The first traces of dawn crept through the window into the small bedroom, alighting upon a pair of dark leather boots as Annie shoved them out the window and smacked them together a few times. The sound echoed through the empty streets, deafening in the early morning silence. She inspected them, tipping one upside down and giving it a little shake to watch a trail of sand spill out in a wispy cloud, then nodded in satisfaction and drew back inside.

She had already beaten the dirt and dust out of the rest of her clothes and gotten mostly dressed. She'd hung her shirt, hat, and duster on the back of the chair along with her belt and pistol while she cleaned out her boots. Then she set them next to one of the chair legs and sat down on the edge of the bed to dig through her bags.

After a moment of blind rummaging her hand closed around a cold glass vial near the bottom. She fished it out and set it on the mattress beside her, then continued her excavation. From the depths she retrieved a small brass tube, just a little bigger than her palm. It had a ring protruding from the side and a small lever on the other.

Annie tucked a finger in one end and pulled out a short cylindrical metal frame, about half the size of the tube itself. Then she picked up the vial, briefly held it to the light to check the thick black liquid that sloshed inside, and twisted it into the other end of the tube until it made a small click and a thin needle sprung out in the center of the frame.

She grit her teeth and placed the contraption against her thigh, threading her thumb through the ring and wrapping her fingers around the lever. With a squeeze of her hand the needle leapt from the tube and pierced her leg, slipping right through the fabric of her pants as it had a hundred times before. Annie felt the ichor flow through her veins in a flood of warmth and hissed as every muscle in her body tensed.

As her body relaxed she rubbed the bridge of her nose and untwisted the vial from the tube, setting it aside as she rose from the bed and walked across the room. She dropped the brass injector into a waiting water glass atop the dresser and grabbed another vial whose label simply read, “Cleaner”. She uncorked it and tipped a drop of the fluid into the glass with the injector. The liquid slowly began to gently bubble and churn. Before long steam was rising from the glass as the water simmered.

“Welp, time to get to work.” She said to the empty room as she slung her belt around her waist and cinched the secondary strap, securing the holster to her leg. Next came the jacket, then her hat, and Andromeda Flynn became a Stranger once more.

They didn’t strictly have a uniform, Strangers weren’t that kind of crowd, but there was a certain amount of presence people came to expect from you when you donned the steel spiral. People thought Strangers were mysterious, intimidating, and dangerous. Who else in their right mind would go around hunting monsters of all things? People tended to take you more seriously if you were dark and foreboding, or decked out in some extravagant armor. Showing up in jeans and a flannel to tell people you killed monsters just didn’t cut it these days.

She began to head out the door before stopping, turning on her heel, and strolling back to her bag. Digging inside she plucked out a handful of small clay discs fixed to leather clasps which she snapped onto her belt. Her fingers brushed the glyphs inscribed in each of them and felt the faint buzz of magic that emanated from the lines.

“Almost forgot these.” She muttered. Charms were important in the Stranger business. Minor enchantments that carried just a bit of magic in them helped Strangers make their own luck and gave them the edge they would need in a fight. Annie had some that made her a little harder to hit, placed her feet in just the right spot to keep her balance, warned her just before she got a nasty surprise, and other tiny adjustments to her fortunes that really added up when you piled them together.

She turned to look at the earring lying atop the nightstand. It was a miniature sword that was about two inches in length, cast in silver with small runes engraved along the blade, and had a red gemstone embedded in its tiny pommel. Annie hung it from an earlobe and secured the clasp, comforted by the slight chill of the metal.

Satisfied she was now properly equipped for a day on the job, Annie marched out the door and into the hallway beyond.

The motel was quiet, the first traces of early dawn light were just beginning to creep through the shutters of the lobby windows and the whole space was still as if it were holding its breath.

Annie’s stomach growled. Right. First breakfast, then work.

Tallis had said she and Tulvir would make breakfast once they were up. Annie felt a bit rude asking them to rise so early, but she was a bit short on options. It was less than ideal to fight monsters on an empty stomach, after all. Maybe one of them was already awake?

She passed a few doors down the hall and stopped in front of the one labelled “office”. Tulvir was supposed to be in here. She hoped he was an early riser, otherwise he might poison her breakfast for making him wake so early.

Annie rapped her knuckles lightly against the door. Silence. A little harder. Silence. Well, Tallis did say she could go to the office if she needed anything. She gently tested the doorknob and it turned with ease. Either Tulvir was a very trusting man or he was already up and about. She should check just to be sure. Quietly as she could, Annie nudged the door open.

The light that bled through was a mottled crimson that cast the Stranger’s silhouette large against the wall behind her. The heavy scent of iron cut through the air and flooded her nostrils. She threw open the door.

A corpse lay in the center of the room in a pool of blood. It was a man, a large and stocky [dragonborn] covered in dull golden scales tinted brown in the red light and clad in just a pair of plain black shorts. He had collapsed backwards on top of his legs facing towards the door, as if he’d been kneeling just before he died. It was probably Tulvir. Shit.

