They went at night, because Alistair said daylight made honest men nervous and dishonest men careful, and he'd rather deal with neither.
Rennick's house sat two streets back from the square where Wren had nearly burned, ordinary in every way that mattered modest stone, a lamp glowing in the window, nothing that marked it as belonging to a man who tied children to poles for a living.
Ethan found that more unsettling than anything overtly wrong would have been.
He'd half expected something that looked the part crooked shutters, a strange smell in the air, some outward sign that the man living here had made his peace with what he did.
Instead, it looked like every other house on the street.
And that, Ethan was starting to understand, was exactly the kind of detail worth remembering.
Monsters that looked like monsters were easy.
The dangerous ones kept tidy gardens.
"Stay close," Marguerite murmured.
She was already at the side door, already working something small and metal into the lock with the practiced patience of someone who had done this before.
"And keep that thing in your chest quiet. If it so much as twitches, every ward in this house will light up like a signal fire."
"It's not going to twitch," Ethan said.
He pressed a hand to his sternum anyway, just to be sure.
The coal sat still.
Watchful.
Almost Ethan thought, though he wasn't certain he trusted his own reading of it yet curious.
He noted that too.
It hadn't reacted this calmly to anything since the night it had lost its fight for him. Whatever it was sensing in this house, it wasn't afraid of it.
The lock gave with a soft click.
Marguerite pushed the door open.
They slipped inside.
The house was ordinary until the cellar wasn't.
There were no strange symbols on the walls. No bloodstains. No occult objects sitting in plain sight.
Nothing.
Just a quiet, well-kept house that could have belonged to anyone.
Then they found the cellar.
Rennick's cellar had no coal, no root vegetables, no wine racks.
Just a single table.
A single chair.
And on the table, laid out with a precision that made Ethan's skin crawl, a row of small green-gold vials.
Each one was stoppered.
Each one was labeled.
The handwriting was too neat to belong to a watch captain.
The air down here was different too.
Thinner, somehow.
It carried a faint, sweetish smell beneath the damp stone. Ethan couldn't put a name to it yet, and he wasn't particularly interested in learning one.
Idris approached the table.
He picked up one of the vials and held it toward the lamplight.
The old man's face went pale.
"This," he said quietly, "is not evidence of a man burning Taken by mistake."
Ethan looked at him.
"What is it?"
Some part of him already suspected the answer wouldn't be one he wanted.
"It's residue."
Idris's fingers tightened slightly around the vial.
"Cthu presence, drawn off at the moment of the pyre instead of destroyed by it."
He lowered the vial.
"Someone has been harvesting every Taking in the eastern district for months."
Ethan stared at the row of vials.
"Harvesting?"
"Yes."
Idris looked from the vials to the others.
"And selling us selling the Vigil a story about routine executions the entire time."
Silence settled over the cellar.
Ethan looked at the vials again.
There were more than he'd initially noticed.
A lot more.
Each one held that same faint green-gold glow.
Each one represented a person.
Someone who had been tied to a pole.
Someone who had screamed.
Someone who had been declared lost.
Someone whose death had apparently been turned into a resource.
His hand tightened into a fist.
Behind them, the cellar door creaked.
Nobody moved.
Then a voice came from the doorway.
Low.
Unbothered.
Almost amused.
"You know, I did wonder how long it would take someone to come looking properly instead of just mourning the ones I burned."
Ethan turned.
Captain Rennick stood in the doorway.
He was unarmed.
Unhurried.
And smiling like a man who had been expecting company for quite some time.
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Rennick's gaze moved across the room, taking in Idris, Marguerite, Alistair, and finally Ethan.
His smile widened slightly when his eyes settled on him.
"Though," he added, "I have to admit, I didn't expect you."
Ethan felt the coal beneath his ribs shift.
Not violently.
Not yet.
But it had noticed Rennick.
And this time, Ethan was certain of one thing.
It recognized him.