“What the fuck am I looking at?” Louise stared up at the weirdest mansion she’d ever seen with nocturnal eyes that allowed her to make out everything despite the darkness of night. “This is where you live now?”

Whoever the architect was seemed to have gotten their inspiration from a pile of boxes and an internet router. The entire building looked like a bunch of perfect white squares and rectangles cobbled together with a few bluish reflective windows to create something more akin to a giant abstract art installation than an actual house.

“Yes, but it’s Enid’s house, not mine.” Valen led Louise through a metal door next to the electric gate with his key card. “She’s letting me stay rent free in exchange for doing the housework.”

“Must be a shit ton of work in a house this big.” Louise glanced at the familiar blue luxury car parked beside the mansion. “You sure thunder tits is cool with me coming?”

“No, but she says it’s fine and this is important anyways.” Valen tested the door behind him to make sure it was locked before making his way up to the mansion itself. “You got the potion with you?”

“Yup.” Louise patted her hoodie pocket. “It’s still warm even after all that time in the fridge though.”

“Probably has to do with its magical properties.” He reached out to knock on the mansion door only for it to open on its own.

Enid stood on the other side with a disapproving frown and one hand on her hip. Indoors, she’d traded her designer trench coat for grey joggers and Valen’s only red hoodie that was way too baggy for her.

“Snowball,” she said, looking Louise in the eye.

“Thunder Tits,” responded Louise without hesitation.

Enid turned her gaze to Valen.

“You better have a good explanation ready.”

“I do, trust me.” Valen felt the excitement bubble up within him. “Can we come in?”

Enid rolled her eyes.

“This is your house too, dumbass.” She stood aside to let them through. “Go on.”

Valen switched his black leather shoes for a pair of fuzzy red slippers and hung up his overcoat at the door. Louise just wiped her bare wolven feet on the carpet a couple of times.

“Fancy a cuppa, Snowball?” Enid asked. She might not like Louise, but even she minded the manners that no self-respecting Dragonite would be without.

“Sure,” said Louise.

“Take a seat in the living room and I’ll bring it when it’s ready.”

“Do you need any help with the tea?” asked Valen.

A simple “No,” was her reply before heading straight to the kitchen without another word.

Valen was definitely sure he’d made a mistake now, but he reminded himself that it was for the greater good as he led Louise to the living room.

Said living room was about the size of Louise’s entire flat combined with a dozen of her neighbours’. The colour palette was neutral all the way through, from the glossy hardwood floors to the grey velvet couches set in front of a giant flatscreen tv mounted to the wall.

“Sorry in advance if you sleep on the couch tonight ‘cause of me.” Louise laid down on one of the velvet couches, allowing her legs to dangle off one side. The moment she did, any pretence of toughness melted away from her face to make way for a look of pure comfort and pleasure. “Actually, that might not be too bad if it’s this couch.”

“Enid and I sleep in different rooms anyways.” Valen sat down beside where she laid her head. “The mansion has six bedrooms, not including her master bedroom.”

Louise scoffed. “Must be nice being rich like her.”

“You’d be surprised.” Valen glanced at the kitchen’s general direction to make sure Enid wasn’t listening in. “It’s easy to forget that rich people are still people too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Enid has her own issues too.” Valen looked back at Louise. “They might not be the same ones we had back in the Nocturnal District, but that doesn’t mean her life’s free of hardship.”

“You do realise you’re saying this inside of her giant mansion, right?”

Louise had a point. Unlike them, Enid never had to struggle with money. She never had to worry about her parents paying the rent on time. Or wonder whether or not someone she knew would be found dead the next day. Or know what it felt like to starve until even a sewer rat looked like a full-course meal.

No. She had her own problems to deal with. Ones that Valen didn’t think he’d ever truly understand himself.

“What do you see when you look at this mansion?” he asked.

Louise gave him a blank stare. “...Are you trying to use your psychologist superpowers on me?”

“I’m not speaking as a scientist, Louise,” said Valen. “I’m speaking as your and Enid’s friend. You two are more alike than you’d think.”

