The dream was familiar.

  Smoke rising from blood-soaked cobblestones. London rain washing crimson into the gutters. A vampire, feral and dying, writhed at the edge of his vision—its mouth slack, its eyes dull.

  Dario stood over it, heart hammering, the weight of the kill settling into his limbs like lead.

  But this time, when he blinked…

  The vampire had Kai’s face.

  He jolted awake, breath ragged.

  Pain tethered him down immediately—a sharp tug at his ribs, a raw ache deep in the shoulder. He let out something between a gasp and a curse as he shifted in the unfamiliar bed. The sheets clung damply to his skin, sweat-soaked and tangled. The ceiling above him was wooden, cross-beamed, low.

  Lazarus Island. Kai’s bungalow.

  He was still alive.

  The door creaked open.

  Dario’s hand twitched instinctively toward the dagger hidden beneath the pillow—

  but stopped.

  Kai stepped in.

  “Slept well?” Kai asked, his voice low, gentle.

  Dario melted slightly at the sight of that half-smile, soft-edged and unguarded. He hated how much it meant. Did Kai still care?

  Before he could respond, a phone buzzed on the nightstand. Kai raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask questions.

  Dario picked it up, wincing at the movement.

  “Good morning,” said the voice on the other end—Inspector Alex Lim, Ninth Precinct.

  “Morning, Inspector. What’s happened?”

  Kai didn’t press. He crossed the room and quietly set a tray on the bedside table: a steaming cappuccino and thick toast with a pale green custard spread.

  Dario stared at the plate, blinking.

  Thick toast. His favorite.

  He remembered.But Dario was curious about the spread.

  With a low breath, Dario took a cautious bite. The toast was warm, sweet, and familiar. A comfort.

  Then Alex spoke again.

  “It seems the Scarlet Frangipani retaliated.”

  The words landed like a stone in a still pond.

  Dario froze mid-chew. His throat went dry.

  “What happened?”

  “They hit the Ghost Lanterns. One of their strongholds in Ann Siang Hill—razed. Wards shattered. Entire floor gutted by magic.”

  Dario sat up straighter, pain forgotten.

  “Who was it?”

  Alex hesitated.

  Just long enough to matter.

  “Lin Shu. A senior elder of the Ghost Lanterns. The last of the old guard that had once balanced the unseen pacts between spirit clans and human enforcers. He had power—but never flaunted it. Authority—but always tempered with restraint. His loss would make th Ghost Lantern feral”

  Everything inside Dario went still.

  “Dead?” Dario asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “Found near his apartment. Burned beyond recognition. Markings consistent with ritual blood magic. They left a frangipani blossom on the balcony.”

  Dario swore under his breath.

  “Was it Michelle?”

  Silence.

  And in that silence—confirmation.

  Dario swung his legs over the edge of the bed, groaning as he moved. His body protested, but he didn’t care. Kai had left a set of fresh clothes folded nearby—a loose cotton shirt and dark slacks, both slightly oversized. Dario breathed them in.

  They smelled like Kai. Warmth. Salt. Steel.

  “Text me the location,” Dario said to Alex. “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up.

  When he stepped out into the main room, Kai was sitting on the coffee table, watching him.

  “What was on the toast?” Dario asked, forcing casual.

  Kai raised an eyebrow.

  “Kaya. Local jam. Coconut, pandan, egg. You liked it last time.”

  Dario paused, then gave a small smile.

  “I remember.”

  Kai’s eyes flicked to Dario’s side.

  “How’s the wound?”

  Dario shrugged, then winced.

  “I’ll live. Just means I can’t dance for a few days.”

  Kai didn’t laugh. Just looked at him. The weight of everything unspoken hung between them.

  “I have to go,” Dario said quietly. “We lost someone good today. I need to see it.”

  Kai nodded once. Tension flickered behind his eyes—but he didn’t stop him.

  Dario hesitated at the door, hand on the frame.

  “Can we—see each other again?”

  Kai didn’t answer immediately.

  Then, he gave a slow, tentative nod.

  “Just don’t get yourself killed.”

  Dario smirked faintly.

  “I’ll try. For the toast, if nothing else.”

  And with that, he slipped out the door into the morning haze—his wounds aching, his heart heavier, but his purpose clear.

  Michelle Teo had declared war.

  And Dario planned to answer.

  _______________________________________________________________________________

  The streets of Ann Siang Hill were unusually still, the silence unnaturally heavy for the heart of Singapore’s magical underbelly. Morning light filtered through a gauzy overcast, bathing the row of colonial shophouses in a pallid, bone-white hue. The usual café bustle was absent—awnings drawn tight, chairs tucked in like forgotten rituals. No laughter, no chatter. Only the lingering scent of ozone, ash, and iron, as though the night’s storm had poured not rain, but fire and vengeance.

