273: The plan?

**Chapter 273**

Now I know this scene could lead to misunderstandings, but no. I wasn’t into necrophilia.

It was just a hunch I got when I touched Anne up and close. Women usually leave a reaction, but her reaction only came from her tits, and even those were rarely touched, because she didn’t let me.

Now I understood why.

There was nothing there to make her feel anything.

Not a slit. Not a fold leading inward. The perineum was a smooth, sealed plane from the pubic mound down to where an anus should have opened and didn’t. No labia framing an introitus. No vaginal orifice. No anal verge. No dimple. Skin, muscle tone, and a blank that didn’t belong on a body I had spent a week treating like a woman’s.

I put my hand on her and sent mana in.

It was the first time I had looked at her that way. Surface had been enough when she was walking and sitting and answering. Inside was a different argument.

There was no vaginal canal. No muscular tube, no rugae, no fornices, no cervix rising to meet a uterus. The space where a tract should have run from the vestibule to the womb was packed with ordinary tissue, fascia, fat, the floor of the pelvis doing a job it had never been asked to finish. No uterine cavity. No cervical canal. The bladder sat where a bladder sits. The urethra existed. The rest of the Müllerian pathway simply wasn’t there.

I shifted the scan lower and back.

No anal canal. The rectum didn’t descend into a passage through the sphincter complex because the complex itself had no opening to serve. Bowel ended in a blind pouch above a closed pelvic floor. No dentate line. No verge. Waste, if this body had ever produced it in a normal way, had nowhere human to go. Either she hadn’t needed to, or whoever built her had solved that off-page.

Now that I thought about it, I never saw her eating or drinking myself. It was an insignificant detail in the face of her ginormous ass, so my mind never went there.

I pulled the mana out.

Copies I could accept. Bloodlines I could accept. This was something else. A woman-shaped thing with tits and an ass and no way in. No birth tract. No waste tract. Built to look finished from the outside and hollow where the biology should have been.

I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t a guess. Guessing over a corpse in the woods was how you wasted a morning the priest might still ruin.

I stored her.

The inventory took the body because she was no longer alive. If alive in her sense truly applied.

I moved the priest and myself to a cave with privacy after cleaning everything up. Which was just me throwing everything in the inventory. For the onlooker, this place would be where their traces vanish. Nothing could be done about the battle signs. They were too much and too little time to cover them up.

The priest came around when I wanted him to.

Water on the face first. Then the kind of waking that has nothing to do with kindness. His eyes found the cave, not the camp, the cart, the paladin, and he started the prayer that men like him start when backed into a corner.

First, the preparations while he prayed. I retrieved a glass orb from the inventory and set it aside. The fucker’s prayer still hadn’t ended.

I ended it for him.

“Look at me.”

He did. Blood on his teeth. One pupil still slow from the pommel. He refused the first few times, kept his mouth shut, but after beating him senseless and then using a potion on him a few times, he was speaking like a parrot. Guess he wasn’t trained in torture, as he was in his arrogance.

“You picked the houses,” I said. “Not the map of Newmark. Carlson house. Grand Lady Elara’s people. Why?”

“We test where we are sent.”

“Sent by whom?”

“The church. The list comes down. I read. That is the work.”

“A list that only touches one banner.” I crouched so he didn’t have the comfort of looking up at God. “You weren’t hunting Demons. You were walking a fence. I want the name on the order.”

“I don’t know.”

I made sure he felt the next part. Not a mark that would kill him. A mark that would make lying expensive. He folded around it and still tried the same sentence.

“I don’t know. I’m a reader. I don’t write the list.”

“Then tell me who does.”

He shook his head. I didn’t accept the head-shake. When he could talk again, his voice had lost the strength in it and found the part of a man who wants the pain to choose someone else.

“Please. I have given the goddess my years. I don’t sit in the prince’s room.”

Prince?

“Why the Carlson house?”

“That was the route.”

“Who drew it?”

Silence. I used the silence. He still had plenty of fingers. He broke on the third toe, not because he grew honest, but because he ran out of the idea that someone could come and save him before even one of his bones was left intact.

“Galliard wants the house gone.”

That was the sentence.

I sat back on my heels and let that sit in.

Crown prince. Paladin. George’s replacement in the story the capital was already telling. If Galliard painted Carlson’s house, now Elara’s, as the roof that had kept a Demon, he didn’t need to beat her in a hall. He needed a mob and a banner and a goddess who agreed on paper. A public enemy doesn’t usurp a throne. A public enemy burns.

“Say it again.”

“Galliard.” His mouth was a ruin of spit and the word. “The first prince. He wants Carlson gone. The house. The woman who holds it. If the court names her shelter for a Demon, the house would be shunned. She becomes the stain. That is all I was told. That is all I needed.”

“There was no Demon,” I said. “If you found nothing, what were you going to do?”

He swallowed.

“The evidence was already forged.” His eyes were empty in a useful way. “Written before we left the capital. We were keeping appearances. Making it look like we were working. So when the charge is read in the city, it looks like proper work was done.”

“What charge?”

“Harboring. A Demon under Carlson’s roof. The king’s death tied to that reason.”

I clicked my tongue.

“Is there more?”

He hesitated. I didn’t give the hesitation a home. He was running out of bones, but he had enough to feel pain. When he spoke again, it was smaller.

He told me the church had already moved, in broken words, and that they were to rendezvous back with them in a few hours after the first light.

That was enough.

I killed him.

Stored his body in the inventory too, and left the cave. Then I was on the horse and pointed at the estate.

A week on the road if you don’t sleep like a man with time. I didn’t. The animal hated me for it. I hated me as well. I should have just prepared an item that would let me teleport back.

But, what use there was over spilled milk? I was late anyway.

Carlson’s gate had gold on it. Paladins. More than a courtesy guard. No scorch on the walls. No broken timber. No smell of a fight that had already happened. That was worse. A fight would have meant Elara had been allowed to be Elara. This was a house holding its breath with church steel in the yard.

I didn’t make it to her office.

A man in white stopped me in the inner corridor, polite the way a closed door is polite. I was measuring the man for a path through him when another priest came out of the turn and looked at my face like he had been told to expect me.

“Grand Lady Elara awaits your presence.”

The smile on his face didn’t indicate an invitation. It was a threat. They seem to have chosen their scapegoat. Me.

I went anyway.

The office door opened on the same desk, the same windows, and a pressure that didn’t belong in a room of this size. Bloodlust sat in the air the way heat sits in a closed room, thick enough that my skin knew it before my head finished the sentence.

This isn’t good.