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SERENITY

The last photo of Jared Muñoz shows him laughing outside a bodega on West Division, one hand wrapped around a horchata, the other mid-gesture like he's telling the world's greatest joke. He was a twenty-three-year-old earth witch with a knack for growing herbs that shouldn't survive Chicago winters. His mother filed a missing persons report nine days ago. The cops gave her a case number and nothing else.

Jared makes three. Before him, it was Marisol Vidal—a hedge witch, forty-one—who disappeared walking home from her sister's house on the South Side. And before Marisol, a seventeen-year-old fire starter named Colby Raines vanished from a group home in Pilsen without so much as a scuffed doorframe. Three practitioners vanished in one month, all gone without a trace.

I jerk up my jacket collar against the wind and study the padlocked entrance to the old Bleecker Street tunnel from across the road. A chain-link fence surrounds the access point, decorated with faded construction warnings and enough rust to give a tetanus shot on contact. The streetlight overhead flickers and casts my shadow across the cracked sidewalk.

My reflection catches in a rain puddle near the curb. Black waves of hair whip across my pale olive skin. Metal rings glint on my fingers, highlighting the dark circles under my eyes that no amount of concealer can fix anymore. I look like I haven't slept in three days, which tracks, because I haven't.

I’m Serenity Crowe, an occult investigator and professional bad-decision maker.

Crouching beside the fence, I grab bolt cutters from the duffel bag slung over my shoulder. The lock gives with a snap that echoes off the surrounding buildings, but nobody flinches. That's the beauty of Chicago after midnight—everybody minds their own damn business.

A familiar, prickling warning races up my arms as I push through the gap in the fence, a sensation I've learned to respect even when I don't listen to it. Three practitioners have vanished near this tunnel in the past month. The supernatural community chalks it up to territorial disputes. The cops wrote them off as runaways.

Both explanations sit wrong in my gut, and my gut has a better track record than the Chicago PD.

Grabbing my phone from my pocket, I switch on the flashlight before starting my descent.

The abandoned Bleecker Street tunnel reeks of rust and decades of human waste. My boots crunch through debris as I navigate the skeletal remains of what once carried thousands of commuters daily. The city sealed this section after the collapse in '98, but locks never stopped me before.

My phone's flashlight cuts through the darkness and illuminates graffiti tags and water stains.

I round the corner where the main platform opens up, stopping short at the sight. The concrete wall bears fresh burns, still warm to the touch. Symbols spiral outward from a central point like a twisted galaxy, each mark immaculate despite the apparent violence of their creation.

"Well, shit."

The lunar crescents are unmistakable. Inverted phases arranged in a pattern I recognize from the forbidden texts my grandmother kept hidden in our family vault, the ones she warned me never to read after Mother died.

I switch my phone to its camera feature and start photographing, the camera flash throwing stark shadows across the ritual space. Each symbol radiates with residual energy that makes the skin beneath my jacket sleeves itch. The Crowe bloodline responds to celestial magic whether I want it to or not.

A larger symbol dominates the center—a moon in eclipse surrounded by binding runes. My stomach drops. On the outside, it looks like a ritual site. Someone performed a harvesting ceremony here, one specifically designed to trap and drain practitioners of their power.

The scorch marks extend in perfect circles, a pattern that suggests multiple casting points. Whoever did this brought friends. Organized covens rarely target random practitioners for sport; they hunt for specific bloodlines and specific abilities.

They target specific families with reputations.

I photograph the binding circle's edge, where dried blood stains the concrete. Three distinct patterns overlap, confirming my worst suspicion. Three victims and three separate rituals, all building toward something larger.

I start a secure encrypted chat and fire off a quick message to Nolan Graves—the only human detective I trust with supernatural shitstorms.

Found a ritual site in the Bleecker tunnel. Three distinct blood markers. Start digging into any missing practitioners in the last month.

My phone dings with a reply almost instantly, but I ignore it. The fewer people who know I'm here right now, the better. The symbols before me represent knowledge that died with my grandmother's generation for good reason. Someone's been digging through archives that should have stayed buried.

I kneel beside the largest blood stain, my knees grinding into grit and broken glass. The Paranormal Governing Council forbids communion with the recently departed and classifies it as a strict felony. But the Crowe family grimoire never forbade it—only warned about the cost. Every spell demands payment, and blood magic extracts the highest price. I'm crossing a massive legal line, but playing by the rules hasn't brought these people home.

I tug out my silver athame, and the blade catches my phone's light. The metal feels cold against my palm as I swipe it across my finger. Three drops of blood hit the concrete, each one hissing as it makes contact with the residual energy.

"By blood spilled and spirit bound, I call to those who walked this ground."

The incantation resonates with sorrow and regret, triggering a subtle warmth beneath my jacket sleeves as my magic responds to my heartbeat. The air grows thick, electric with possibility.

A whisper echoes through the tunnel, barely audible above the distant rumble of active subway lines.

"Who disturbs my rest?"