My testing closet lay utterly empty except for a small pile of clothes. I stared down at them. I….the door had been locked. I leaned down, lifting the clothes up, searching through them as if I could find them hiding among them. The door had been locked!

I found nothing besides the piece of paper, which had three words scrawled across it: Out For Lunch.

The rest of the room was bare, which wasn’t strange. You could see the marks on the stone floor from me dragging the testing table in and out of the room, and nothing else was stored here during testing. Which only made the lack of the intruder more apparent.

I let out a noise reminiscent of a steam whistle as I moved to one of the walls, hammering it with my fist. Rough wood threatened to put splinters in my hand as Tolman leaned down, reading the note.

“Well, what do you know, they disappeared from a locked closet. And they left their clothes behind. Maybe they got overly warm and decided to go streaking to cool off?”

I ignored the joke. Thud went my head into the wall, then again and again. My head hit rough wood, my short horns digging into it.

“Falara? It was a joke.”

“Why me?” I asked no one in particular. “I’ve done my best. It’s been years since I killed anyone before yesterday. I barely do anything worse than anyone in this district. I’ve kept away from the worst of my vices. I’ve not done a scrap of diabolism since. Why are the gods punishing me?”

Tolman went to grab a chair from my lab, sitting down on it. “I'm pretty sure stopping killing people doesn’t improve your standing too much. Scamming people and stealing at the same level as those in this district is still a sin. And you drink way too much mead to claim you don’t have any vices.”

“Tea is not a vice. Neither is mead. But besides that, things were looking up. Now they’re heading down at a swift rate.”

He’d picked up some of the clothing, searching it for anything hidden inside. “Might be true, but no use moping about it. You’ve had a few bad days. You’ll bounce back.”

Tolman did have a point. Moping about this would not solve anything. Sighing, I looked around the lab. I had an emergency teapot somewhere. The intruder had gone through the drawers again, opening up even more ingredient containers I dutifully shut. Some of these were ruined, but at least nothing poisonous had been touched.

I eventually found the shattered remnants of my spare teapot inside one of the cupboards. Ah, they had chosen death.

I returned to the testing closet where Tolman had finished going through the clothes pockets.

“Okay. Let’s think about this. The intruder got out, but they couldn’t have used a key. Outside of why they didn’t just use it to continue trying to fight me, leaving the clothes here suggests their only method of escape required needing to strip their clothes off.”

Tolman cocked his head. “Are you copying Voltar?”

I didn’t know whether he was referring to having encountered Voltar as part of the Black Flame or one of Dawes’ published accounts of their cases. He was right, but I did sound like the detective's vocalization of his deductions.

“I…it’s not copying. Voltar didn’t invent deductive thinking, Tolman. But besides that point, if the intruder could open the door, they wouldn’t have stripped naked.”

“Unless they want you to think that.”

I shook my head. “No. As insane as events in this district get, someone strolling through naked would have gotten attention. They wouldn’t do that willingly. So they got out of the testing room. The door is locked, and most of the room is reinforced. So the only potential exit is this.”

This was the crack underneath the door, one I’d cut out myself to precise measurements. If testing something with dangerous fumes, I’d stop it up with a material that would expand and seal it off from the air. Then, I’d prepare the rest of the lab so I could safely open the door. Not the best solution, but on limited funds the best I could do. Most of the time I left it unblocked, like I had last night.

It also was a gap only half an inch tall. I should have noticed my stop-gap of rags to stop the intruder’s screaming had somehow vanished.

Tolman leaned down, poking a finger into the gap. “You think he made it out through that?”

I lay down on the floor, looking at the crack. “Unless another explanation presents itself, it’s what we must go with.”

I wasn’t enthused about this being the possibility either, but there were no signs of another way they could have left. The wood of the testing closet, roughly knotted and pockmarked, was solid and showed no signs of being tampered with.

“Well, if he went through there, maybe he Biosculpted himself to fit through it?”

I shook my head. “Remember how long it took me to alter myself compared to you and Arsene? It’s even more time-intensive when you work on yourself because inevitably you’ll be altering parts of your body that help you manipulate the tools you use to alter it.”

That had been the struggle in handling my own disguise. The only reason I’d managed it was having a half-year in which to do it bit by bit slowly. Once in place, the temporary alterations only required me to touch up on them and fuel them every two weeks. I’d done minor alterations, like the ones since Lady Karsin had contacted me, but they were relatively easy compared to altering my entire form.

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“It wouldn’t be possible to do some quick and dirty ones just to make him capable of leaving under the door?”

“If she, or he wanted to try that in the time they had, they must have accomplished some breakthrough in the field that I haven’t heard a whiff of. We’re talking about a complete transformation to something barely resembling their base form overnight.”

“You’ve not been doing it the past couple of years. Considering how little you've been doing, you might be a little out of touch.”

“Which doesn’t mean I haven’t been following it.” Although if the ability to alter one's form on the fly like this had been made, it being kept secret wasn’t too far a stretch. Not if they wanted to keep that ability for themselves. But there was still one issue besides all that.

I gestured at the pile of clothes at our feet and hooves. “Even if they did make some breakthrough, they wouldn’t be able to take their sculpting tools with them. Even the finest set wouldn’t fit through that opening.”

“If not biosculpting, perhaps some other kind of magic. Teleportation?”

