Fog sat on the Cornish cliffs like a debt collector. Patient. Personal.

  Sable Voss pressed her back to the lighthouse ruin, claws scoring rust, and watched the Devourer Bloom work its way through what used to be a fishing village. Ninety-two days since the vats burst and she'd been doing this — tracking, trapping, portaling the mess back where it came from. Same rhythm as the old jobs, minus the paycheck. Plus the guilt. Hell's idea of a promotion.

  The bloom had turned the harbour into a stomach. Boats half-dissolved in slime, rigging webbed with something that pulsed. The air tasted like brine and rot and something sweeter underneath — the fae bleed, that purple contamination that made these bastards creative. This one was spinning illusions out over the water: ghost pasties, phantom pints, a full Sunday roast shimmering in the mist. Bait for the starving.

  Sable's own gut twisted. Noted. Moving on.

  She sighted down the Reaper's Claw and put a hellfire round through the bloom's central mass. It shrieked — a wet, tearing sound — and swelled, which meant she'd annoyed it. A tendril whipped at the lighthouse wall and she dropped, boots punching into quickmud, one hand clawing purchase on the stone.

  "Log entry, Day 92. Southwest variant. Three traits active — mass absorption, illusion lures, ground liquefaction. Illusions running complex sequences, more than yesterday's. Purple bleed's deepening. Salt rounds next."

  Click off. Hell's paperwork, filed even when she was about to eat mud.

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  A human voice screamed somewhere in the fog.

  She found him tangled in vines near the boat launch — mid-thirties, smelled like gin and several bad decisions, fighting the grip with the pure panicked energy of someone who had nothing left to lose. She cut him free, hauled him back, shoved him behind the ruins with enough force to keep him there.

  "Bloody hell." He took her in — the ears, the eyes, the claws. "You're one of them. Hellcat. You lot caused this."

  "Yep." She turned back to the bloom. "Stay down."

  "That's all you've got? Yep?"

  "I'm busy."

  The Abyss Anchor hummed as she activated it, chains unspooling to bind the thing while the portal yawned open. The bloom went in screaming. Purple-blue residue splattered across the mud and something glinted in it — dense, pulsing, wrong in a way that made her back teeth ache. She crouched and pocketed it.

  "Finn," the man said. Like she'd asked.

  Sable wiped slime from her claws on her coat, the fabric already stiff with older stains. The village — what was left — stretched quiet now, just the lap of waves and the occasional groan from a settling hull. Blooms didn't travel alone anymore; the bleed made them territorial in packs.

  Finn pushed to his feet. "There's a pocket up the coast. Lighthouses, mostly. Fishers who barricaded in when it started. They trade petal dust — grind it off the blooms, gives you a few hours where the illusions look like the old world instead of something hungry."

  Sable said nothing.

  "I run supply. Petals for food, information for passage." He watched her check the waterline. "I know where the nests are. Which routes the things use. You could use that."

  She could. That was the problem with talkers — sometimes they were right.

  "Don't slow the work," she said. "Don't touch anything I pocket. And the first time you lie to me, you're on your own."

  Finn nodded once. Something in his expression she didn't have time to read.

  The radio crackled. Devil's voice, smooth as something that knows it's winning. "One down, kitty. Keep collecting those little trinkets. Redemption's closer than you think."

  Sable looked at the shard in her palm.

  Lie number one.