“... so after the mother and the child are buried separately, you’d need to re-open the graves the first night, and put a copper nail through each of the heads of the corpse.” though Agent Jill was scared off by the black blocks in the metal box, she showed a somewhat strange and disturbing enthusiasm in explaining the lores behind terribly evil artifacts: “And on the third day, you’d need to go and dig up the bodies, sit the mother straight, place the baby back into the mother’s arms, then start kowtowing to the bodies. Now, since they died of birthing dystocia, there was some kind of twisted bond between them...”

“Stop, stop, I don’t wanna know.” Agent Manzene immediately waved her hands and shook her head: “Let’s just get to logging these things.”

“Well, Manzene, you should start to get used to these kinds of things, especially when you are dealing with matters of malice and dark energy in general.” Pei found a cozy corner and sat down by it: “But still, Jill, be careful when talking to someone who has recently joined the team. Not many could handle the gritty truths of this line of work, we don’t want our turnover rate to grow any higher.”

“Welp. Luckily we still have the best therapists.” Agent Hall shook his head.

“But, who would use such an evil thing? And what the heck can it even be used for?” Agent Manzene shivered a little and asked: “Should I be feeling kind of… happy that this place is gone?”

“That depends on what your experience with evil is, and what kind of darkness you could have handled.” Pei took out a half-knitted hand glove and started knitting: “From what I could tell, and from what I learned dealing with the ones that sabotaged this place, they are nowhere near benign by any standards, and worse in many aspects. Have you looked into the history of the Exalted Bondsmen?”

“Umm...” Agent Manzene hesitated: “Not in detail yet, I just skimmed through the brief version from the official archives.”

“Well, that brochure left out a lot of crucial things and simplified the matters too much.” Agent Hall said: “And it doesn’t describe enough details about some of the High Brokers. It only shows the basic shit.”

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“So, the elemental broker and the ‘Depth Dweller’ broker, they’re actually real?” Agent Manzene asked with her eyes open widely: “My god, I was a bit too nervous to ask. I wonder why we haven’t heard that much about them.”

“Yes, because, and they’re the less troublesome ones.” Pei adjusted her position on her wooden chair: “What you’re seeing here is the doing of the three most nasty ones. Soren Lupei, the de facto leader of the biggest lycan pack in this region, also the spokesman for the alliance between several lycan packs and vampire tribes; Carol Summers, who once had another name, and once a marginal member of the infamous Coven of Crows, now the leader of her own Coven and practitioner of some of the darkest of dark arts. Take a look at some of the marks on the wall and on the ground, they’re left there by dark energy, and yes, they’re created by both sides.”

“I can sorta understand.” Agent Manzene sighed as she picked up a piece of bone fragment from underneath a broken machine, marked its position on the ground and put it inside a plastic bag: “I was almost hired to do some hex jobs by some actresses in Hollywood several times, those petty divas are perfectly willing to cast the nastiest curses even if it cost a whole bunch of money.”

“So why is this war happening anyway?” Agent Jill asked as she put some labels on the samples she just collected: “They’re at peace for that long, and Lucias Vyn and Carol Summers seem like they would get along - they’re both evil nasty bitches.”

“Probably precisely because they’re so alike.” Agent Hall used a long metal clamp to pick up the black blocks and put them inside of a specialized silver metal container with symbols carved all over its exterior: “Dark arts always have resource issues.”

“It all started with the incident at the Grant Academy, they were not on the best of terms before but their conflict never escalated to this level either. Allegedly they were fighting for a piece of artifact that could tip the balance of power not just between the two groups but also the power balance among the High Brokers. Before that there used to be some sort of tacit agreement between the two groups, the alliance of Carol Summers and Soren Lupei, and the crime syndicate of Lucias Vyn.” Pei sighed and said: “Their M.O was that Carol Summers’ members, vampires and lycans take the blood, and Lucias Vyn’s dark practitioners collect the grudge. It’s a whole underground business cycle, hundreds if not thousands of poor young people die at their hands each year. But now the war has bled into the streets like this, who knows how many innocent people will die because of this...”

“Shit!” Agent Hall jolted to the side and fell onto the ground when all the others in the room became silent: “Holy fuck! I should not have tried to listen - holy shit… all those voices - I’ve only heard something like this in San Francisco - ”

“Hey, Pei.” just this moment, a tall, buff, bearded man in a rugged looking tight shirt came into the room and said: “There’s something I’d like your opinion on, can you come over to the other side when you’re done here?”

“Sure thing.” Pei stood up: “What is it?”

“Some kind of - well, some kind of pile of flesh that seemed to be the result of a curse. From what I can tell it belongs to a young lycan.” Alexander, another member of Josephine Wong’s core team thought for a short moment and said: “And also, the pack that was there left something in their den, I think you'd have experience dealing with it.”