Stratford, London

  The day after

  “Hey, pass the artifact over, will you?”

  “Pipe down for a second! I think I see something…”

  Crouched low on the rooftops circling the Gentleman’s Club main base, two of Henry’s duplicates kept close lookout over the movements in the surrounding streets. One of them, peering around the corner of an industrial air vent, was holding a small, lens-like stone up to his eye. His face was scrunched up in concentration, biting the inside of his cheek as he swept his sharpened gaze over a group of gangers unloading an oversized van on one of the floors of the adjoined parking lot.

  The other, conversely, was bored out of his skull keeping an eye on their backs to make sure they weren’t snuck up on. It was absolutely dead quiet at the moment, leaving him with nothing to preoccupy his mind aside from nagging his partner for the next few hours before it was his turn to get rest.

  He couldn’t wait to head down to the floor below and get his 8 hours. Just like the other two, he was still feeling the effects of sleep deprivation from the days prior.

  “Hang on,” the spotter blurted. “One of ‘em dropped a crate to the ground. Spilled out a bunch of… what is that, scrap metal?”

  Whole lot of nothing, it sounded like.

  “Oh come on, that’s it? You’ve been staking this group out for what, a half hour, and didn’t realize it was just one of their scav groups until now?”

  They both cursed under their breath at the same time. After the initial bonanza of new information discovered in the first few hours of their little stakeout rotation, it had been easy to get used to their efforts being rewarded. Unfortunately, the nature of watching and waiting for something to happen was fickle at best, shown plain as day by the dry spell they’d fell onto.

  Not that the information gathered previously wasn’t extremely valuable. They’d been able to confirm that the Club had perfect coverage of their sightlines within about a city block of the building. Realizing that sneaking in would not be an option for them was disheartening, but better to know it than to find it out at a worse time.

  Their other notable discovery had been the large quantity of delivery vehicles moving in and out of their motor pool over the past day.

  Nearly all of them had been moving people. Some in chains, but more than half of them equipped the same as any other Gentleman. The sudden burst in activity had them all leaning on the edge of their seats.

  At least, until the trucks had started unloading literal junk again.

  “They’re preparing for something,” the spotter said, his mind apparently on the previous deliveries as well.

  “Well, yeah, that much is obvious, but what?”

  “Can’t be too many things they’d gather this many bodies for. War’s not really their style, and it’s been too quiet in the immediate area for them feel the need to call for a monster hunt.”

  “So… by process of elimination… guess they found something, then.”

  “Probably, yeah.”

  The spotter pulled back around the corner, offering the stone to his partner.

  “I should go in for a closer look. Wait here with the other one, just in case.”

  “Best of luck, then.”

  As foolhardy as it might seem to split up in the low visibility environment, for the three of them most of the disadvantages were negated by the abilities they shared.

  For one, they had rather extensive knowledge of the area – at least up to the point of prior to their creation. Any meeting points their original had done the leg work to keep track of before, they all knew by heart without having to say a word. Stashes they’d dug previously, while rather sparse these days, still gave them a few options to gear up for sneaking around and getting a good look of things, provided they stayed out of sight.

  More morbidly, however, was the fact that their 3-day time limit made long term survival a moot point for them. With almost half that time already expired, the need to remain cautious applied less and less to them as time went on.

  Not that he, personally, wanted to push that boundary just yet. For now, he was content to use one of the few artifacts they’d managed to keep a hold of and do his job from a nice, safe distance.

  He held the stone up to his eye and looked out towards the towering office building, in much the same fashion as his partner had. The vision in his other eye went completely dead, but the remaining pupil was now able to drink in every detail of the surrounding landscape thanks to its strange properties.

  Artifacts were a bit of a more recent development, and probably the only good that had really come of being trapped in the Shroud. Theoretically, they had started showing up since the very beginning of the first Witching Hour, but Henry’s personal experience clashed with those rumors. If they did exist then, they must have been exceedingly rare and hard to find.

