Jason was startled to see silver hair spill out, forming a corona around the thief's dark beauty. He froze in that fleeting moment, recognising her as Jory's celestine friend. She also froze, looking cornered as her eyes darted around. Then out of nowhere, a group of attackers came barrelling at Jason, dressed head-to-toe in black.

“Ninjas?” he said, and they were on him.

He evaded, but the celestine took the chance to run. He had to send her where he knew he could find her.

“Your fate is to suffer.”

She would have to run to Jory if she wanted to stay alive but casting the spell cost Jason as he was overrun by attackers. They dropped him to the ground and gathered over him, laying in kicks. Jason evened the odds and then some by sending a geyser of leeches spraying up into them. The attackers reeled, screaming as they pulled off leeches who took gobbets of flesh with them in rings of burrowing teeth. The watching dock workers backed off, but not so much that they couldn’t keep watching.

Jason got to his feet and held out a hand at one of the men yanking leeches off his body.

“Your blood is not yours to keep, but mine on which to feast.”

Jason siphoned-off the man’s life force to heal the beating they had got in. They all had essences, but he could tell from their auras that none had a full set.

“You won’t survive long if you don’t tell me who sent you,” he told them.

“You can kill us,” one of them said, “but the man who sent us will kill our whole families.”

Jason frowned at that.

“Encircle,” he commanded.

The leeches dropped off the men to form a ring around them. They were all bleeding and poisoned, but Jason used his feast of absolution power on each in turn. It replenished his mana and kept them alive; they would probably survive one bleed affliction. They stood in place, unsure and unsteady. Jason moved forwards and ripped the mask off the one who had spoken. Jason didn’t recognise him.

“The person who sent you will kill your family if you talk?”

“That's right,” he said, scared but looking back with defiance. “You might as well let us go. We won't talk, even if you kill us.”

“Let you go?” Jason asked. “After you attacked me? If you’re not going to talk, then you’re no use to me alive.”

* * *

Jory was seeing out a patient when he heard a crashing sound from the back room and rushed back there. Donal, the priest of the Healer, was likewise coming to check the commotion. Together, they found a woman who had apparently staggered in the back and knocked over a rack of alchemy implements as she collapsed. She now lay amongst shattered glass.

“Silver hair,” Donal said. “A celestine.”