Annie glanced around the room, the threat was almost certainly long gone but it never hurt to check. Tulvir’s office was a repurposed motel room, the bed was in the same place as hers and it had the same tiny bathroom door, this one with a number of dents and scratches about shoulder height in the frame. A desk had been dragged in and placed opposite the bed and the chair in front of it was padded, a bit nicer than the one in Annie’s room. The papers on top of it were orderly, a small lamp connected to a bending metal arm that shone a bit of light over them and a quill set beside them to dry. Everything seemed to be in place, there were no signs of a struggle.

She moved inside, stepped over the man’s outstretched tail, and crouched over the body, careful to avoid touching it or tracking any blood around. He didn’t seem to have any defensive wounds, but the enormous gash in the front of his neck was obvious. And it wasn’t just large, it was deep. Whatever had cut into his throat had sliced through scale, skin, and muscle, stopping only when they reached the bone of his spine. And even then, it looked like a chunk of that had been severed as well. It left his head bent too far backwards, his blue reptilian eyes wide with shock and his jaw stretched open with the beginnings of a scream or maybe a desperate gasp for air. Trailing down his neck a bit Annie could see cracked scales and faint discoloration, the [dragonborn] equivalent of bruising, on his collarbone right between the neck and shoulder.

His killer had surprised him. Forced him down on his knees, and slit his throat. [Dragonborn] were a hardy folk, their scales made them a bit tougher than humans and were difficult to cut through compared to skin. And Tulvir was not a small man, he’d have come up to about Annie’s height standing, maybe even a little taller. And his arms were the size of small trees! This was a man used to labor, he’d likely been working all his life. A man like that shouldn’t have gone down so easily. Whoever had killed him was strong, unnaturally strong.

Annie looked to the bed, it looked slept in, but neat. The blanket and sheet had been tossed to one side, away from the edge. If he’d been dragged out of bed they would have gone with him for part of the trip, ended up hanging over the side or even on the floor. They weren’t, they just rested atop the bed waiting for him to return. Tulvir had gotten out of bed on his own.

So what had happened?

The killer had somehow gotten into the room, but Tulvir seemed unsurprised to see them. He had been out of bed, maybe before they got there or he had gotten up when they did, and he was comfortable enough not to look for clothes; the closet and dresser were undisturbed and she couldn’t see any discarded anywhere in the room. He was facing the door as if to greet them, so he might have trusted them? Then the killer had grabbed him, shoved him to his knees, and cut his throat all in one smooth motion so he didn’t have time to react.

The spray from the wound had arced as he fell, drawing a line in the ceiling, along the wall, and splattering the shade of the lit lamp on his bedside table. The light filtered through the blood, painting the room in an eerie red.

Annie heard a scream from behind her and whipped around, but whoever it was had taken off running down the hallway towards the main room. She heard the sound of a hinge, a clatter, another smaller clatter as something wooden bounced, then silence. She got up and walked over to the door, sticking her head out into the hall only to feel a buzz in the base of her neck that made her jerk back inside just before a click and echoing BOOM blasted a chunk of the doorframe into splinters and sawdust.

She looked around the room for something, anything that could be a weapon, then froze. Even if she found something, whoever had that shotgun was just scared. Hurting them wouldn’t help anything. And it would upset Deputy Kenton, the man who was going to write her check.

With a sigh she straightened up from where she’d crouched, tipped her hat to fall behind her head and hang on the chord strung from it, and removed her glasses.

“I’m gonna come out now, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t shoot me.” She called, and then stepped gingerly out into the hallway.

Tallis stood shaking behind the counter where Annie had first seen her, clutching a double-barrel shotgun in trembling hands that she now leveled at Annie. She hadn’t shot her yet, so that was promising.

“You! What did you do to him!?” Her voice was hoarse and she squinted like she was fighting back tears. The shotgun didn’t budge.

Annie raised her hands above her head, slowly as she could, “I didn’t do anything to him, Tallis. I just got in last night.”

Tallis wiped at her eyes and adjusted her grip, “Right. You get here one day, he’s dead the next, and that’s just coincidence?”

“Considering I never even met the man, I’d say so.” She started to slowly walk towards the counter.

“Don’t you move!” Tallis cried, raising the shotgun menacingly, “I swear to the gods I will shoot you dead!”

Annie stopped, “Okay Tallis, I’ll stand right here.” She looked the scared woman in the eyes, “What’re we gonna do now?”

“You’re gonna stand right there, and we’re gonna wait for Connor to get here!”

“Right. Okay.” Annie nodded, “But that might take a while.”

“No,” Tallis [said], “Y’all said you were going to meet in the morning. First light, I heard you!”

“You’re right, we did,” Annie said slowly, “But we didn’t actually pick a place to meet. Bit of an oversight on our part, honestly. He might be waiting for me at the station. He seems pretty polite, he might wait there a while for me.”

A flicker of worry crossed the girl’s face and she quickly covered it, “I can wait as long as it takes!”

“Tallis, listen. This is the second death in this town, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And Deputy Kenton and the Sheriff have been investigating them for almost a week.”

“Right.” Her face was dubious.