  By all accounts, they appeared to be a product of the environment of Hallow London. Typically, they manifested in uninhabited areas – which, nowadays, were unfortunately more common than inhabited ones. What’s more, their appearance seemed to be completely random, leading to some rather popular corollaries between this new phenomenon and Ghost of Tolkien incidents.

  He wasn’t sure if the theory held any water, but then again, he was very much not the expert on the subject. As his old Liverpool application could readily attest to.

  Past that point, however, the similarities stopped dead in their tracks. For one, Ghost of Tolkien dealt strictly with magic that had been well understood for decades now. Artifacts, on the other hand, dealt almost exclusively in the opposite.

  Take this… seeing stone of theirs, for example. You look into it, you lose vision in one eye as long as you hold it there, but the other can make out literally every detail it can see. It was like having a telescopic lens that didn’t shrink your field of view. A bit disconcerting the first few times, but once you got the hang of filtering information, the usefulness of the unassuming translucent rock was unquestionable.

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  Now, hypothetically, which Domain would it fall under? Definitely not any of the most common ones. Day or Law might be able to replicate it somewhat, but that reasoning felt flimsy because it didn’t seem like it was manipulating light in any way. And none of that helped a bit in explaining why it blinded your other eye while you used it, regardless of whether you kept it open or not.

  The current working theory most factions had arrived at was that… there were more Domains. No idea how many, or how much they varied in scope compared to the known ones, but provably existed to some extent. Efforts to categorize them remained elusive to this day, leading to the widespread use of ‘exotic’ as a catch-all term for unknown magic.

  What was more worrying was that some of these unexplored Domains proved much less benign to the user than their better explored counterparts. Henry hadn’t gathered around a campfire with fellow survivors for some time now, but when he had, horror stories of explorations gone wrong or stumbling into an area affected by harmful artifacts circulated faster than air in a wind tunnel.

  Cursed, he’d heard them called. Which seemed a pretty apt descriptor, in his opinion.

  Though, I doubt the Club headquarters would be swarming like an upturned anthill at the discovery of a cursed artifact. Which means…

  Out of curiosity, the duplicate focused his attention towards the higher floors of the skyscraper. Hoping to find some hint of activity through the windows, he scanned each floor from top to bottom in search of any kind of clue as to what they might have found.

  Might have to swipe it for ourselves, if it’s good enough…

  Nothing of note really jumped out at him, however. At least, not until he reached the top floor in his searching.

  Huh, so I guess that’s where they decided to keep him. Surprised he’s not dead yet, honestly.

  Staring down through the window, looking even more bored out of his mind than he was currently, was the original. His hands lay in his lap, handcuffed, and the rest of the room looked pretty close to a prison cell, from what was closest to the window. From somewhere behind Henry, he could just make out the steel-tipped wings of the Harpy, though the viewing angle meant he wasn’t able to see any more than that.

  Makes sense, I suppose. It’s not like just anyone would be suited to watch over-

  A pain like a white-hot poker seared into the base of his skull, scattering his idle thoughts to the wind as a vision flashed in his mind. The artifact clattered out of his hands, falling to the floor with a slight spin.

  Pain. Blood everywhere. Sign for the Stratford Underground. Claws. Legs missing.

  Disjointed images fit together in his head like a lopsided jigsaw puzzle. In the time the other duplicate had gone out to explore, something had caught him and killed him. As the last of the vision clicked into place, the source of the copy’s end became clear as crystal.

  Werewolf.

  But more importantly, there had been a whole pack following behind it.

  He snatched the artifact back up from where it had fallen on the ground, and scrambled his way back down to the floor below.

  They needed to hunker down somewhere out of the way fast.

  < -|- -|- >

  Henry clutched the back of his head as the pain from the vision began to subside. This one had been particularly nasty, in no small part to the carnage wrought on his duplicate’s body in its final moments. He’d nearly convulsed his face into hitting the tempered glass window from the shock of it.

  The Harpy, naturally, noticed something was immediately wrong with him. He’d been barely halfway through the split-second vision before it had landed into a battle-ready stance, wings flaring in anticipation of the worst.

