The trees thinned and we came to a small clearing.

A massive black bear lay on its side. Alive. Breathing. Chained to an anchor sunk deep in the ground, heavy gauge links that had been chosen by someone who understood what they were containing.

This wasn’t a hunt. This was a farm.

They rear them, I thought. Fresh blood. Sustainable. Not taken all at once. The bear’s chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of something that had been through this before and had stopped fighting the routine.

"Heart’s still strong," the young man said, approaching without fear. "We’ll get thirty liters easy if we bleed it properly."

I looked at the chain. Then at the clearing. Then at the careful distance between the trees, maintained and deliberate, shade above and soft ground below.

"Who thought of this?" I asked.

"Can’t tell you that," the young man said. "But we’ve been doing it since I was employed."

Vapour was already laying out equipment behind me. Bags. Tubes. A large stainless-steel drum lined with plastic. The practiced efficiency of someone who had done this enough times to stop thinking about it.

"Twenty liters, bro," he said cheerfully. "Easy money."

I looked at the bear. Its eyes were open. Dark. Aware in a way that made me uncomfortable about the word easy. And then something else caught my attention.

The chain had a crack in one of the links. Not broken. Not yet. But stressed. Like something that had been working on it quietly for a while.

"Why do they hire two ability users if the job is this simple?" I asked.

The young man paused. Not long. Just enough to register that the question had landed somewhere.

"Things go wrong sometimes," he said, and moved toward the bear with the needle.

I watched the bear’s eye shift. Not randomly. Not the unfocused movement of a sedated animal. Directly to him. Tracking.

My body tensed before my brain had finished the sentence.

"Wait," I said.

Too late. The needle touched skin. The chain snapped. Not violently. Not with any drama. Just a sharp clean crack, the sound of something that had been holding finally deciding it was done holding.

The bear moved. Its body twisted upward in one fluid motion that had no business belonging to something that size, rising fast and purposeful, its head swinging toward the young man with the specific intent of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment.

Then it stopped. Every muscle locked. Mid-motion. Frozen. Its chest rose once and held.

The forest went silent. Not quiet. Silent. The pressing kind that fills your ears and tells you something has made a decision about the air. Vapour stopped moving behind me. The air itself seemed to hold still, cooler now.

The bear’s eyes shifted again. Past the young man. Past me. Into the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Something in its body resisted, just enough to see it. Then it lowered its head. Slowly. Deliberately. The way things lower their heads when they recognize something above them in the order of things.

The broken chain dragged softly against the ground as it settled back down. My eyes moved to the tree line.

Whatever was in there had just reminded the bear who owned this clearing. Without making a sound. Without stepping out of the shade.

There’s someone in those trees, I thought. Watching. Making sure the job goes smoothly.

The young man swallowed once.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "That’s why they send two."

He stepped forward again, composed, like nothing had happened, and inserted the needle properly this time. Vapour joined him. They worked with the practiced ease of people who had learned not to ask questions about what had just happened in this clearing.

I stood at the edge and thought about the politics of the walls.

Families like this one. Old money and old power and arrangements with governments that ran deeper than any official record admitted.

The life layer fed by ability users who were slowly burning out. And somewhere in this equation, a family that farmed bear blood in a private forest and threw parties for Strays in July and had a doctor who needed twenty liters at a time for test purposes that nobody explained.

"I study with a Vale," I said, keeping my voice casual. "Vince."

"Oh, Vincent." The young man said the full name with the familiarity of someone who had heard it many times and spoken it carefully each time. "He’s the rarest one. Only appears when there’s need."

Like a ghost, Azure had said. Can’t touch him.

Which meant chasing him was the wrong approach. You didn’t catch ghosts by running after them. You made them come to you.

"Vince spends most of his time with his girlfriend," Vapour added, with the conversational ease of someone contributing a fact.

The redhead. Front row. The boy who had relocated himself to another seat the moment Vince walked in.

His girlfriend, I thought.

If Vince was unreachable by conventional approach, surrounded by a family the government was in business with, living in a property designed to keep him covered and comfortable, then going directly at him was the wrong angle.

But a man who kept a slave and had a girlfriend was a man with two things I could reach before I could reach him. I had already found one.

The girlfriend, I thought. That’s the easier door.

"I’m done," the young man announced, capping the drum. "Let’s go see Celestine."

I picked up my bag and followed them out of the clearing, back under the trees, back toward the mansion.

Celestine, I thought.

The name sat in my chest like cold iron as we moved toward the mansion. The same creature who had drained warmth and strength from my neck and warned me not to cross her path.

I had crossed it again approximately eight hours later.

This was going to be an interesting conversation.