"Here for the application? Name?" "Leo... Cassius Thorne." Thorne? At the familiar-sounding surname, the bored interviewer behind the desk arched a brow and looked up at the pale, skinny young man standing before her, asking with a hint of surprise: "Thorne... as in the Duke of Boarheart's Thornes?" "No, no..." The young man seemed well used to the question. He gave a small shake of his head and rattled off the explanation like he'd given it a hundred times: "It sounds the same, but the Duke of Boarheart took his from the black boar on the family crest — that 'Thorne.' Mine comes from Thornfield. Way back, our family was nothing but commoners from there." "Oh. Figured as much." The red-haired woman nodded in easy understanding, privately amused at her own jumpiness. That insufferable family, so proud of their pure gold hair, had hardly produced a member with any other color in generations. A black-haired, black-eyed descendant? One who'd sun

Scrambling out of bed at midnight, hauling his sister — her face shading toward purple — to the hospital on his back, and enduring a good dozen-plus hours of chaos afterward, Cassius sat bleary-eyed at the edge of a filthy hospital cot with the sunset at his back, watching his sister, who had finally stopped choking. In a low, complicated voice, he asked: "Mira. Tell me the truth. When did you stop taking your medicine?" He so rarely used her name that the pale, thin girl on the cot flinched. She knew: her brother might look calm right now, but inside he was probably mad enough to lose his mind. Head dipped, she came clean: "About... two months ago?" Two months ago... Cassius did the math, and his fists clenched hard, nails — still edged with grime — digging into the meat of his palms. Two months ago was the day he turned sixteen. The day he came of age. That was when the War Office's pension officer showed up right on schedule for his follow-up visit,

"Now, the Oddity Cleanup Bureau may technically sit under the Police Department as an off-the-books arm, but we don't answer entirely to the Kingdom's police — we're a relatively independent, loosely knit outfit that spans countries, with branches all over the world. Each one takes assignments and direction from its host nation, handling certain... special situations. "Set aside Headquarters, whose whereabouts nobody knows: the Oddity Cleanup Bureau runs 71 branches in all, each assigned a Seal of Solomon as its code name. The one you've just joined is the Tenth Seal branch, coded to the Seal of Buer — also called the House of Buer." Having laid out the Oddity Cleanup Bureau's basics at a leisurely pace, and watching Cassius visibly relax, the red-haired woman — taste for mischief now sated — hooked the corners of her mouth up, then pointed a finger at the black goat beside her: "As for our work — it's putting down the types who drag trouble behind them, before it can

Matches the job description... wait a second — did I ever actually ask what the Oddity Cleanup Bureau's job description was? As if someone had wiped the condensation from a pane of glass, or drawn back the masking curtain of a theater, the "job description" he'd inexplicably forgotten eerily broke through the red-haired woman's blockade of smiles and surfaced from the depths of Cassius's mind. Otherworld demons out to scavenge souls, maddened evil bells scheming to make their will descend, radical gods preparing to seize control of the world, special weirdness born of human obsession, undying wraiths escaped from the normal order of time... ugh... A dense crop of sweat beads broke out across Cassius's face almost instantly, and with every item of the job description the red-haired woman had described that he brought to mind, the sweat thickened by another degree. Some near-instinctive intuition kept firing warnings at Cassius: that gorgeous-but-dangerous red-haired

Wait three days... would there even be time left by then? He hadn't expected the friendly bandaged woman to refuse to act. Sick with worry over the hospital, Cassius gritted his teeth, bowed his head, and tried begging one more time: "If you'd be willing to act, then I could..." "I'm sorry. This isn't a matter of price." Cutting Cassius off, the bandage-covered woman shook her head and said, looking sorry: "The reason I've lasted six safe years in the Oddity Cleanup Bureau is precisely that I never act when I'm not certain. "I do sympathize with what you're going through, but I have my reasons for never staking my neck lightly. I hope you can understand my decision." "..." Understand? Of course I understand — what else could I do about it, honestly? Drag you over there by force? Hearing that refusal with no room for argument, Cassius's hand slipped open, limp, and a pale gray of despair slowly crept into his eyes. Cold as it sounded, she had