Chapter 17 – Favor

Luke quickly discovered that using his ability to manipulate shadows drained his mana, but it was small. Which was a good thing because his MP was simply pathetic.

He experimented with manipulating the shadows to wrap around himself, to go almost entirely invisible. The few people still awake at night and patrolling didn’t stand a chance at seeing him.

Luke had chosen Rogue over Mage. While he still stood by that decision, he couldn’t help but feel a child-like sense of wonder at wielding magic.

It was a handy trick, but he quickly learned that the more shadows he controlled, the faster his mana burned away. They seemed to passively cling to him, like gossamer strands of darkness, making his passage through the night smooth and nearly effortless.

Shadow Lord, indeed, he thought, marveling at the supernatural result.

There had been a few close calls, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

If he harbored any doubts whether Marcy and Henry had planned this, the amount of patrols out in the middle of the night would have dispelled that post-haste.

There was no reason for so many people to be out. There had to be at least half of all the people that lived here, all of them looking around curiously as if unsure why they were out here at all.

Marcy always did cover her bases, Luke thought. She was nothing if not thorough. Her only weakness was that she probably still thought of Luke as that pathetic, broken-hearted fool she’d met.

If she hadn’t underestimated him, if she had sent even one or two more people, he might not be here now.

Checking both ways for any patrols, Luke slipped from shadow to shadow into the storeroom he and John had discovered. He took the ladder two rungs at a time, searching for the battered wooden door with the crossbar holding it shut from outsiders.

Lifting it as carefully as he could, he tried to open the door but found it stuck fast. A few nudges with his shoulder had the aged and warped wood squealing. He had shut the trapdoor, but the night was quiet.

He was used to the bustle and noise of a massive city. Even in the dead of night, it was never this quiet. Luke waited for the sound of booted feet running on stone, but they never came.

With a sigh of relief, Luke went into the room beyond where he left the bridge, and his past, behind.

He was on his own now.

Feeling a thrill of excitement, he grinned. Perhaps I’m finally free to hunt some monsters.

***

Johnathan Case was naturally an early riser, but getting his door knocked on only a few hours after he managed to fall asleep was not welcome.

Still, he followed the loyal men and women to the upper floor. He was unsurprised when it turned out this was Luke’s room.

He still remembered being impressed by the view. Luke had seemed somewhat less than thrilled, muttering to himself and looking around as if he was a rat in a cage.

John hadn’t understood. Clearly, Marcy was making an attempt to mend fences. Why was he being so standoffish?

Marcy and Henry were both in the room. The big man’s bulky arm was over the narrow shoulder of a petite young woman with cornflower blue eyes and blonde hair. She looked rattled.

“Naomi here was just telling us what she saw,” Marcy said, looking up with fire in her blue eyes.

Beside her, Henry shook his head sadly, but something about it rang false to John’s exceptional BS-radar. Long years of dealing with suits had left him with a good eye for spotting rehearsed lines and this pinged his radar.

Naomi sniffled, grabbed a handkerchief from Henry, blew her nose, and then told her story. She was passing out candles to all the new arrivals, going floor by floor so the rooms weren’t quite so dark when she happened to hear something from this room.

The door was cracked open. She saw Luke with one of Marcy’s personal guards on his knees, his sword at the man’s throat.

She didn’t hear what Luke said to the man, but that hardly mattered when, a moment later, he slit the poor soul’s throat without a flicker of remorse.

It was a cold-blooded murder.

She’s not lying, John thought. So why are Marcy and Henry?

“Thank you, Naomi. Peter, please take Naomi to one of the Healers on duty, see if they can help her.”

The man who had summoned John nodded. He gently extended a hand to the young woman and guided her out.

There were five others in the room beside John, Henry, and Marcy, making Luke’s room more than a little cramped.

With the lanterns spilling light everywhere, it was easy to see the bloodstains all over the stones. They were still fresh and red. This couldn’t have happened long ago.

“Why would he do this?” Marcy asked, her eyes misting over just as Henry put an arm around her shoulders. “I was trying to make amends, even giving him his space since he seemed so freaked out.”

John’s eyes couldn’t stop from roaming across the arterial spray pattern on the wall to the splotches that ran and gathered in the seams between the stone blocks of the floor.

“Luke did this, you’re sure?” he heard himself saying from a million miles away.

Not Luke, surely? John had known the guy for years. Luke was a bit odd, shy, and something of a loner even before his love life imploded. But not a murderer.

After Emma left him, he went full workaholic. His skills had been good after coming out of college, but in just a few months they had gone from decent to astounding.

But it had worried him.

John had been a senior developer for long enough that he knew the signs of burnout like the back of his hand. And Luke had been on fire. He had this unsettling single-mindedness that let him tear through anything in his way. Without anything but work, he breathed, ate, and slept code.

By the time Marcy came into the story, he was nearly John’s rival. After… well, least said soonest mended, as his mother used to say. Suffice to say, Luke evened out afterward and was a stellar employee, if a bit more of a loner.

