"He feels too safe," Kaelus said, adjusting his gloves. "And his house is... dirty. It upsets the child."
He looked down the hallway, where the Count was waiting to offer him wine.
"Prepare the interrogation room," Kaelus ordered. "I think it is time we cleared the fog."
As the knights saluted, Kaelus von Nacht walked toward his host, and for the first time, the "Death Aura" that Seraphina loved so much flared up, ready to turn the Count's comfortable mansion into a true house of horrors, but this time, only for the wicked.
Sleep had taken her not with a gentle embrace, but with the sudden, crushing weight of a falling anvil.
When Seraphina finally drifted off, buried beneath the thick, downy duvet of Count Rodhe's guest bed, she had been entirely consumed by exhaustion.
Her small, six-year-old body had been pushed past its absolute limits, surviving a carriage ride, a magical ambush, the psychic shockwave of fresh slaughter, and the suffocating miasma of the Count's cursed estate.
But the sanctuary of unconsciousness did not last.
Seraphina's eyes snapped open.
There was no gradual waking, no groggy stretching of limbs.
One second, she was asleep, and the next, her survival instincts had practically kicked her brain awake.
The room was pitch black. The amber glow of the afternoon sun that had been filtering through the heavy velvet curtains was gone, replaced by the oppressive, ink-like darkness of deep night.
The fireplace on the opposite side of the room had burned down to nothing but a few glowing, resentful embers.
But the darkness wasn't what had woken her. It was the temperature.
The comforting, terrifying heat of the Duke was gone.
Seraphina bolted upright, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped sparrow. She looked to her left.
The mattress was smooth and empty.
She looked toward the connecting door that led to the adjoining suite. It was firmly shut, a line of absolute darkness beneath it.
"Papa Duke?" she whispered, the childish moniker slipping out before her adult mind could censor it.
Silence answered her.
No, not silence.
As the lingering traces of Kaelus's aura began to dissipate from the air around her, the 'fog' that she had felt upon entering the estate rushed back in to fill the vacuum. And with the fog came the noise.
...why... why did he take the coins...
...my baby... It's so cold in the cellar...
...poison... the wine was poison...
The whispers started as a low hum, like the buzzing of a thousand angry hornets, before crystallizing into distinct, agonizing voices.
Seraphina clamped her hands over her ears, her breath hitching in her throat.
She could see them now.
Without the Duke's overwhelming presence to act as a blinding flare, her Spirit Sight adjusted to the gloom of the room.
The shadows in the corners detached themselves from the walls.
They were circling the bed.
There were perhaps a dozen of them in this room alone. A young woman in a maid's uniform, her neck bruised a mottled purple, wept silently as she wrung her translucent hands.
An older man, dressed in the fine silks of a merchant but bearing a gaping, spectral wound across his stomach, paced back and forth, muttering about stolen ledgers.
Near the window, three small, emaciated figures, children who had likely starved in the Count's outer territories while he dined on roasted boar, huddled together, their hollow eyes fixed on Seraphina.
They weren't the violently aggressive spirits of the battlefield. They didn't bear the raw, screaming fury of the freshly butchered assassins in the canyon.
These were the victims of Count Rodhe's quiet, insidious sins. They were the casualties of his greed, his paranoia, and his corruption.
They were pitiful, broken things, trapped in the physical location of their torment, endlessly reliving their final, miserable moments.
They noticed her awake.
Like sunflowers turning toward the sun, the ghostly figures stopped their pacing and weeping. Their hollow, glowing eyes locked onto the small girl sitting up in the bed.
To them, the living were beacons of warmth in an ocean of freezing static. They didn't necessarily want to hurt her; they just wanted to touch the fire.
They wanted to be seen. They wanted to share their unbearable cold.
The merchant floated closer, his hand reaching out toward the mattress. "...tell the magistrate... the ledger is beneath the floorboards..."
Seraphina scrambled backward, pressing her back flush against the ornate mahogany headboard.
She pulled her knees to her chest, making herself as small as possible.
"Go away," she whimpered, her voice trembling. "I can't help you. Go away."
But they didn't. They pressed closer, a slowly tightening noose of gray mist and sorrow. The temperature in the room plummeted further.
Seraphina could see her own breath pluming in the air. Frost began to creep across the edges of the washbasin on the nightstand.
Yet, they stopped.
Just as the merchant's spectral fingers were about to brush the edge of the silk bedsheets, a violent sizzle echoed through the spiritual plane, like a drop of water hitting a red-hot iron skillet.
The merchant shrieked soundlessly and recoiled, clutching his burning hand.
The other ghosts flinched, floating backward in terror, creating a perfect, five-foot perimeter around the bed.
Seraphina blinked, her panicked tears momentarily pausing. She looked down at the foot of the massive bed.
There, crumpled in a messy heap over the thick duvet, was a mass of dark fabric.
It was Kaelus's cape.
He must have unclasped it before he left the room and tossed it onto the bed.
The heavy, midnight-blue wool, lined with the fur of some demonic beast from the Northern reaches, sat there like a sleeping dragon.
To the naked eye, it was just a piece of expensive clothing. But to Seraphina's Spirit Sight, the cape was practically glowing with a dark, suffocating energy.
It had been worn by the Duke for so long, carried through so many slaughters and soaked in so much of his tyrannical mana, that it had become a cursed artifact in its own right.