Vapour was not good at explaining things. By the time we were standing in front of the gate I had approximately thirty percent of the information a person would want before committing to a job.

I had decided that was enough.

The gate was big and black and said *old money* without using words. Vapour pressed his communication watch and it opened without a sound, the kind of smooth that required significant maintenance.

The mansion beyond it was enormous. Old building, dull colours, the kind of architecture that had stopped trying to impress people a hundred years ago because it no longer needed to.

Expensive vehicles parked in the drive like the apocalypse had been something that happened to other people, which for this family it probably had been.

But what struck me first wasn’t the building or the cars. It was the trees.

They were everywhere. Deliberate. Old and thick and planted close enough that even in the open areas of the property the shade never fully broke.

The grounds were designed around them, paths curving to accommodate root systems that had been here longer than the walls, buildings positioned to maximize cover. Whoever had built this place had wanted shade above almost everything else.

They don’t like the sun. They built a property that keeps it out.

No gatekeeper. We walked in.

The closer we got the colder the air became. Not weather cold. The cold of a place that had been this way for a long time and had stopped noticing.

Up on the balcony, a man. Middle aged. Grey hair. Watching us with the stillness of someone who watched everything and reacted to nothing. The tree in front of him was thick enough that he was standing almost entirely in shade despite the morning.

Sophia Vale was outside the front door, dressed for School Central, glasses on, the composed efficiency of a woman who ran things and had somewhere to be.

"Vapour," she said, like she had been expecting him.

Then she looked at me. The specific look of someone accessing a file they had recently reviewed.

"Aren’t you the boy from Hogsby?" she said. "The healer from outside?"

"From outside," I confirmed.

She was quiet for a moment. Something moving behind her eyes.

"I hope Vapour explained what you’ve come to do," she said, adjusting her glasses.

"Yes, he did," I said.

Vapour had told me almost nothing. I was treating that as a flexible truth.

A young man came out of the house carrying a bag packed with equipment. Fat, unhurried, dressed practically.

He looked nothing like the Vales I had encountered so far. Servant, probably. The kind of person a household this size required and didn’t think much about.

"Celestine will pay you when you’re done," Sophia told Vapour, already turning toward her car.

Celestine.

She drove off without another word.

The three of us stood outside in the shade of a tree that had no business being this large inside a city. The man on the balcony had not moved. He was standing in shadow so complete I could barely make out his face. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

They probably stay in the shade. Every single one of them.

"Vale jobs are always simple," Vapour said cheerfully. "We hunt animals. Extract blood. They’ve got a doctor in the family who runs tests or whatever."

"Bony hooked me up with them," he added. "They pay silver for simple work like this."

I looked at him. The nappy gold hair, the open face, the complete absence of suspicion. He had no idea what walked these grounds at night. He was going to stay that way.

The young man came back with a second bag. We picked them up and started walking.

The trees followed us the entire way around the mansion. Not randomly distributed. Planned. A continuous canopy stretching from the front gate all the way to the back of the property, maintained and deliberately spaced to ensure that almost no part of the grounds received direct sunlight.

Old money, I had thought when I saw the gate. But this wasn’t just wealth. This was infrastructure. Built for a specific kind of life that required shade the way ordinary people required air.

The bag I was carrying had something metallic inside. Cold against my side even through the material.

"The Vales seem like nice people," I said, as we walked under the trees.

"Very nice," the young man said immediately. "Every Fourth of July they throw a huge party. Invite distant relatives, Strays, everyone. Only family in the city that opens their doors to Strays like that." He said it with genuine warmth.

Or, I thought, the only family that needs a regular supply of people whose disappearance nobody investigates.

"How many liters today?" Vapour asked.

"Twenty," the young man said. "One bear should cover it."

I processed that.

The forest came into view behind the mansion. Thick. Real. The trees here were even larger than the ones at the front, canopy so dense that the light coming through was green and dim, more like being underwater than being outside.

This is why they built here, I thought, looking up into the branches. The forest. The shade. Year-round cover from the sun.

Twenty liters of bear blood. For a family doctor. For test purposes.

How long have the Vales been running this experiment?

"Twenty liters," I said, keeping my voice casual. "One bear should be enough."

"Should be plenty," the young man said, pushing a low branch aside as the forest closed around us.

I followed him in and thought about Vince Vale and Azure’s blue thigh and Celestine’s teeth and a family that threw parties for Strays every July under the shade of very old trees.

"Been doing this long?" I asked.

"Year," he said. "Family’s always had... special requirements. The doctor handles it. I just do the collecting."

Special requirements. Not medical tests. Not research. Something else.

Vapour was ahead, humming, completely unbothered. The bag on his shoulder clanked with every step.

"We use food-grade containers," the young man added, as if that was normal. "Sterilized. Kept cold."

Food-grade. Coolers.

"One bear should do it. They don’t like it when we take too much from one animal. ’Stresses them,’ the doctor says."

They don’t like it, I thought. Not the doctor. They.

"Where’s the bear?"

"About a quarter mile north."

We moved deeper into the forest. The silence was wrong. No birds. No insects. The kind of quiet that happens when animals know something dangerous is nearby.

Hunt the bear first, I told myself.

Everything else after.