RISE OF THE DEMON KING

Chapter 11: The River Town

The safehouse door was barred from the inside. That was all Aeris needed to see. Rhea hadn't even finished with her count of the guards, but the message was already clear.

Three long days on the road had finally brought the trio to Millbrook Ferry, a tight mass of houses and muggy streets huddled on a river bend. Imperial grain barges clustered on the docks, coughing up their cargo for the capital. Rhea’s intel had been dead on, third house past the tanner’s yard, blue shutters, a cloth merchant who kept to herself. Ophelia Rask. The next name on a list that started with Cedric Vane’s bloody corpse, still cooling in a collapsed ritual chamber just a week before.

“She’s already spooked,” Rhea muttered, crouching beside Aeris in the deep shadow of a grain cart. “Look at the windows.”

Aeris checked, sure enough, the place seemed almost hermetically sealed. The evening air was warm, but every shutter had been yanked closed, and those faint glimmers of ward-light tracing the sills weren’t lost on him. Not serious magework, the kind of cheap, bulk-bought sigils someone puts up when they’re scared and want to look tougher than they are. Out by the yard, two men tried just a little too hard not to look like thugs-for-hire.

“She knows someone’s coming,” Aeris said, keeping his voice low. “The question is, does she think it’s us, or something worse?”

Next to him, Alba pulled her stolen cloak tight, eyes locked on the shuttered house. She’d been strangely quiet since they set off, not just tired, but wary, studying Aeris like she was trying to solve a riddle she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to. He hadn’t asked. Truthfully, he didn’t want to know.

“We’re not using the front door,” Rhea said, already sliding off into the backstreet shadows. “Rask used to be Fourth Circle before she ran. She’ll stack her wards thickest where she expects trouble. That’s ground level. So, the roof.”

“You’ve done this before,” Aeris said, hurrying after her.

“I’ve done a lot before.” That was all she gave him. It sounded like she’d bite if he pushed her further. “Keep the girl behind you if things get loud. Away from the windows, don’t argue.”

They looped around the block, slow and silent, boots barely whispering on the packed dirt. The alley between the safehouse and its neighbor was barely a slit, just wide enough for Aeris to squeeze through sideways. Rhea, somehow, just flowed through, Alba’s hand firm in Aeris’s grip. He could feel the demon’s steady second heartbeat pulsing inside him, watchful, but not hungry. He’d learned to notice that difference. The demon was always there, patient, waiting. He still wasn’t sure which of its moods unsettled him more.

Behind the house, a narrow drainage gap cut under the stone foundation. Rhea’s information again, threading just on the edge of uncanny, details only someone who’d studied Rask for years would know.

“Wait.” Aeris caught Rhea’s sleeve. “You know this place too well. How long have you been tracking her?”

Rhea froze. That usual cool competence slipped for just a second, revealing something old and wounded. “A long time,” she admitted quietly. “Longer than I’ve wanted to admit. But let’s not discuss it here, not with a Fourth Circle mage behind that door.”

He wanted to press, but a sharp shout from the thugs by the tanner’s yard cut him off.

“Oi! Who’s back there?”

Rhea muttered a curse. So much for subtlety.

Two shapes detached themselves from the shadows, moving fast now, no longer pretending to loiter. Aeris put himself squarely between Alba and the advancing men, instinct flaring along with the demon’s patient, predatory hum in his chest.

“Just travelers,” Rhea called out, holding her hands loose and empty, not that anyone was fooled. “Looking for lodging.”

“At the back of Mistress Rask’s house? At this hour?” The leader’s hand fell toward his club. “Try again.”

Aeris didn’t wait for her signal. He stepped forward, making sure to block Alba with his body. He let just a trickle of the demon’s presence fill his voice, a threat without words. The nearer thug hesitated, hackles rising.

“We don’t want trouble,” Aeris said. “Just five minutes with the woman inside. Whatever she’s paying, it’s not enough to die for.”

“Big talk from a boy who,”

A shutter clattered open on the second floor and a woman leaned out. Pale eyes, sharp features, exactly as Rhea had described. But she’d shed the look of the confident imperial mage. Fear had burned all that away.

“You’re not Thorne’s men,” Ophelia Rask called, eyes scanning their faces, flickering between relief and fresh panic. “You’re from the village. The anomaly.”

“I have a name,” Aeris said.

“I don’t care.” Her eyes slid up and down the street, searching every shadow. She looked half-crazed with exhaustion. “If you’re here to kill me, get in line. If not, talk fast, this street’s going to fill up with people who want all of us dead in about ten minutes, and I’m not making small talk when that starts.”

Aeris shot Rhea a look.

“What people?” he called up.

Rask let out a jagged, humorless laugh. “You really don’t know.” She glanced behind her through the darkness, then back at Aeris, her face shifting from panic to something hard and unyielding. “Thorne didn’t send his soldiers after you tonight. They’re after me. I was never supposed to make it out of the failed ritual. I knew it the second I ran.”

The thugs below heard every word. One of them slowly backed away, hand sliding from his weapon.

“Let us in,” Rhea shouted, her voice urgent. “We need to know Thorne’s plans and you need better friends than men who’ll scatter when the steel comes out.”

Rask hesitated, clinging white-knuckled to the window frame, caught between her old imperial instincts and a brand new understanding of just how disposable the Empire thought she was.

A horn blared somewhere close, not the bugle Aeris remembered from Stonevale, but sharper, a signal meant to bring squads running.

“That’s a containment call,” Rask yelled. “They’re sealing the whole district.”

“Why would they block off a street for one runaway mage?” Aeris asked, already scanning the side alley for another squad, just like Rhea warned.

“They wouldn’t,” Rask shot back. “They’re not here just for me. Somewhere between Stonevale and here, Thorne learned the anomaly’s with the woman he ordered silenced. This just became about both of us.”

Rask’s face drained of color.

“Too late,” she whispered. She yanked the shutter closed just as the first imperial soldiers rounded the corner, weapons drawn and gleaming.

The thugs fled instantly, their loyalty not worth the price. Suddenly, Aeris stood wide open in the street, Alba at his side and Rhea’s bow rising, arrow already notched.

“That’s not a standard patrol,” Rhea said, tracking the soldiers’ approach. Too neat, too many, too coordinated.

“They’re not here for a sweep,” Aeris replied, pulling Alba after him toward the alley. “They came because someone told them exactly where to look.”

“Which means someone talked,” Rhea muttered, “or someone’s had eyes on this house longer than we realized.”

The torches sent writhing shadows up and down the street. Somewhere above, Aeris caught the muffled crash of someone fighting for an escape. Rask, no doubt, fleeing through a previously planned bolt-hole.

“We can’t just leave her,” Alba said. Even with fear in her eyes, she sounded determined.

“We’re not,” Aeris promised. “But we’re not walking through those soldiers, either.”

“Come on.” Rhea was already moving. “This way, before they seal off the street.”