“Really?” Louise made no attempt to hide her doubt and sat up on the couch to look him in the eye. “Enlighten me.”

“Well for one, Enid moved out to live alone when she was sixteen like you did.”

“Yeah. Into a giant mansion,” Louise reminded him. “I don’t think that really compares.”

“That’s not the point. She lived here for a whole two years alone before I took her up on her offer to move in.”

Louise’s expression somewhat softened. “That must’ve been a big change for you.”

“Not in the way you’d think,” said Valen. “This place was an absolute mess when I first got here.”

He recalled the state the mansion had been in before his arrival. Furniture that hadn’t been dusted in the two years she’d spent living there by herself. Take-out boxes strewn about the living room and master bedroom because she couldn’t be bothered to cook for herself. Not to mention the most egregious of all, bins that hadn’t been emptied in forever because she kept trying to push the rubbish down to put off taking them out and by extension going outside. He could hardly believe that was how Dragon Rest’s richest heiress lived when he saw it.

“Huh.” Louise leaned back on the couch, rested her head on her palms. “No wonder why she likes you so much. She must’ve been really glad to have you around to clean up.”

“I think so too, but it’s more than that. I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning the mansion while Enid’s asleep in her room. Whenever I do, I can’t help but notice just how…” he took a moment to find the right word, “...lonely it felt. Completely and utterly lonely. For all its luxury, there’s very little warmth to be felt here. And she lived in it by herself for two whole years.”

That wasn’t the half of it. Enid hardly ever left her room during his first year there. Valen didn’t mean to pry, but his hypersensitive hearing told him that she was mostly just sleeping and snoring in there. Sometimes for entire days. When the door to her room did open, it was mostly to bring in food she ordered online. Even then, it was always brought straight to her bedroom from the front door by Valen.

It took a while for Valen to trick her into eating some actual food. First he had to teach himself how to cook with an embarrassing amount of trial and error due to having eaten little to no solid food for most of his life. Then, he asked her to taste his cooking under the pretence of helping him learn long after he’d already mastered the essentials. Things spiralled from there.

Enid started coming out of her room more to eat at the dining table. They started having film nights in her private theatre while eating his homemade snacks. She even started joining him on trips to the supermarket. It took time, effort, and memorising all of her favourite foods, but it was all worth it in the end. Because sometimes, if he was really lucky and the day was going just right, he’d see Enid actually smile.

However, today was not one of those days.

Enid entered the living room holding a tray with a porcelain teapot and three matching cups. The frown on her face was just a few centimetre deeper than usual to show Valen her complete and utter disapproval at Louise’s presence in her house.

“Here’s the tea.” Enid put the tray down on the coffee table and sat down on the sofa beside Valen, though she didn’t deign to look at him as she sipped her own cup.

Louise picked up one of the porcelain cups and squinted at the contents with a bewildered look on her face.

“What the hell kind of tea is this?” She sounded more confused than angry.

“Silver Earl,” said Enid without further explanation.

“Where’s the milk?” Louise sniffed at the drink. “And is that a lemon slice I see in there?”

“Enid likes her Silver Earl with lemon,” said Valen. “Trust me, it’s good.”

Louise took a hesitant sip.

“...Bit too rich for my blood,” she said before downing the entire cup in one go.

“Glad you like it,” Enid lied. She set down her own cup and side-eyed Valen. “Now, you owe an explanation.”

“I know, I know.” Valen looked at Louise. “Why don’t you show her, Louise?”

“Show me what?” asked Enid. “If she’s trying to prove to me she had tits then I’m-”

Louise reached into her pocket and pulled out the potion she stole from the Primordial Church. Enid took a moment to stare at the rounded flask.

“We can explain,” said Valen before she could start an interrogation.

Enid crossed her arms and leaned back on the couch while glaring at him. “Do so.”

And so they did. Or rather, Valen did while Louise busied herself slurping down all the tea she claimed to not like.

When the explanation was over, Enid stood up from her seat.