“They could have taken the clothes with them if they teleported. Shifting magic maybe, but they all have a limited number of forms, and anything small enough to fit through the door crack would be difficult to change back from.”

“Right, you mentioned it a couple of times when Darlav wanted to become part wolf. The animal brain exerts an influence, and the smaller you get, the more it does. What happened to him anyway?”

“Went chasing stories of lycanthropes. Versalicci didn’t receive it well. You never heard?”

“Versalicci trusted me with a lot less than he did you. But if we’re talking about lycanthropes, vampires, maybe? They can turn into mist. Even if they’re a bit rare.”

I snorted. The reason vampires were rare is that most of them were dead. After the Infernal Empire's collapse, vampire hunters killed most of the known vampires. Which didn’t stop rumors of them cropping up every time a new spree of murders occurred. Even in quite a few cases where the killer has been caught, rumors still fly about a vampire being responsible. It was easier to believe a blood-sucking monster could do such cruel acts over someone you knew.

This was on top of the usual everyday rumors about various nobles or public figures secretly being vampires. Although apparently, a new trend among some in the upper class was to pretend to be vampires. Supposedly to spice up their love lives, or so I’d heard.

That sounded like the kind of utter nonsense people stuck in arranged marriages might pursue to spice up their lives. Either way, I doubted any member of the nobility could be a vampire.

“If it was a vampire, I doubt I could have manhandled them into the closet so easily. And before you ask about lycanthropes, outside of them, they are also strong enough to rip my arm from its socket on average, and they can’t displace their mass as easily. Their animal forms can’t get smaller than a small dog. No, wait. Some can do vermin, but only very large vermin.”

“Shapeshifters, perhaps? They might be able to shrink their bodies small enough to fit out between the door crack.”

“The last shapeshifter known to exist in the city was perhaps a hundred years ago? Ignoring all the claims and rumors that were never proven.”

Those were always in season, especially if you wanted an excuse guaranteed not to work for why your spouse caught you cheating on them.

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a shapeshifter. Not knowing if someone is them or not is part of their entire deal.”

I frowned. “The question is why they’d be rooting through my lab. Regardless of whether they are shapeshifters, vampires, or something else. Montague still tops that list.”

“Where did you put the cures?”

“Somewhere secure,” I answered. “Not that I don’t trust you Tolman, but considering everything that’s occurring, I’m not saying it out loud.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t in your head either, you never know if they have someone capable of reading minds,” he joked.

I glared at him. “I am being precisely the amount of paranoid this situation requires, Tolman. Those cures were expensive to make, and I doubt I’ll be able to acquire the ingredients for more.”

There were very few substances that could be substituted for the extracted brain fluids of a draconic entity. I doubted another would die again so soon or be so poorly guarded. Smaller creatures wouldn’t be much easier to find and wouldn’t be as useful to harvest. You didn’t tend to get much fluid out of the brains in the first place.

I couldn’t go out and kill one either. Outside of morality, I rather doubted I could.

Sighing, I went through the pile of clothes again. I found nothing, not even any personal items to help find out who he’d been. The clothes were definitely not what I expected: a morning coat with silver metal thread mixed in, trousers, a waistcoat with more metal thread except this looked like gold, a shirt with well-done embroidery, and even a top hat. Despite our brief fight last night, their tears were only minor.

Had the intruder broken into my lab after a fancy dinner party?

“We’ll need to take these with us,” I said, already folding them up. I’d need to find a box or a bag from my lab to put them in.

Tolman tossed me the waistcoat. “They’re pretty fancy, but I don’t see pawning them earning you much.”

I considered the belt missing from the set of clothes. Perhaps taken with, if it could fit under the door? Perhaps with a weapon, like the second saber I had strapped to my own? “Maybe I’d pawn them eventually, but I meant more for finding out who the intruder is with them. These couldn’t have been cheap. Hrrm, no identifying marks, but they might have been hand-tailored.”

We both left the lab, the clothes stowed away in a bag. I locked it behind me and sighed. I’d have to remove everything from here or figure out how its defenses had been bypassed.

“Apologies for dragging you out here, Tolman.” I pressed a few pounds into his hand. If I kept burning through Lord Montague’s advance at this rate it wouldn’t last a week.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking the money and then opening the door for me. We’d be traveling light. I’d have to hire security or people to help me move the lab’s contents and tools. “It beats work at the laboring and gives me something outside the fighting pits. Arsene is the breadwinner anyway, even if he keeps moaning about not being able to artifice like he used to. I think someday he will murder Karlat for not doing things right.”

Karlat would be the blacksmith Arsene had gone to work under after I’d arranged his, Tolman's, and my own exits from Versalicci’s gang.

“Still. This is an additional risk for you since Versalicci knows who I am. He might guess you and Arsene’s true identities.”

Tolman snorted derisively. He always didn’t have the proper fear and respect one should have for Versalicci. He’d not been around the boss when things had reached the end, and he’d never been as far into the inner circle as he thought.

I’d never spill the details on that. Partially because just remembering some of them made me sick, partially not to draw attention from Versalicci. I did not want to see if any of the curses set up to prevent us from talking about them still worked.

We reached the downstairs. It would be mid-morning now, so if I ran for it, I might make it to Halmon before he closed for today.

Of course, as soon as we exited the building, the next batch of trouble began.