Chapter 1: The Murder of a Living Man

Chapter 1: The Murder of a Living Man

The rain in Slakterquay had a personality. It wasn't the gentle pitter-patter of a summer shower; it was a persistent, sulking drizzle that slicked the streets with a permanent sheen of grimy neon and seeped into the very bones of the city. It was the kind of rain that made good people stay home and bad people feel bold. For me, it was just Tuesday.

From my second-floor office, the window offered a distorted view of the world through water-streaked glass. The neon sign for ‘SPECTRAL ANALYSIS’ flickered in reverse, its crimson glow bleeding into the puddles below. The office smelled of its three primary food groups: old paper, stale coffee, and the faint, peaty promise of the whiskey bottle in my desk drawer. Business was as slow as the city’s drains. I was three sips away from calling it a day and two days away from my landlord calling me about the rent.

A tarnished brass bell above the door jingled, a sound so rare it made me jump.

The woman who stepped inside was a splash of colour in my monochrome world. She wore a tailored beige suit that probably cost more than my entire office, and her heels clicked with anxious precision on the worn floorboards. Everything about her screamed corporate, from the sleek leather handbag clutched in her white-knuckled grip to the frantic, bird-like way her eyes darted around the room, taking in the overflowing filing cabinets and the faint warding sigils I’d scratched into the doorframe. She was a goldfish who’d just flopped into a shark tank and was only now realizing the water was gone.

“Are you… Aggie McPherson?” she asked, her voice a tight, high-wire thing.

I leaned back in my chair, letting it creak a complaint. “Last I checked. And you are a long way from the high-rises, miss…?”

“Reed. Evelyn Reed.” She took a hesitant step forward. “I’m the executive assistant to Alistair Finch. Of Finch Enterprises.”

I raised an eyebrow. Finch Enterprises was one of the corporate titans gobbling up the city’s skyline, a monolith of glass and steel where people like Evelyn Reed made six figures to organize the lives of men who made nine. “Big shot. What’s he done? Upset a poltergeist? Built his headquarters on an ancient burial ground? That’s usually how I get your type in here.”

Evelyn flinched, hugging her handbag tighter. “He’s been murdered.”

I sighed, steepling my fingers. “My condolences, Ms. Reed, but you want the police, fourth precinct. I deal with the dead, sure, but usually when they’re the ones with the complaint.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Her voice cracked, and the dam of her corporate composure began to break. “I saw it. I was working late last night, in my office across the hall. I heard a struggle… I looked through the blinds. There were… figures. In robes. There was a struggle, a blade… so much blood.” Tears welled in her eyes, genuine and terrified. “I hid under my desk until they left. I was sure he was dead. I was going to call the police, but I was so scared. I waited.”

“And?” I prompted, my patience wearing thin. This was a standard, tragic story. Still not my jurisdiction.

Her next words shattered the mundane. “And this morning,” she whispered, her gaze unfocused, lost in the horror of it. “He came into work. He greeted me, asked for his morning coffee—black, two sugars, just like always. He’s in his office right now, leading a board meeting.”

I fell silent, studying her. She wasn't lying. Hysterical, maybe. Traumatized into delusion, possibly. But she believed every word she was saying. My initial desire to kick her out and get to that whiskey warred with a flicker of professional curiosity.

“People don’t get brutally murdered in their penthouses and then show up for a nine-a.m. conference call, Ms. Reed,” I said, my tone softer than before. “It’s bad for morale.”

“It’s not him!” she insisted, her voice rising. “He looks like him, he sounds like him, but his eyes… they’re empty. When I handed him his coffee, our fingers brushed, and it was like touching a block of ice. There’s nothing there, Ms. McPherson. Nothing behind the eyes. It’s a… a shell.”

That word. Shell. It snagged on something in the back of my mind, a cold hook in the warm fug of my skepticism. I’d dealt with possessions, with glamour-weavers and ghosts who couldn't let go. But a shell… that was different. That spoke of a void.

My desire for rent money and a real case was starting to win. The obstacle was the sheer impossibility of her claim. The action had to be to find proof.

“You saw this happen in his penthouse apartment?” I asked, my mind already shifting gears.

She nodded numbly.

“Do you have anything of his on you? Something he’s touched recently? Something personal?”

Her brow furrowed in thought, then her eyes lit with panicked understanding. She fumbled in her handbag, her manicured fingers trembling, and pulled out a sleek, heavy fountain pen of polished silver. “His favorite. He left it on my desk yesterday afternoon, before… before it happened. He asked me to get the cartridge refilled.”

I gestured for her to place it on the desk. She did so as if it were a venomous snake. I stared at it for a long moment. This was the turning point. Either the pen was just a pen and the woman was a case for a therapist, or it was the key to a case that would pay my bills and probably try to kill me. The latter was infinitely more interesting.

“My fee is five hundred a day, plus expenses,” I said flatly. “I want a two-thousand-dollar retainer. In cash.”

She didn’t even blink, already pulling a thick envelope from her bag. The rich really did live in another world.

Once the money was counted and tucked away, I picked up the pen. The silver was cool against my skin. I closed my eyes, focusing, pushing past the mundane world of ringing phones and dripping rain. This was my curse, my gift, my ‘cheat code.’ Psychometry. The ability to read the echoes left on objects, to see the ghosts of memory clinging to them.

The world dissolved into a cacophony of sensation.

The smooth, confident grip of a hand signing a multi-million-dollar contract. The scent of expensive cologne and ambition. The faint taste of bitter coffee. The frustration of a business rival. Muted anger. Power. These were the normal, everyday echoes of a man like Alistair Finch.

I pushed deeper.

Then, a jarring shift. The penthouse. The scent of ozone and something else, something metallic and cloying, like burnt sugar and old blood. I saw flashes—not a clear picture, but violent impressions. Sharp, jagged lines of a ritual circle glowing on a marble floor. The glint of an obsidian knife. A sensation of profound, soul-shattering violation. It wasn’t just the echo of pain; it was the echo of erasure.

A wave of icy nausea crashed over me. My own power recoiled from the place where the final moments of Alistair Finch’s life should have been. There was no ghost, no dying scream, no lingering spirit clinging to its last moments. There was just… a hole. A perfect, silent, soul-shaped vacuum that pulled at the edges of my perception like a psychic black hole. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever felt.

My eyes snapped open. I was breathing heavily, a cold sweat on my brow. The silver streaks at my temples, a permanent souvenir from a past magical incident, felt like they were burning ice-cold against my skin.

Evelyn Reed was staring at me, her face pale with dread. “What did you see?”

I dropped the pen on the desk. It clattered loudly in the sudden silence of the office. The obstacle of my disbelief was gone, replaced by the chilling certainty of the impossible. A man had been murdered. His soul had been… scooped out. And something else was now walking around in his skin.

A surprise, even for me. This wasn't a haunting. This was an amputation of the spirit.

I stood up, grabbing my worn trench coat from the hook on the door. The familiar weight was a small comfort against the unnatural cold that had settled deep in my bones.

“Ms. Reed,” I said, my voice a low growl. “You paid for an investigation. You’re going to get one.”

I looked out the window at the rain-soaked city, at the distant, gleaming spike of the Finch Enterprises tower.

“Time to go interview a dead man.”