They found a new safe house through Webb's contacts. It was above a restaurant in a neighborhood where no one asked questions. The apartment smelled of garlic and frying oil. The bed was lumpy. The windows were covered in steel bars. Elias sat on the bed and opened the System window. He searched for Ares. The interface showed him a location, a status, a profile that was locked behind senior-level encryption. [COLLECTOR: ARES.] [STATUS: ACTIVE.] [LOCATION: REDACTED.] [CLASS: SENIOR.] [YEARS OF SERVICE: 8.] [HARVESTS: 347.] Three hundred forty-seven souls. Elias had harvested three. The gap was not a gap. It was a chasm. "He is stronger than me," Elias said. "Faster. More experienced. He has abilities I have not unlocked. He has resources I cannot match." "Then how do we fight him?" Selene asked. "We don't," Elias said. "Not yet. We learn. We observe. We find the flaw." He reached into the interface, searching for communication channels, for ways to contact other

The name sat in Elias's mouth like a stone he had swallowed on purpose. The Dollmaker. Not a man with a face yet, not a man with a history he could hold in his hands, only a name the department had given to something it could not catch, and a body count that grew every few months in a city too large to notice one more missing woman until she turned up arranged like a piece of furniture in a place she had never chosen to be.[SOULS COLLECTED: 3/10.][SOULS REMAINING: 7.][TIME REMAINING: 321 DAYS.][TARGET IDENTIFIED: UNKNOWN. ALIAS -- "THE DOLLMAKER."]He read the numbers twice, the way he used to read a verdict twice before he let himself believe it. Three souls. Kessler screaming apologies that were really just fear of pain. Cole confessing in his own chambers with his own gavel still warm on the desk. Vane, who had once called herself Voss, who had killed children with a vaccine and called it acceptable loss on a spreadsheet. Three names crossed off a list only Elias could see, and

The evidence room in the Fourth Precinct held its temperature at a level designed to preserve fingerprint powder and blood evidence indefinitely, which meant it was always cold enough to make Elias's breath fog faintly in the fluorescent light, a small discomfort he had learned not to mind in the years before he died and had certainly stopped minding after.Elias Cross had no legal standing to be here at all, but a disbarred attorney seeking reinstatement, working with a private investigator's license and a smile that suggested he had nothing left to lose, could talk his way past a records clerk who had been on shift for eleven hours and simply wanted to go home. He had learned, across three previous harvests, that the smallest lies were always the most effective ones. He did not claim to be police. He did not claim any authority he could not produce paperwork for. He simply implied, gently and repeatedly, that he was one small signature away from being reinstated to a bar that had wr

The maintenance access behind Halloway Station required a bolt cutter and roughly four minutes of patience, both of which Elias possessed in ample supply by the time he found it, three days into a hunt that had taught him more about the Dollmaker's discipline than anything in the case files had managed.The tunnel beyond smelled of rust and standing water and something underneath both, a faint chemical sweetness that his old life would have identified immediately as embalming fluid and his new one recognized simply as a smell that belonged to death that had been given time to arrange itself. He moved through the dark with a flashlight held low against his leg, the way he had once moved through a courthouse basement looking for a filing cabinet nobody wanted him to find, patience doing the work that supernatural sight refused to do here.The old platform signage still hung crooked from the ceiling in places, faded advertisements for products that had stopped existing before Elias was b

He met her for dinner two nights later because avoiding her any longer would have raised more questions than answering a few carefully chosen ones, and because some small, stubborn part of him that refused entirely to die along with the rest of his old life still wanted, simply, to sit across a table from her and pretend for one hour that neither of them carried what they carried.The restaurant was small and quiet, the kind of place with no television over the bar and no reason for anyone from either of their lives to walk in unexpectedly, which was precisely why Elias had chosen it months ago and kept choosing it since. He watched her come in from the cold with her coat still buttoned to the throat, scanning the room out of a habit she probably no longer noticed in herself, and felt, as he always did, the small unfair ache of loving someone he had no right to keep safe by honest means."You look tired," she said, over a plate of food neither of them had touched with any real appetit