Cole had never been to a legit haunted house. Not out of any particular avoidance; he’d just never had a reason to go looking for one. As far as he’d ever figured, the whole thing came down to old architecture and overactive imaginations: creaky buildings and people who wanted to be spooked. But walking through Ostreva at night, he was starting to think he’d underestimated them.

After all, this whole damn city felt haunted.

The wind was the main offender. It moved through the buildings like they weren’t even there: in through a broken window, out through a doorway, carrying sounds the whole way that Cole knew were structural and still didn’t like.

Twice in the first ten minutes, he caught himself checking his six over what turned out to be a shutter banging somewhere behind them. The fact that he could explain every single noise didn’t seem to matter much when the explanation had to compete with his gut telling him to get the hell out.

Yet as oppressive as the city felt at street level, it hadn’t managed to take everything with it.

Without a single light burning for miles in any direction, the stars had the whole skies to themselves. Whatever galaxy this world sat in put the Milky Way to shame: a dense, luminous band that swept from horizon to horizon, bright enough to throw faint shadows across the pavement.

He’d seen skies like this before, driving through the Nevada desert at two in the morning with nothing but sand and empty highway for a hundred miles in every direction. Out there, it was just a good sky on a long drive. Here, it just reminded him that a few million people used to drown it out.

Cole gave the skyline another second, then got his team moving again. They followed the highway corridor south for another half hour or so.

The signage started picking up as the highway curved south, though most of it was too corroded or overgrown to make out. One of the bigger directional signs had held up well enough to still be legible, and Graves read it off as they passed beneath.

“Port of Ostreva. One mile, south.”

It aligned with the evacuation map, so they took that exit.

The off-ramp deposited them onto a four-lane surface road that dead-ended into a wall of vehicles just two hundred meters ahead. Cars, trucks, at least one bus: all packed across the full width of the road, tight enough that he couldn’t see through it.

Cole brought the team to a halt and checked it out from a distance. The vehicles had rusted through and sagged on flat tires, glass long gone, vegetation grown up through the undercarriages. Whether they’d been there since the original evacuation or set up more recently, he couldn’t really tell.

They went around it through the brush on the left and came out the other side into a different part of the city.

The brush spat them out onto a side street that fed into a commercial district. Two- and three-story buildings lined both sides, sharing walls, with narrow alleys cutting between blocks every hundred feet or so. The whole thing had an almost familiar feel to it, like he’d driven through it a dozen times on the way to somewhere else.

Swap out the signage and add a few taco trucks, and he could’ve been standing in Koreatown. The layout, at least, felt like home.

The buildings did too, honestly, which was kind of disappointing. The construction was concrete and timber, with glass only showing up in windows and the occasional storefront. He’d actually been expecting something closer to what he’d seen at Ashpoint, but then again, expecting strip malls and apartments to look like government buildings was a bit naive on his part.

The street wasn’t much of a stretch, either. Abandoned vehicles sat where they’d been left, some pulled to the curb, others stopped mid-lane with doors still open. Litter had compacted against the building fronts in drifts, years of wind and rain turning it into something closer to sediment than trash. A few of the smaller structures had partially collapsed where the timber frames had given out, but none of it looked recent.

Cole brought the team up along the left side of the street. He wanted to check one of the buildings before they pushed further in, and a market about halfway down the block looked like a good option. The entrance was wide and the interior was visible from outside, which made it easy to clear. He took Mack and Graves in while the rest held outside.

The shelves had been stripped clean: methodically, from the look of it: and the dust across the floors remained completely undisturbed. Nobody had been through here in years.

They checked two more buildings on the way through the block and got the same result.

He pulled out the evacuation map and oriented himself against the freeway exit they’d come in from. The refugee center sat about eight blocks south, roughly fifteen minutes at their current pace.

Once everyone confirmed, they resumed their journey.

Block after block, they walked past a depressing number of abandoned vehicles and empty storefronts. That uneasy feeling he’d had on the highway had gotten worse in here, mostly because the buildings cut most of the wind that had given the road some auditory texture. Without it, the only sounds were their footsteps and the occasional creak of something settling overhead.

And the more he walked, the more the silence started to bother him. He caught the occasional rat darting out of sight well before they got close, and a few birds perched high on the rooftops, but they never made a sound. Whatever caused this anomaly, he didn’t have enough information to pin down, and the short list of things that spook wildlife wasn’t encouraging.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait long for an answer. About two blocks from the refugee center, he caught the faint scent of woodsmoke. Shortly after that, he also caught light flickering between the structures ahead. Something was alive out here after all, and whatever it was, it was thriving in a place where even the rats couldn’t.

He raised a fist, brought the team to a halt, and pulled them into the nearest alley.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

He gave himself a minute to study the layout from the alley mouth.

The structure’s dome registered first, an elongated glass shell catching just enough starlight to separate it from the sky behind it. It reminded him of a stadium, almost, if someone had taken the concept and let it grow instead of engineering it. Beneath it, the rest of the building spread across the end of the block in what looked like a wide oval, its long axis running more or less parallel to the street.

The ground floor was harder to read, but he could pick out wide entrance bays facing toward the city. It must have been a community hall once, or a performing arts center: something built for the public, back when there’d been a public to build for.

What was left of that spirit had since been buried behind a wall of rusting vehicles and concrete, which wrapped around the building on all sides. The Istraynian military had set it up, same as the highway checkpoint. Unlike the highway, though, none of it had seen any fighting. The garrison must have pulled out before it ever came to that.