“I just got here. You checked me in. And I’ve never met Tulvir. Not much reason to kill him, and it’s a lot more likely whoever did also did the first murder.” Annie gestured with her hands a bit in the air, “Plus his throat was cut. You still have my sword. And my gun! I couldn’t kill anybody even if I wanted to!”

“You’re a damn Stranger! You could’ve used some magic or something to do it!” She cried.

“And risk bringing a crowd of demons on our heads just to kill some random innkeeper? Why would I go and do a fool thing like that?”

She could see Tallis’ arms begin to shake from the strain. Shotguns were heavy, her arms were getting tired.

“Tallis, please. I just want to help.”

A pause. And then, “Fuck!” Tallis lowered the shotgun. She didn’t look at Annie, “Fine.”

Annie let out a breath and lowered her hands, “One of us should go get Deputy Kenton.”

“I’ll do it. I don’t want…” Tallis shuddered, “I’ll do it. You stay here.”

“Yes ma’am.” She said. Tallis shot her a glare and trudged out the door, shotgun in hand, leaving Annie alone in the motel lobby.

“Right,” she said to nobody in particular, “That went well.” She slipped behind the counter. Annie hadn’t lied to Tallis really, she wouldn’t use magic to kill some random innkeeper - that could tear open the Veil and loose demons all over the place even if she was able to. Somebody had run that risk though. Tulvir was killed using magic, she was sure of it. The question remained: what kind?

She touched the amulet on her chest as the gears in her head churned. Stranger emblems, the little metal spirals they wore to prove who they were, reacted to tears in the Veil. Hers hadn’t. So whatever magic had killed Tulvir was either not very strong or pulled from somewhere else. Given the depth of that cut, she was betting on the latter.

She scooped up her weapons and noticed some string had been tied around the cloth containing her sword, keeping it from falling open. She wasn’t sure if the gesture was thoughtful or fearful, but it was appreciated nonetheless. She swung the bundle over her shoulder and felt it snap onto the magnetic clips she kept strapped across her back. A sword that size was difficult to carry on the hip without knocking it into things, so she’d found the back mount easier over the years.

Slotting her pistol into its holster, she turned and marched down the hallway back towards the office.

Arriving at the door once again, Annie took out her glasses and returned them to their proper place at the bridge of her nose. Then she tapped a tiny, almost imperceptible rune engraved on one of the pin heads that held the frame together, giving her a view of the room suffused with threads of brilliant light and color.

Mages had an ability called “Thread Sense” which let them instinctively feel the integrity of the Veil around them. This was actually an ability present in most living beings that people ascribed to instinct. Like when you feel like you’re being watched, a sudden sense of dread and you say something like, “This doesn’t feel right!” Practicing mages had to refine that ability to a near science through years of study and training until it was strong enough to detect the threads of the Veil. Only then was it deemed “Thread Sense”.

A few mages like Annie had developed tools that took that ability even further, allowing them to actually see glimpses the Veil and therefore spells that had pulled from it. She was using one such tool now.

Thin threads of neon light scattered themselves around the room, wrapping around the furniture and trailing along the walls, casting nearly every surface in light. Everything except Tulvir’s body. The Veil was present everywhere, it followed the essence of life wherever it went, leaving traces of itself wherever living beings stepped and on whatever they touched. Tulvir had lived and worked in this room, it was full of the Veil he had left behind. Some of the threads by the door were even tinged with Annie’s violet magic. But Tulvir’s body was dark, desolate compared to the rest of the room. Dead was dead. Death seemed to repel the Veil like a magnetic force meeting its opposite charge, leaving spaces feeling empty and forlorn in its absence.

It would be helpful to see what sort of magic had caused Tulvir’s wound, but whatever Veil energy had been used was scattered away by his demise. Annie hoped to find evidence elsewhere. She surveyed the room, walking in a slow circle around Tulvir to inspect every inch of the place. Threads tended to take on a color based on whoever touched them, Annie thought it had something to do with personalities and intentions. Tulvir’s threads were a steady blue, a little darker than the midday sky. She could see a variety of tone and hue shifts trail around the room as his moods shifted and varied over the years of his life he spent here. This office was lived in, it had been his home. It would start to empty without him as the stain of death slowly drove the Veil away. The office would miss him, in a sense.

Annie wasn’t finding anything productive in the room. Tulvir’s threads covered everything and the denseness of them made it hard to pick out anything else from among the tangles. She went over to the desk and rifled through the papers, lifting each one close to her face. He’d spent much less time with these, with any luck she’d find…. A-ha!

One of the papers sported a single thread of dull grey light. Somebody other than Tulvir had briefly picked this one up to inspect it. She folded it up and stuck it in her duster, the thread would cling to it for a while, she could hopefully use it for comparison.

She finished her trail around the room and stopped again at the door, she realized more grey threads lay scattered among the door’s handle and frame. Whoever these threads belonged to had opened the door and brushed the frame on their way inside. She filed that away for later.

A dull pain began to ache behind her eyes and she tapped the small rune once more, then rubbed at her eyes. Intensifying a person’s Thread Sense like that was taxing, spending too long looking at the veil lead to migraines and strange dreams. Looking at the Veil was like looking at the soul of the world. It was best to do it sparingly.