

She had her own secrets. Which meant she’d weigh mine against them.

No, for now it was better to play it safe.

“I’ve already told you everything,” I said. “I knew him, I wanted to help, but it’s like he just disappeared.”

“About Japan.” She hadn’t finished with that. “You called from some student’s phone.”

She’d rung back the number. Of course she had.

“My phone died. I asked to borrow one. Someone was kind enough to say yes.”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment. Then, unhurriedly, she let it go. Not because she believed me. The narrowing had been the disbelief, and the relaxation after was something else, a decision to change approach.

“So you didn’t find anything.”

“Nothing.”

She nodded, slow. Then she looked at me again with that same careful scrutiny, and I recognized the expression from the other side. I used to do that. Take stock of something that didn’t quite fit the expected pattern and hold it there until the discrepancy resolved.

“So, how did Liam end up with someone like you?”

The question landed carefully.

“What do you mean?”

“Colleague’s a stretch.” She wasn’t aggressive about it. Just honest. “If you know him, you know he didn’t really do close colleagues. So.”

I exhaled. “Mutual interests. We met after you two ended things.”

She accepted that with a small nod and kept looking at me. Then something shifted in her expression, some internal conclusion that apparently warranted a verbal disclaimer before delivery.

“Half-joking question,” she said. “Don’t take it personally.”

She paused.

“You’re not actually a succubus, are you?”

* * *

The question sat in the air between us.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

“I.”

Faith waited.

“That’s an oddly specific question,” I managed.

“Not really.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded receipt, flipped it over. A phone number was written on the back. “I rang back the number after we spoke. Kid answered. Told me he and his friends had summoned a succubus.”

I said nothing.

“Said she refused to sleep with them.” The corner of her mouth moved. “Apparently delivered quite the lecture on the dangers of ritual summoning, borrowed his phone, made one call, and disappeared back into the circle.”

A pause expanded between us.

I didn’t know she spoke Japanese.

“You don’t actually believe that,” I said.

She measured me. Took her time with it. The flat was quiet enough that I could hear traffic from the embankment road, faint and rhythmic.

“Who knows,” she said, finally. “But a real succubus wouldn’t spend her time moralising a group of students who’d just handed her exactly what she wanted. So forgive me if I’m not convinced.”

She was right, of course. A real succubus, would have taken all three of them. Probably dragged at least one back through the circle as a souvenir.

More importantly, she hadn’t said succubi don’t exist.

I kept my face neutral. “Maybe I’m not a typical succubus.”

The sound she made was a genuine laugh, brief and unguarded. It was startlingly familiar and I had to look at the window to recover from it.

“You certainly have the face for one,” she said. “But my money’s on freelance witch. Or wizard, I don’t know your preference. Someone who stumbled across three idiots playing with fire and decided, on a whim, to save them from themselves.” She tilted her head. “So which is it?”

I touched my cheek without thinking about it. Under the glamour I was still exactly what she’d guessed. That was the problem with this body. Even when it was hidden, something of it bled through.

“How about,” I said, “we compare notes on Liam instead. You’ve been looking for him, I’ve been looking for him, maybe between us something useful surfaces.” I lowered my hand. “I can offer a certain perspective. Witch’s perspective, if you insist.”

She considered that for a moment. Then nodded, once.

“Fair enough.” She glanced toward the kitchen, then back at me. “You already know who I am. What should I call you?”

“Lily.”

I crossed to the nearest chair, the one by the bookshelf, and sat. The flat pressed in around me with a familiarity that felt wrong from this angle, wrong height, wrong centre of gravity.

“You said he still matters to you.” I looked at her directly. “After the breakup.”

Something crossed her face. Brief enough that I might have missed it, once. I didn’t miss anything anymore.

“That’s personal.”

“It is,” I agreed. “But you’re still here. You still have the key. So.”

The traffic noise continued outside. Somewhere down the hall, a neighbour’s television murmured through the wall.

Faith exhaled. She pulled out the chair opposite and sat down, forearms on her knees, and for a moment she looked less like someone running a calculation and more like someone who was very tired.

“Fair,” she said.

We’d been talking for thirty minutes already. Maybe thirty-five. The flat had gotten darker around us, the last of the afternoon light retreating from the window, and neither of us had moved to turn on a lamp.

“I ended it to protect him,” Faith said. “That’s what I told myself, anyway. My work puts targets on people close to me, and Liam was…” She stopped. Turned her phone over in her hands, once. “He was close. So I made a clean cut. Professional decision.”

She said it like she was still trying to believe it.

“And then he disappeared anyway.”

“Yeah.” The word came out flat. “So maybe I just caused him two years of hurt for nothing and he decided to just disappear. Or maybe something found him through me regardless.” Her jaw tightened. “I don’t know which is worse.”

The lamp on the side table caught the edge of her profile. She looked like someone who had been carrying the same question for a long time and had stopped expecting an answer.

“He didn’t leave a note,” she said. “Not even a text. If he’d just said he needed space, or time, or anything, I could…” She exhaled through her nose. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to be worried or angry or guilty. I’ve been all three, alternating, for three weeks.”