  The building in question stood nestled between two boutique hotels—narrow, three stories tall, its fa?ade an echo of a bygone era: carved stone, lacquered shutters, pristine white walls. From the street, it appeared untouched. Serene, even. A mask.

  Dario stepped inside without hesitation, his coat brushing against the walls of the old lift as it rattled upward. He passed the lobby like a ghost, the Division Zero sigil at his throat flaring just enough to keep the staff silent.

  At the top, he emerged into a hallway smeared in soot.

  The air thickened instantly.

  The magical boundary line still shimmered faintly across the corridor floor—scorched sigils humming with residual power. Dario moved like smoke through it, and the glyph sewn into his collar pulsed in response. Two Ninth Precinct officers loitered by the door, their posture rigid.

  They didn’t question him.

  His boots crunched through splinters of glass and charred wardstone as he stepped forward. The apartment ahead had clearly taken the brunt of it—black scorch marks bloomed outward from the doorway, and the ceiling above sagged as if weary from holding too many screams.

  Then the scent hit him.

  Not just blood and flame.

  Flowers. Jasmine. Frangipani.

  Sickly sweet. Too precise to be accident. Deliberate. Mocking.

  A magical calling card.

  His jaw tensed. The perfume of the Scarlet Frangipani gang wasn’t metaphorical—it was woven into their rituals, carried by the blood of their victims, bound to the essence of their dominion. Anyone with the Sight could trace the residual glamour to its source.

  Inside, Alex Lim stood amid the wreckage, crouched beside the charred remnants of a floorboard where a ritual circle had been half-scoured by fire. His trench coat was streaked with soot, shirt rumpled, and his hair—usually neat—was flattened by sweat and smoke. The deep shadows under his eyes said he hadn’t slept. But his posture remained steady. Alert.

  Still a cop. Still in control. For now.

  “Agent Dario,” Alex greeted as he stood. His voice was hoarse, clipped. “You got here fast.”

  “Wasn’t far,” Dario replied, his tone even but tight. His shoulder still throbbed from the Hollow Fang’s curse. The skin beneath his shirt pulsed with the memory of necrotic energy.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  His eyes flicked over the scorched room, and he blinked into Shamanic Sight. Faded sigils ignited to life—spectral traces of protection glyphs glowing faintly along the ceiling beams, corners, and floor joints. The wards here had been powerful. Ancient. Layered.

  But not broken.

  Dario’s expression hardened.

  “They weren’t breached,” he murmured. “They were deactivated.”

  Alex’s jaw clenched. “So someone let them in.”

  Dario nodded. “Someone Lin Shu trusted. Or someone forced to act against him.”

  He stepped carefully across the blasted floor, glass and ash crackling under his boots. His gaze combed the wreckage—walls scorched, talismans burned down to wax stains, fragments of prayer papers fluttering like brittle leaves.

  “You don’t kill a man like Lin Shu in silence,” Dario said. “You do it like this—loud. Brutal. Public. So every spirit clan, every mortal ally, every rival—knows.”

  Alex was already nodding. “He had enemies. Ghost clans, rogue mediums. Even a few in the ministry who didn’t like the old ways being protected.”

  “But this,” Dario muttered, “isn’t just politics. This is ritual.”

  He stopped in front of the far wall—where the remnants of a mural had been blackened away. Beneath the burned paint, jagged sigils had been carved directly into the wood, scorched into permanence by heat and magic. The shapes were crude, but deliberate—each mark still pulsing with residual force.

  Alex joined him, arms crossed tightly. “Can you interpret them?”

  Dario knelt, eyes narrowing as he traced the sigils without touching them.

  “They cleared Lin Shu’s body already,” he said quietly. “But they didn’t erase the message.”

  He pointed. “These aren’t just draining glyphs. Some of them are spirit anchors—linked to a summoning array. They weren’t just here to kill him. They wanted his soul intact. Bound.”

  Alex paled. “They harvested him?”

  Dario gave a grim nod.

  “They used him as fuel.”

  He dropped lower, crouching beside the blast pattern at the heart of the room. His fingers hovered over the floor—not quite touching, just sensing.

  And he felt it.

  Pain.

  Panic.

  A soul unraveling.

  The echoes soaked into the wood like blood into cloth.

  “He tried to fight,” Dario murmured. “Tried to call for help. But something… something severed the connection. Whatever came through, it was already feeding before he could even scream.”

