A full four days of rain, a full four days of Magnus’s nebulous idea of a police force running like rabid squirrels around town. Knocking on doors, upturning dumpsters, crawling up and down apartment buildings late at night. It was like the Gallery Massacre or Christmastime Corpse Dumper all over again. Though, Uriel knew from his inside sources, there was only one victim involved here. And nobody could even be sure he was a victim. What Verd was, was extremely important, so he was given the care and time and resources that would normally be reserved for fifty people who were actually injured. The injustice of it all kept Uriel up at night.

All of the vague threats that Magnus had hung over their heads kept him up even later. Oh, just the collapse of our lives and infrastructure as we know it. There was no point in masking it all, the ignorant blowhard smiling over his luxury brunch as if it were all fine. He was clearly concerned too.

Uriel could understand the state of emergency, though it was nothing to brag about. The powers that be, the ones that stood above even Magnus, were expecting a report. If Verd had given a bad review of his time here, the city's funding, their privacy, their livelihood could be cut off and the people would struggle and most likely decompose in great pain. Uriel did not know every aspect of city management but he knew enough not to expect Magnus at the absolute top of the food chain, able to magically dredge money from nowhere. To be at a mercy of some visiting blockhead must have been killing him.

Magnus may have been able to talk or blackmail or - God forbid - grovel his way out of a bad report - a task Uriel didn’t envy or find particularly plausible. It wouldn’t be easy convincing a man who had been holed up in some cult coliseum for three days. Depending on the outcome, just making the problem disappear might be the easier solution. You had to explain directly to someone higher up, but perhaps that was easier.

A forced “disappearance” in Magnus’s book meant you weren’t coming back to make further problems.

But therein lay the problem with this particular disappearance: Magnus had not decided on it, it was therefore messy, nobody knew where the pieces were, how many pieces there were, and that meant Verd could be coming back any moment. Maybe he’d return as a distance face on a distance screen, wailing about how he’d had to make his own way out, couldn’t trust anyone. Or maybe he’d come up in a highly publicized dump or kidnapping or execution, hitting the news before Magnus had time to cover it up.

Uriel was incensed. He wanted to help, or to shout abuse, but Magnus wasn’t seeing anyone. He seemed to be out of the office - genuinely, this time.

News reports had claimed his investigation was focused on the church where they had found some bloodstains during that period of heavy rain. It was chilling, but Uriel wasn’t so convinced that blood from the church could only come from one source.

In short, there wasn’t much to go on. So on the first clear morning, he got on his bike and jetted off to the church and its surrounding park.

A birdless, bugless sprawl, quiet as a grave - and there were, in fact, several literal graves. The church had been attempting to form a graveyard for the city, but there hadn’t been too many takers yet. Even the graveyard was empty, just another uncanny imitation of the real world. He wasn’t eager to enter the place at all. But that was alright. The blood had been found on the surrounding sidewalk, he could circle the area and decide what to do after that - and circling would take a while.

He looped behind the clearest quarter of the park first. Hardly any trees, and no visitors. After the rain, the mud wouldn’t make it a popular location. The rows of upturned earth and brown, sunken tire tracks were probably making extra sure of that.

Near the north side of the park, facing the back of the church, there was a scattering of artificial hills and the stark blue-gray oblong of lake. No ducks or geese, not at this time of the year, and not here. The lake lay between the hills, small as a puddle from the distant viewpoint of the street.

Uriel stopped here. By the lake there was a small bench, and in the bench he saw a dark head perched on a body that sported a jacket the color of sewage. The seated figure had his back facing Uriel, he was disheveled, and alone, but not really caring. Definitely not. He was absorbed with the contents of a plastic bag he was holding, Uriel would wager that it contained food. The lonely park visitor had to be Val.

He was mildly dizzied by this, and realized why. As far as he knew from his own experience, and the searches Magnus and Ritz had conducted in the past, Val tended to just turn up in places you didn't expect, not the other way around. He came to you when he felt like it, dropped absurd clues or made inconvenient appointments, but you didn’t run into him in the streets. When you really looked for him, he tended to disappear. Unfortunately, when you were really looking for him, it tended to be because of some trouble he’d caused or was required to fix. He functioned a bit like their missing man dilemma that way - it was better to know where he was, dead or alive. But Val himself seemed opposed to that.

To see him without him seeing you then, it was much like spotting a unicorn in the wild. Uriel was suddenly possessed with the desire to laugh and sneak up on him, tap the back of his head and maybe say something. Something loud. “Boo!” Would that get him? He may happy go along with it. Or would he turn around and lob a knife straight through Uriel's nose? No, that didn’t seem like something he’d do. But this was uncharted territory, so who could be sure?

A second person emerged from behind a tree, and the scene became even more baffling.

At first, Uriel was sure he was going to witness a murder. The second person was very plain, a pale coloration and an off-white shirt, like any of Magnus’s office goons on their days off. He was slightly closer to the lake, so his back was facing Val, who had become still and was watching the newcomer intently.

A few seconds passed. Uriel was too far to hear if the two made any noise. The mumbling in the air could have been the sound of distant traffic. He was focusing so hard that when Val got up, Uriel's heart nearly jerked itself from his chest.

Val stalked like a wolf over to where the other man was standing, approaching in a wide arc from behind. One hand was tensed to grasp or strike, and the other was at his side, or in his coat, Uriel couldn’t see. When he was just behind the man at the lake, Val spread his arm wide.

Uriel wondered if he could call up a loud enough yell to be heard over there, and quickly.

He would be glad he saved his breath.

Val continued until he was standing beside the man, who didn’t move, but turned slightly to regard him. And then the curled fingers - which he now saw were too slow to tear skin, too loose to grasp and restrain fabric, too gentle for even a friendly battering - continued its trajectory down and finally rested at the back of the colorless man’s arm.

They turned to each other, just slightly, enough to see the edges of their faces. The stranger appeared not to have an eye, but a square of white gauze over half of his face. Uriel realized, that must have been Patches.

The two exchanged some words, Val's mouth flapping considerably faster, then turned back to the lake. One arm against the other. They planned to be there a while.

Uriel took his leave. He continued around the compound without much further inspection to the grounds, and then exited towards the highway. He wasn’t sure where he was headed next but he would be getting there with an peculiar grin plastered to his face.