I had nothing useful to say. I knew exactly where he was. I knew he was feeding regularly and sleeping in clean sheets and had two people who would burn something down for him if asked. But I couldn’t say any of that without explaining the rest of it, and the rest of it was considerably complicated.

“Wherever he went,” I said, “I’m fairly certain he’s alright.”

She looked at me.

“He’s not the type to fall apart,” I said. “He’d find the edges of whatever situation he was in and start mapping them. Methodically. That’s just how he works.”

Silence.

“He still cared about you,” I added. “For what it’s worth. Before whatever happened, happened.”

Faith was quiet long enough that I thought I’d overstepped. Then she nodded, once, and something in her shoulders dropped a fraction.

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s a strange thing to get comfort from, a stranger in his flat.” A beat. “But it helps. You talk about him like you know him well.”

“Different kind of knowing.”

She tilted her head slightly. “You know, talking to you is…” She seemed to think better of finishing it. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”

I let it go.

“So,” I said. “Graphics designer.”

Her expression shifted. The softness closed over.

“Liam told you that.”

“He did. And you walked in here with a combat stance and deduced a summoning circle from a single phone call routed through Japan.” I kept my voice even. “So. Not graphics designer.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“AOR,” she said. “Vampire Control Division. That’s all I can tell you.”

AOR. The same three letters Charles had mentioned last night with the particular careful tone people use around things that can cause them problems.

I kept my expression neutral and filed the collision course away for later.

“Fair,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair, and the assessment in her eyes sharpened into something more direct. “Your turn, then. I’ve been reasonably honest with you. Who are you actually, Miss succubus-slash-witch?”

“I’m not his girlfriend,” I said first.

It came out slightly strange. Faith’s expression eased in a way she didn’t fully manage to conceal, and something in me noticed that and was, inexplicably, glad.

“We’re more…” I searched for the word. “Kindred spirits. Similar wiring, maybe. He matters to me enough that I came looking.” All of that was true. Technically, completely, uncomplicatedly true. “As for who I am, it’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

Outside, a bus pulled away from the stop below. Its headlights swept briefly across the ceiling.

“Let’s say I’m currently enrolled in an institution that teaches, among other subjects, practical magic.” I nodded toward the AOR comment she’d just made. “And that’s about as far as I can take it.”

One corner of her mouth moved. “Fair enough.” She straightened, and the investigator came back fully, personal conversation folding away behind professional habit. “Then let’s get to the part that actually brought us both here.”

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a folded paper, smoothed it flat on her knee. A timeline. Dates, locations, a question mark at the end.

“Thirty days ago,” she said, “Liam Dawnstar walked out of his office, went home, and ceased to exist. No withdrawals, no transport records, no contacts reached out to, no—”

* * *

She had a colour-coded legend in the margin. Red for confirmed, blue for probable, black for unknown. The red entries stopped at the sixteenth of August.

I studied the timeline without touching it. I’d woken in the palace on the seventeenth or perhaps eighteenth. One or two days unaccounted for, even from my side of it.

“No hospital admissions,” I said.

“None. I checked.”

“Friends?”

“Daniel Rowe. He reported the flat looked lived-in the last time he visited, maybe a week before the disappearance. Nothing disturbed, no signs of struggle.” She tapped the black question mark at the end of the line. “He just wasn’t there anymore.”

I handed the paper back without comment.

We talked for another half hour. She had a theory involving a targeted abduction, someone using Liam to get leverage over her, which she dismissed herself before I could. I offered the possibility of a voluntary disappearance, thinking that the real Lilithiel could’ve taken her body somewhere. Faith dismissed without heat, just the quiet certainty of someone who had spent a month ruling it out. We went in circles the way you do when both parties are withholding the one thing that would actually resolve the question.

The lamp flickered once. Neither of us mentioned it.

Eventually she folded the timeline back into her jacket and checked her watch, and the atmosphere shifted the way it does when a conversation has finished even if neither person has said so yet.

I stood first.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I came in here thinking I had something useful and it turns out I mostly just took up your evening.”

She shook her head, still seated, looking up at me with an expression I couldn’t quite name. “No. You didn’t.” She seemed to mean it. “It helps, sometimes, just talking to someone who knew him. Knows him.”

I smiled. It came out smaller than I intended.

She stood, and we moved toward the door with the particular awkwardness of people who have been more honest with each other than they planned.

“Can I reach you?” she asked. “If something comes up.”

“I don’t really have a number at the moment.” True. Technically, completely true. “But if you want to give me yours, I’ll call when I’m back in the city.”

She looked at me. A long, flat look that I recognised because I’d done it to other people, the one that means I know you’re not telling me something and I’ve decided to let it go anyway.

Then she recited the number.

I didn’t write it down. I didn’t need to. It was the same number I’d memorised eighteen months ago over dinner, the same string I’d dialled on a day I collapsed, the one that had rung out to voicemail while I was still in my kitchen wondering what I’d done wrong.

I nodded once.

“Don’t forget,” she said, at the door.

“I won’t.”

The hallway outside was cool and faintly lit, the kind of institutional corridor that smells of carpet cleaner and old heating. I took the stairs down rather than wait for the lift, and came out through the lobby into the evening air.

The street was wet. It must have rained while we were talking. The lights from the shops opposite caught the surface of the pavement in long orange streaks.

I needed a SIM card.