Warm sunlight spilled across the step outside the lodge. Bamboo leaves swayed, shaking thin slats of shadow over the flagstones. Lyza squinted into the brightness.
Jared and Luther stood beside her a heartbeat ago. Now their outlines shimmered, slipped between light and shadow, and were simply gone. Her fingers curled against her palm. Breath held, she shaped a prayer she dared not speak: *Come back alive, both of you.*
She spun to Panther and Monkey. Sunlight slid off her face, leaving only hard intent. “Pack everything,” she said, voice low but sharp. “We move to Number Two safehouse exactly as the elder ordered. Fast, no trace!”
Roof tiles flickered past beneath Luther’s boots as he followed Jared across Jade Immortal City. They were nothing more than wind-rushed shadows slipping over tangled alleys and eaves. Jared never took a straight path. He cut left into a deserted lane, dropped behind a collapsed courtyard wall, then vanished through a drain mouth that stank of moss and rust.
Luther mirrored him, letting every wisp of his own ghostly breath thin until even he could barely feel it. Shadow craft was blood and bone for Luther, a birthright of the Ghost Clan. Yet tonight he chased Jared’s heel prints and still couldn’t catch the man’s scent. Awe pricked beneath his ribs, a sharp, wordless thrill that someone not born to darkness could fold himself this thin.
Time stretched, the cadence of their footfalls matching Luther’s pulse. After what felt like a single slow exhale, Jared halted beneath the west wall of Jade Immortal Manor. No guard had barked, no dog had stirred. They could almost hear dust settling.
This section wasn’t the formal gate. A single lantern burned far off, and the patrol route left lazy gaps. Still, pale runes trickled along the spirit-jade blocks, and small eye-slits marked sniper niches every dozen paces.
Jared waved Luther down the wall line to a tangle of ancient vines. The cords were thick as arms, knotted into the stone like stubborn veins. Pausing, Jared pressed two fingers to the vine-coated brick. Luther felt nothing, but his eyes unfocused, listening with a sense far deeper than hearing.
“There’s an old runoff pipe inside,” Jared murmured, barely shaping air. “Rusty, forgotten, and too small for maintenance spells to bother with.” His mouth curved. “Perfect…”
Jared’s thought brushed Luther’s mind like cold breath. “Here’s our door.”
A bead of gray haze pooled on Jared’s fingertip. He tapped a brick beneath the vines. The haze seeped inward. Tiny clicks rang, soft as beetle jaws behind the stone. Hidden tumblers rolled open. A hand-sized panel slid back without a whisper. Cool, musty air gusted from the gap, carrying the taste of old water and stone. The passage was barely shoulder wide. Jared slipped sideways and was gone. Luther inhaled once, flattened his shoulders, and flowed in after him. Once they stood within, Jared pressed an inner catch. The brick eased shut, erasing every seam.
The tunnel dropped at a shallow angle. Slime-dark moss slicked each stone, making their steps whisper. Mildew and wet earth thickened every breath. They descended what Luther judged to be several dozen yards before the shaft split. Jared paused, comparing Lyza’s markings with his own sweeping sense. He pointed toward the left fork, half choked with rubble and night.
They burrowed forward, bodies folding and twisting like climbing animals, squeezing between cracked drain tiles and natural faults. Where rusted grates blocked them, Jared brushed them with a flicker of chaotic force; metal sighed and fell away like dust. Elsewhere he guided Luther around splinters of bygone wards still sparking weak, mean bites. Again and again he sensed stress points Luther hadn’t noticed, whittling the route to a silent sprint.
Luther kept pace, saying nothing. Each new display tightened the knot of respect and unease inside him. Skill alone couldn’t explain it. This was battlefield memory layered over ruthless calm, hammered into muscle and nerve. How many times had Jared walked edges sharper than this to learn such poise? The question throbbed without answer.
Another hush of time slid by. A breath of fresh air drifted forward, stirring a shy glow ahead. Jared halted beneath a mat of hanging weeds. His awareness poured outward like water through cloth. Beyond the veil lay a forgotten corner of garden: toppled rock mound, dry pond, weeds up to Luther’s knees. Farther off, jade roofs of the manor’s inner court cut the skyline, proud and gilded. Here, time had been allowed to rot.
“We’re at the outer fringe of Hundred Blossom Garden,” Jared’s whisper slid across the bond. “Pine-Whisper Path lies east. Cross the dead garden, slip through a bamboo stand, and we’re there. Quentin has to walk that way from Tranquil Heart Pavilion. We’ll prepare the ground first.”
They floated out of the hole and melted into the ragged undergrowth, moving soundless toward the pines. The path lived up to its name—a ribbon of gray flagstones winding through towering old pines. Trunks as thick as four men braided skyward; interlaced needles sifted sunlight into glittering shards across moss-slick stones. Jagged boulders crowded either side, bending the trail into blind turns. No footstep, no bird, only wind rustling pine.
Jared’s gaze raked the scene, quick and hard, fixing angles and cover the way a craftsman studies grain. He pointed to a shallow bend boxed by stacked fake cliffs and two massive pines whose branches wove a ceiling of needles.
“Luther, behind that boulder,” Jared breathed. “Shut your presence down. Unless I cue you, hold your strike.” Jared kept his voice lower than the wind in the pines. “If a patrol wanders through, or Quentin’s guards try to raise an alarm, you shut them down first. No flash, no trace. Misdirect them, stall them, do whatever buys us time.”
A quick brush of his gaze measured every blind spot. The assignment had left his mouth before the sap cooling on his gloves even stiffened.
“Understood…” Luther’s answer was a wisp of breath that vanished between two heartbeats. Luther blurred. One moment he stood beside the boulder; the next, the shadow behind it swallowed him whole. Jared’s senses skimmed bare stone—heat, sound, presence, all gone.
Jared bent his knees, sprang, and let the old pine embrace him. A nest of needles folded around his shoulders, muffling his heartbeat. From the crook of the trunk he watched the bend below, a hundred feet each way. Anyone using that path would step into his sightline, yet not a glance could find him among the green.
The waiting began. Breath by breath he sank deeper into stillness, mapping every root and pebble to the ambush that would bloom without a sound. Jared spread his hands. At each fingertip a dust-fine mote of gray chaotic force glimmered, softer than dew on bark.
A flick of his wrists, and hair-thin threads shot into air, needles, cracks, loam. They nested, linked, and vanished—tightening the invisible net. With each new line the pattern thickened, patient and silent, its outline known only to him.