From this distance, it was clear the firelight had all the signs of someone cooking. Now, demons didn’t cook, and they sure as hell didn’t build fires either: unless they were burning something down: so Cole was putting his money on cultists.

Naturally, an active presence ruled out the front door as an approach.

A service entrance sat further back, set away from the main doors, but getting to it meant crossing a good forty feet of open ground on the lit side of the building. Even with the firelight as dim as it was, that was a lot of exposure for a full team. If he’d gotten around to learning a cloaking spell, this would’ve been the time for it.

The second floor, at least, gave him something to work with. Several windows sat open along the near face, above a convenient cluster of shipping containers waiting to be used as a hop-up. If they came around the left side where the perimeter wall threw enough shadow, they could make the climb without advertising themselves to the entire building.

Cole pulled the team in close. “We’re gonna slip around the left side wall, then use those containers to get up to the second floor.”

Everyone acknowledged and dropped their NODs into place. The Celdornians didn’t have any, so Cole spread them between his guys: Elina behind him, Graves with Ethan, Vale with Mack: and put Miles on rear security, where his night vision could cover their six.

They slipped through a gap in the perimeter wall and into the container settlement on the far side. The layout was denser than it had looked from across the street: containers stacked two high in places, with tarps and improvised awnings filling the gaps between them. Cole threaded the team through it in a low file, keeping the building’s entrance bays and ground-floor windows out of their sightline, which also kept them out of anyone else’s.

They were maybe twenty feet from the target container when, because apparently nothing could just go smoothly, a lantern rounded the corner about ten feet out, approaching them.

Cole brought a fist up.

The team pulled behind the nearest cover: crates, barrels, whatever was there. Meanwhile, Cole drew his knife and pressed flat against the corner of the closest container, ready to ambush whoever came around it. Yet no one ever came. The footsteps had stopped just around the corner, for reasons he couldn’t guess at.

There was no way they’d been spotted, right?

Cole had just finished mulling that over when he heard the rustle of fabric, accompanied by the unmistakable sound of liquid splattering against dirt. For fuck’s sake, the guy was just taking a piss.

Cole almost pinched the bridge of his nose.

The man finished, adjusted himself, and shuffled back the way he’d come. The lantern light shrank around the corner and disappeared.

Cole maintained position for another good minute, just to make sure the coast was fully clear. Only after the footsteps had faded well out of earshot did he sheathe the knife and bring the team forward.

Miles went first, pulling himself onto the container roof and through the window in one clean motion. The rest followed: Mack, then Vale, then Ethan, then Graves, then Elina. Cole boosted her up to where Miles could grab her arm from the other side, then hauled himself through last.

He landed in a wide hallway that had probably been impressive at some point. Old portraits lined the walls between tarnished display cases, and the ceiling overhead still had traces of decorative molding that someone had put real effort into. The carpet underfoot had gone stiff with age but still deadened their footsteps, which he’d take. The whole place had the feel of a building that had once been proud of itself.

He turned to check his team. His guys were perfectly fine, of course: scanning the hallway, oriented, doing their thing. The Celdornians, on the other hand, could barely see a thing. They shuffled through by touch and guesswork, none of them looking too happy about it.

Cole had done enough night ops that he’d mostly forgotten what genuine darkness felt like to someone who hadn’t trained in it. They had night vision spells, of course, but casting anything this close to a building full of hostiles was out of the question. Seriously, it was pretty ballsy of them to just take that on the chin and keep moving.

He reached over, took Elina’s hand, and set it on his shoulder. She held on without a word. He gave the other two a minute to let their eyes adjust, then moved out.

Cole eased open the first set of doors they came to and found himself on a mezzanine overlooking the building’s interior.

The courtyard below was massive: three stories of open space ringed by mezzanine walkways, with what was left of the dome overhead open to the sky. Whole sections of the glass had caved in at some point, leaving a jagged frame around a wide oval of stars. It must have been something, back when it was intact.

Rain and years of exposure had done the rest. Vegetation had taken the floor entirely, climbing the support columns and swallowing what was left of the decorative installations beneath it. The stone tiles had buckled under root systems thick enough to see from up here, and standing water pooled in the low points where drainage had given out.

Down at ground level, maybe a dozen campfires burned in loose clusters among the overgrowth, smoke venting up through the open dome. Cole could hear conversation carrying from below: not loud, but enough to put the headcount at a few dozen, easily. The longer he looked, the more he picked out: bedrolls laid around the fires, shelters cobbled together from whatever people could find, supply stacks under tarps. These people had been here a while.

And they numbered a lot more than Cole had expected. If the cult had enough bodies to keep a satellite camp running out here on top of whatever they had at their main base, then OTAC had probably lowballed the operation. He eased the door shut and filed that thought for later.

They circled toward the rear of the building along the second-floor corridor, which, thanks to the oval layout, curved the entire way and turned what should have been a two-minute walk into something closer to ten. Not that Cole was complaining: the curvature kept their sightlines short, and the hallway stayed empty the whole way through. By the time they reached the far side, the most dangerous thing they’d encountered was a coat rack.

Once they reached the end of the hallway, Cole found a window and scoped the outside. The container settlement thinned out on this end, opening onto a street that ran perpendicular to the one they’d come in on. As far as he could tell, the whole stretch was dead.

They took the stairs down to the ground floor and slipped out through a utility exit.

The containers on this side were sparser, with a straight shot to the street if they wanted it. Cole took the long way through the rows instead, because that was just how it worked. Honestly, the whole infiltration had gone about as cleanly as he could’ve asked for.

They were three containers from the street when an old man stepped out from behind a tarp, blinking against the darkness with a lantern in one hand and a gun in the other.