“Enid?” said Valen hesitantly.

“This is probably the most reckless thing you’ve ever done.” She started walking away from her couch.

“Where are you going?” Louise hopped from the cushy couch she’d been enjoying.

“To my lab.” Enid turned around to look back at Valen and Enid. “You two coming?”

“Right!” Valen stood up with a smile on his face.

“You have a lab?” Louise asked. “In your house?”

“Having it here means I don’t have to go outside to work.” Enid led them to the metal door that led to the basement. It looked like something straight out of a high-security prison but was shiny enough that it didn’t clash with the pretentious modernist aesthetic the whole place had going on.

Next to the door was an electronic keypad that Enid used to open the door with a password way too long for any normal person to remember. A loud metallic clunk rang out before the heavy door drifted open from its own weight.

Enid walked in and flicked a nearby switch. Cold light illuminated the basement in an instant, revealing something in between a mad scientist’s lab and an occult apochetary.

It’d been a good couple years since Enid did any actual work in it. She was all too happy to rest on the obscenely lucrative laurels her first few inventions had earned her. Still, Valen had made sure to keep it in working condition anyways out of a sense of completion in cleaning the whole house.

Sterile white plastic tables furnished with mirror-polished scientific equipment were arranged in perfect rows that formed a large square around an empty transmutation circle in the centre of the room. They were juxtaposed by the many rune carved wooden tables lined up against the walls decked out with arcane tomes, racks of magical components, and diagrams depicting alchemical symbols.

To top it all off, a single stuffed crocodile inexplicably hung from the ceiling on leather straps at the far end of the room. Why it was there is anybody’s guess.

“What’s up with the crocodile?” asked Louise, casually asking what Valen had been meaning to bring up for the past five years.

“Don’t worry about it.” Enid walked over to a table with a microscope on it and held out her hand. “Give me that potion.”

Louise stood up on her tiptoes to hand her the flask.

Enid proceeded to extract a tiny portion of the contents with a dropper and allowed a single viscous drop to fall onto a microscope slide. She slipped on a transparent cover over the slide and looked at it under the microscope, twisting the side knob to adjust the magnification as she did.

“...Weird.” She looked up from the microscope and turned to Louise. “Where did you say you found this potion again?”

“In a storage closet,” said Louise.

Enid pressed two fingers on the sides of the potion bottle, probably to check its temperature. “Was it refrigerated at all?”

“The storage room I found it in wasn’t, but we put it in my flat’s fridge while we were waiting for the sun to set.”

“Hmm.” Enid turned to Valen and gestured for him to come closer with two fingers.

Valen walked over to stand beside her at the microscope. “What is it?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Valen did just that. He squinted into the microscope only for his eyes to widen the moment he saw the pinkish red dots wiggling under the specimen plate.

“It’s just blood!” he exclaimed. “I can see the cells and everything.”

“Didn’t the girl who got healed say it smelled like blood?” asked Louise.

“I thought that was because they just used bloodwine to mix it in,” said Valen. “To play into the blood of the Unborn God gimmick.”

“Looking at this, I’m fairly certain they were actually using it to mask the taste of this ‘potion’,” said Enid. “And that’s not even half of it.”

“The cells were alive under the microscope,” said Valen. “Blood can only be outside of controlled conditions for about half an hour until the cells start dying. They kept this blood unrefrigerated in the back of the church for the entire one-hour sermon and yet this blood looks perfectly healthy.”

“Plus it’s somehow still warm even after you put it in a refrigerator for several hours,” said Enid.

“What do you think it’s from?” asked Louise.

Valen picked up the open potion bottle and sniffed at the contents. It was definitely a bottle of blood, but far from a normal one. The blood of magic-abled races like mages and succubi tended to taste and smell of a distinct but enjoyable tang that made it more invigorating than normal blood.

The ‘potion’ had that same tang, but amped up to an alarming degree. Like food that's been drenched in enough hot sauce to be classified as a biological hazard. Whatever the blood came from, it must’ve been capable of some very powerful magic.