  Alex’s shoulders stiffened. “They didn’t just drain him, did they?”

  “No,” Dario said, still listening to the echo. “They took pieces. Memories. Emotions. Pulled them out like thread from cloth. Fragmented him.”

  He rose slowly, his eyes darkening with something old and bitter.

  “That kind of death doesn’t fade. It ripples across the Veil.”

  The room seemed to hush at those words.

  Dario turned, gaze moving toward the back of the apartment. A narrow hallway led to a charred bedroom—the doorframe half-melted, blackened with soot. But the air there shimmered—heat haze, despite the ruin. Not physical warmth. Magical residue. The kind left behind after invocation.

  The kind left behind by soulcraft.

  He took a step toward it. His Sight caught faint trails of red-gold energy curling out from the room, spiderwebbing across the air like veins of lightning trapped in glass.

  “There’s something in the bedroom,” Dario said softly.

  Alex followed without a word, his boots thudding gently on the warped wood.

  The room was gutted.

  Walls partially collapsed, ceiling scorched until it sagged, weeping charcoal dust. An altar in the far corner had been cracked in half, the stone altar slab split clean through. Incense burners lay overturned, their contents melted into oily residue. One paper talisman still clung to the back wall—half-fused, its runes bleeding like old wounds.

  At the center of the destruction, untouched by flame or collapse, was a second ritual array—smaller, more intricate. Its layered inks still glistened faintly under Dario’s Shamanic Sight, pulsing with a ghostly rhythm.

  He exhaled, voice hushed. “This wasn’t just a kill zone.”

  He stepped forward, careful not to disturb the edges of the ritual.

  “It was a forge.”

  The words hung heavy.

  The room pulsed with latent power—heat trapped between the Veil and reality. The walls peeled back like layers of burned skin. Residual magic crawled across the surface of every object, trying to cling to the waking world.

  “There,” Dario said, pointing.

  In the center, woven into the ritual’s heart, a glyph twisted in a spiral—a whisper seal.

  Alex stepped closer, blinking hard. “What does it do?”

  Dario’s gaze didn’t shift. “It captures a soul’s final thoughts. Echoes them across the Veil. It's an old shamanic spy tool—banned by most pacts.”

  He pulled a stylus from the inside of his coat—silver-etched and wrapped in warded twine—and dipped it into a small vial of blood. His own. Then he touched it to the center of the circle.

  The glyph flared.

  A low pulse rang through the room.

  And then—a voice.

  Fractured. Faint. A breath before death.

  “You said there was peace… why are you doing this?”

  It was Lin Shu’s voice.

  Strained. Disbelieving. Already unraveling into spirit-silence.

  Neither man spoke.

  The silence after was heavier than grief. It was judgment. Proof.

  Dario rose slowly, turning toward the wall where the sigils converged into a single, tangled knot of spirit-thread—visible only to those who could See. A tether, pale and shimmering, snaked through the floorboards and vanished beyond sight, leading deeper into the city.

  “She led him into a negotiation,” Dario said finally. “She told him it was peace. That’s how she got past the wards.”

  Alex’s expression darkened. “She didn’t just kill him.”

  “No,” Dario replied. “She used him.”

  He gestured to the residual tether.

  “This was a ritual of transition. The soul was channeled. Not devoured, not destroyed. Collected. Repurposed.”

  Alex processed that in silence. “Michelle’s building something.”

  “She’s not acting alone,” Dario said. “This kind of soulcraft requires a conduit. A structure. She’s storing fragments—feeding something. Power. Maybe even an avatar.”

  Alex shook his head. “You think it’s connected to the Sahkil sightings?”

  Dario didn’t answer immediately.

  His eyes followed the tether, squinting into its direction like someone trying to read storm clouds on the horizon.

  “Possibly,” he said at last. “But this? This is more than possession. It’s construction. Something is being prepared.”

  Alex’s jaw tightened. “And you’re sure you’re fit to follow it?”

  Dario didn’t flinch. “I’m the only one who can.”

  He pulled his blazer tighter, eyes lingering on the charred altar—splintered wood, melted offerings, the scent of jasmine burned into the stone.

  Then he turned and walked to the balcony, where glass crunched under his boots. He pushed open the ruined doors and stepped out into the light.

  The dawn had begun to cut through the clouds. Long golden shafts stretched over the rooftops of Ann Siang Hill. The streets below had begun to stir, far removed from the death and ritual hovering above them.

  But this street?

  This building?

  Still held its breath.

  The air smelled of magic and memory.

  Dario turned back toward Alex, the breeze tugging at his coat.