John nodded along as Marcy and Henry took turns telling the story as they had pieced it together. Apparently, Luke had asked to speak to two of Marcy’s personal guards, Julian and Francis.

What exactly happened after that was anybody’s guess, but there was no way you could refute what the result was. How it happened was another story altogether. There were no bodies, but John knew firsthand that Luke had no problems vanishing a body to loot it.

And yet… he didn’t buy it. Not entirely.

Perhaps it was because Luke had told him that they would try to make it look like an accident. But as much as he liked Luke, he didn’t trust him entirely either.

It didn’t feel right to admit to it, but no matter what happened, it seemed pretty clear that Luke killed two men here.

There was so much blood that John wondered if there wasn’t a third. According to Henry and Marcy, there wasn’t, and that was part of what gave him pause.

Not that John had a lot (or any) forensic knowledge, even though his last girlfriend was an absolute fiend for trashy serial killer documentaries.

He watched way more than he was ever comfortable with, and he was pretty sure the signs of struggle were between four people, not three.

That meant a third person had come upon Luke and the guards, but either Marcy and Henry didn’t know… or they were covering it up.

But why?

Something wasn’t adding up. He knew it looked bad, but they didn’t have the whole story. He needed Luke’s side of things, but the guy was nowhere to be found.

Tensions were sky high. And the world, as everyone knew it, was gone. No matter how much John wished it wasn’t so.

Though this place was just starting out, it was as well protected as it could be. That might not have been enough to stop a monster from getting in and attacking.

They didn’t know for sure it was Luke, but John knew he was trying to convince himself. Those bloodstains, combined with the lack of bodies, were damning evidence of Luke’s handiwork.

Monsters didn’t vanish the bodies of their kills. He saw what they did first hand.

John never would have thought Luke had it in him.

What if he had no choice? Wouldn’t you defend yourself too, no matter what it cost? John’s thoughts followed a dark passage. The room around him seemed to desaturate into tones of gray.

“Did he say anything to you, anything at all?” Marcy asked, tears barely held back. “I know he’s your friend, but–”

If she really was a liar, as Luke had claimed, she was somehow good enough to fool his BS-radar. The earlier lines felt rehearsed, but this seemed raw and emotional.

Where is the truth?

“We were associates,” John said coldly, thinking on his feet. “Coworkers. He was a little unhinged when all this happened. He was already on the outs with the group. I had hoped a stable place meant we could work on rebuilding the trust he had broken, but…” He sighed and gestured at the room.

Marcy pressed him again for information in that convincing way of hers, but John didn’t change his story.

John put on his best “talking to the suits” face and kept all the plates spinning without dropping a single one. Everything he said was, factually speaking, correct.

They could verify it with any of the members of his group, and they would all say the same thing.

Luke seemed like a nice enough guy, but had trouble adapting to this new world. He thought it was a game where he didn’t have to hold to the same values that clearly Marcy and Henry did, society, order, rules, everything that made the old world work.

There was one thing for certain that John decided. He wasn’t going to turn on Luke. Not without knowing the truth, at the very least.

“I hope you won’t take offense if we sequester your group away from the others for now?” Henry asked tentatively. “This looks very bad, and trust needs time to be built. I don’t want to kick any of you out. You’re all valuable members, but you’ll understand that we need to be sure Luke was a wild card.”

“Of course,” John said. He tried his best to be understanding, but it wasn’t easy, even for him. “Where would you like us to move?”

Things didn’t feel right, but this place was too good to pass up. Too valuable of a location. Even if Luke didn’t do it and was framed, there was no going back for him.

John wasn’t like Luke. He didn’t belong here. He liked his life on Earth.

He didn’t want to start all over again from scratch, building his life up one brick at a time. This place represented stability and a way forward. If they had a misunderstanding with Luke… well, that sucked for him, but John wasn’t about to ruin his life on an assumption.

That didn’t mean he was going to rat Luke out, though. He could cover for him while also taking care of himself and his group.

When Henry and Marcy suggested they find an empty storage building on the bridge, John took the demotion with as much aplomb as he could muster. It wasn’t like he had a choice, though he didn’t want to admit it to himself.

They agreed, in the end, to do one final sweep with all hands on deck. Everybody went off in groups. It didn’t go amiss that John’s people always had two or three people from other groups, with only one of his own.

Every room was searched, top to bottom. When they came across the half-buried storeroom that Luke and John had found earlier, John slid down the ladder and fell when he hit a weak, rotten rung.

The two men up top called down to him, but he waved away their concern and continued searching.

John quickly found the door cracked open with its bracing bar lifted. So that’s how you got out,he thought to himself.

Before he could wonder at just how much he was risking, John shut the door and gently laid the bar back in place. For good measure, he walked around the dusty space, obscuring any footprints.

By the time his fellow “searchers” came down, there was no sign of Luke’s passage.

You owe me, John thought to himself.