“Unicorn maybe?” He suggested. “Or phoenix? Legends say that their body parts can heal people.”

“There’s no way to know for sure.” Enid scratched the back of her head. “The body of research for extinct magic beast parts isn’t exactly extensive.”

“So…” Louise slumped her shoulders. “It’s worthless.”

“Not entirely.” Enid used a syringe to extract a bit of the potion into a test tube for later study. “I could try to synthesise something similar to it but it’ll take a while for me to-”

A loud bang from somewhere upstairs cut her off.

Louise looked up into the ceiling. “I don’t suppose you two have a pet tiger hopping around up there.”

“No, no we do not,” said Enid.

Valen closed his eyes and focused on his hearing. Past the mice scurrying in the walls, shuffling footsteps thundered atop the hardwood floor above them. There were three sets of feet by the sound of it, going from one room to the next in a search for something.

“I can hear people upstairs,” said Valen. “Can’t tell if they’re armed or not though.”

“What?!” Louise’s head snapped to the direction of the basement door.

“Goons sent by Byron, no doubt,” said Enid. “Looks like he didn’t heed your warning.”

Valen pulled out his phone.

“I’ll call the police. We just have to stay here and-wait, where’d Louise go?” Valen turned to look at the basement door just in time to see it swinging in the nonexistent wind. “Dammit Louise!”

He tucked in his ponytail and leapt up the stairs, throwing off his red slippers in the process. When he emerged from the basement, the sound of something metallic clattering onto the floor caught his attention and he sprinted towards its direction.

Louise was in the dining room repeatedly bashing a human man’s head into the side of a mahogany table. Said man was a bit improperly dressed for a burglar in his preppy red blazer and white trousers that made him look like someone who’d gotten lost on his way to the country club. The double-barrel shotgun laying on the floor close to him made no mystery of his intention, however.

Valen swooped down to grab the shotgun. The long barrel had been sawed off to the length of a ruler for easy concealment. If he had to guess, it was probably a hunting shotgun taken from Dragon Rest’s rural outskirts where gun laws were more lax.

“I think that’s enough, Louise,” said Valen. “His mates are still roaming about.”

“Right.” Louise threw the man onto the floor by his hair, ripping a few blonde strands out as she did.

“Ugggh.” The burglar groaned as he pushed himself up from the floor on his arms. “Fucking bitch…”

Valen hauled the man up by his shirt and pushed him against the kitchen counter, making sure that the middle of his back pressed uncomfortably against the edge of the counter.

“How many more of you are here?” he asked in a voice made low by his attempt to hide the elongated fangs in his mouth.

The intruder’s face, bloodied by Louise’s beating, scowled at him with hatred burning in his shit brown eyes. “It’s just me-hey!”

Louise snatched the intruder from Valen, her clawed hands grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and scratching a bit of his neck in the process. She pulled the man down to her level before launching her knee into his stomach, then her shin into his crotch.

“I can smell more than one person on you,” said Louise with a snarl.

“And I heard more than one pair of footsteps.” Valen placed a hand on Louise’s shoulder in a silent signal to take it easy. “Now tell me how many there were and where they went or I’ll let my friend here turn your testicles into an omelette.”

“Four! There’s four of us!” the man squeaked as he cradled his destroyed crotch. “We split up, I don’t know where they are now, I swear!”

“Much obliged.” Valen bent down and walloped him on the side of the head.

The man’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and his body went limp on the ground.

Louise’s eyes went wide. “Did you just-”

“I just knocked him out,” said Valen before she could finish. “He might have some brain damage when he wakes up, but he’ll live.”

“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” muttered Louise under her breath.

“You’re already on it but we can talk about that later.” Valen handed her the sawed off shotgun. “I’m going to assume you’re a better shot than me?”

“I can shoot straight enough.” Louise took the shotgun from him and casually broke it open to check the rounds. “Huh. Twelve gauge slugs. Enough to kill a bear and just about anything else.”

“Let’s get back to Enid,” said Valen. “We need to-”

A cacophony of gunshots rang through the air, which was soon joined by the crackling buzz of magical electricity.