  “What was that,” it demanded the moment he got control of himself again.

  “Gah… copy died out there, somewhere. Looked like it was…”

  A cacophony of howls rang out through the night, audible even from their vantage point. The pitches of the bestial warcries ranged from mid-tenor to deep bass.

  “...werewolves…” Henry finished redundantly.

  The Harpy sprung into action immediately, waving a hand against the door and unlocking it from the other side. He spun to face him once again, pointing a steel-taloned finger in his direction.

  “You must stay here. I am required to aid in the defense.”

  Before he could get a word in edgewise, the door slammed shut, and the heavy footfalls of the Harpy racing down the hallway echoed off into the distance, past what he could perceive.

  He checked the door. Locked, as expected. Guillaume didn’t allow for sloppiness in his ranks.

  Though, that wasn’t to say his current solitude didn’t give him options. The real question now was whether he wanted to keep up the model prisoner act.

  The shadow of the Harpy flashed past the window as it dive-bombed toward the ground at breakneck speeds. He whipped his head over his shoulder, watching as the Gentleman’s Club formed ranks below to meet the pack of wolves bounding down the streets from several blocks further away.

  “Damn, they’re getting big these days…”

  It was hard to tell from up here, but they seemed to be… maybe a head taller than the thugs, on all fours? On average, at least.

  More than enough to keep the whole army preoccupied, and then some, even with the Harpy’s intervention. Henry made his decision as the Harpy began strafing the front runners with sharpened air currents.

  “Right, we’re doing this, then.”

  With a slight grunt, he pressed his face to the floor, peering under the gap between the door and the frame. A thin sliver of light allowed him to make out the adjoining hallway.

  “Here goes nothing…”

  The glow in the crystal embedded in his chest heightened in intensity, from dull blue to a blinding white flash. He blinked, the bright light in such close proximity causing him to instinctively close his eyes.

  Once he opened them again, he could make out a pair of shoes standing just outside the door. They slunk off shortly after, looking for anything that could be used to aid him in the moment.

  They didn’t need words to hash out the plan. He knew what he needed to look for before making the copy, so by extension the plan transferred between them.

  And with that, all he could do was wait once again. With nothing better to occupy his time, he returned to the window, watching the battle below unfold.

  It was a mess, but it wasn’t quite a massacre. Both sides were trading blows with equal ferocity. Wolves raged forward in berserk fury, trying to close the distance to the Club’s ranks to tear as many of them to mincemeat as possible.

  The arrayed humans, well aware that they did not stand a chance up close, fanned out and peppered the oncoming beasts from a distance. Automatic gunfire rang out from less-than-legal homemade manufacture. Flashes of magic bolts streaked out from their lines like volleys of roman candles. And whenever one of the wolves got a little too close for comfort, the Harpy would swoop down from the skies for a disemboweling strike.

  Granted, it couldn’t be everywhere at once. One did manage to break through into melee range with one of the small squads of foot soldiers, and that went about as well as you’d expect.

  The other guards didn’t even bother to check for friendly fire. Shots from four different angles riddled the beast with holes without hesitation. Those who hadn’t been immediately slaughtered were caught in the crossfire. The term ‘accuracy by volume’ came to mind, as the bulletstorm of low-caliber rounds and low-powered spellcraft took its toll, leading to the musclebound creature’s death at the hand of a thousand cuts.

  Despite the losses, morale seemed to be quite high among them. The Gentleman’s Club pressed the attack, returning the full force of their firepower to the encroaching targets as they sought to reposition. The Harpy, likewise, redoubled its efforts to interdict in time to save the retreating forces.

  The battle ground on for minutes on end. For each wolf that went down, roughly a half dozen to a dozen guards would go down with it. Not great by any stretch of the imagination, but compared to the numbers in the early days…

  There wasn’t a military man alive in the Shroud who wouldn’t call that more than a fair trade.

  What worried him most, though, was the fact that the big one hadn’t moved in like the rest of them, yet.