“That sounded like it came upstairs!” shouted Louise.

“Enid!” Valen raced towards the direction of the noise and leaped up the floating stairs.

The cries of an unfamiliar male voice smothered underneath the gunshots and electric hisses told him exactly where to head.

“Why won’t you die?!” the voice screamed. “What the fucking-fuck-fuck-fuck!”

His next dozen f-bombs were cut off by a deafening thunderclap that reverberated throughout the mansion and silenced every other noise in the mansion.

Valen arrived at the source of the noise to find a hallway splattered with magic-scented blood. Enid stood looming over two unconscious intruders, an incubus with a purple spear-like tail and an green orc woman, both dressed in the same stupid red blazer their mate downstairs wore. A pistol and a revolver on the floor beside them with both their barrels still smoking.

Enid turned to look at Valen, her one icy blue eye still half-closed in total calm that didn’t befit the situation.

“Saw these two running amok.” Her voice didn’t hint of any fear. “Thought I should come up here to-”

Valen pulled her into a hug. Though he couldn’t see it, her eyes widened when she felt his racing heart beating so close to hers.

“I’m just glad you’re alright.” Valen broke away from the embrace and held up her face by the chin to examine her for any injuries. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

Her hoodie, or rather, his hoodie that she stole, was riddled in bullet holes. And yet by some miracle, Enid herself seemed unharmed. With how baggy the hoodie was, the gunmen probably couldn’t tell where her body was inside it and ended up shooting everywhere else instead.

“I’m fine.” Enid slipped away from his grasp and stared at the floor where her would-be killers lay. “These guys are much worse off than I am.”

Louise bolted into the hallway and scuttled to a screeching halt.

“Finally found you! Gods, your house is large as shit.” She looked at the blood splattered across the walls. “What the hell happened to them?”

“I electrocuted them,” Enid said plainly.

“You electrocuted them until they bled?” Louise asked. “Is that even possible?”

Valen didn’t think it was either, but they didn’t have time to care at the moment.

“Let’s save the biology questions for later.” He picked up the revolver and pistol before handing the latter to Enid.

“This looks like a Gaston model.” Enid slided out the boxy pistol’s magazine to check the ammo, a move she learned from copious amounts of FPS games featuring the gun. “10mm rounds. Police grade. How’d a cultist get a hold of this?”

“Let’s leave that for the police to figure out.” Valen carefully dislodge his revolver chamber to check on the ammo. Although it’d already been fired six times, the revolver luckily had eight chambers that left him with two shots to work with should push come to shove. “There was another intruder downstairs. He said that four of them came here.”

Louise poked at the electrocuted orc with the claw of her feet to no response. “Counting these two leaves just one more to go.”

Enid flicked off the safety of her pistol. “The poor bastard.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come down to killing them,” said Valen. “I’d very much rather not-”

“There!” Louise pointed down the hall.

Valen and Enid followed her finger to find a tall human in a red blazer standing at the end of the hallway. His face, though partially hidden by a pair of sunglasses that he wore at night for some reason, twisted into a look of surprise at the sight of his fallen friends.

Louise was the first one to shoot. Both barrels of her shotgun went off at once, though only one of the slugs hit its target.

A spurt of blood erupted from the man’s left shoulder as the slug tore through his muscles and crashed against the wall behind him. And yet, whether out of adrenaline or sheer stubbornness, the intruder remained standing and raised his right arm to aim his own gun.

Enid joined in and emptied her magazine into him before he could touch the trigger. Blood sprouted from the eight newly torn holes in his chest. He staggered backwards but didn’t fall or loosen the grip around his gun.

Seeing no other choice, Valen raised his stolen revolver and jerked back the heavy trigger twice in quick succession. He admittedly wasn’t the best shot, but most revolvers were largely idiotproof thanks to its simple design. Both of the high-powered hollow points found its mark in the man’s chest, finally toppling him onto the ground with a loud thud. The gun he’d been carrying, another Gaston model, skittered across the floor away from him.

Blood pooled under the man’s motionless body from the dozen bullet holes inside him. Valen slowly approached, his eyes darting between the man and the gun just a few feet away. Louise and Enid followed close beside him, still gripping their useless empty guns.

Louise frowned. “Is it just me or did that take way too many bullets?”

“That was way too many bullets,” Enid agreed.

Valen kicked away the gun the intruder had been holding and crouched down beside the bullet-ridden corpse. The sunglasses the man wore had flown in the one sided firefight to reveal his face. With his eyes closed the way they were, he almost looked like he was sleeping.

He looked human enough, with plain brown hair that matched the stubble on his cheek. He was a bit on the pale side, but not paper white like most vampires were. His hands didn’t have fur or claws and had five sausage fingers on each of them, so he definitely wasn’t a werebeast either.

“Hold on.” Valen leaned down to hover his ear over the man’s chest. “He’s still breathing!”

Valen immediately put his hands and right knee over as many of the man’s bleeding bullet wounds as he could, prioritising the ones nearest to his vitals.

“What?!” Louise looked genuinely concerned. “What the hell is this guy made of?”

Without a word, Enid calmly walked over to where Valen had kicked the intruder’s gun and switched her empty gun for it.

Valen frowned in disapproval. “We’re not going to murder him, Enid.”

“I figured you’d say that.” Enid held onto the gun but kept her finger off the trigger and the barrel pointing down. “Can’t hurt to be safe though.”

“Uh, Valen?” Louise looked at the blood quickly staining Valen’s trousers where his knee was pressed against the gunshot wounds. “I think we’re already quite past not murdering him.”

“That was in self-defence against an intruder,” said Valen. “Now he’s just an injured bloke who can’t hurt us anymore.”

“I’ll call the police.” Enid pulled out her phone with one hand while still holding the loaded gun in the other. “Doubt an ambulance will get here in time though.”

“You’re right.” Valen turned to Louise. “Louise, go get that potion from the basement.”

Louise shot him an incredulous look. “You can’t be serious.”

“From what we’ve seen it only takes a drop to heal someone,” Valen reminded her. “We have to try. I can just beat him up the old fashioned way if he tries anything later. Now hurry!”

“If you say so,” she grumbled before sprinting back downstairs.

Valen looked down at his would-be intruder.

“Sorry about shooting you, mate,” he whispered under his breath. “Though to be fair, you were the one who broke into our house.”

The man’s lips parted to receive a sharp intake of breath that was followed by a long, low groan.

“Uuugh.”

“Easy there,” Valen warned. “You got like twelve bullets inside you right now. Best if you don’t lose any more blood than you already did.”

The man murmured something unintelligible under his breath.

Valen bent down to listen to him. He didn’t have to with his enhanced hearing, but it helped show the man that he was listening. If he did bleed out before Louise could get back with the potion, the least Valen could do was listen to his final words.

The man’s eyes fluttered open. His irises and pupils were both a milky white. They’d just look like cataracts if not for the additional oddity of his sclera. Where his eyes were supposed to be white there was instead bright pinkish red, presumably from blood having pooled into them.

Valen was about to ask what was wrong with his eyes when the man’s hand shot up and grabbed him by his throat. The man was stronger than he would've expected from a man with twelve bullets inside him. It went beyond what even the fittest humans were capable of and his skin felt scalding hot to the touch for some reason.

“Valen!” Enid raised her gun to shoot.

In an instant, the man who couldn’t possibly be human stood up on his feet and held Valen up by the throat as a living shield. Valen tried to pry off the man’s grip with his fingers but only managed to loosen it by just enough to breathe through.

Enid refrained from shooting but kept her gun raised, waiting for a chance to shoot him without hitting her friend.

The bullets inside the man slowly squeezed themselves out of him with a long, low squish before falling off from the holes they’d entered through. The sound of the metal bullets clattering to the floor mingled with the man’s voice as she spoke.

“Thanks,” he said before throwing Valen at Enid.