Here’s an excerpt for you!

“Since this scrap seem to have been a few places,” you note, “we should go to graveyard.”

Patrick arches an eyebrow.  “Think it came off something fresh?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“I don’t want to go there,” Tonrak complains.  “Scary.”

You pat her on the head.  “Go to red brick temple on north side of town.  I send message for your father to meet you there.”

Patrick snaps his fingers at an underling, who salutes and shouts, “I’m on it!” before gently escorting your niece away.

It takes you just a few minutes to reach the cemetery on foot, but in that time a threatening cloud bank rolls in, sheathing the afternoon in dank gray.  The increased humidity pricks at your lungs as the sun’s rays struggle to pierce the sky.

You gesture toward the southernmost row of headstones, where Patrick begins scanning thoroughly for anything suspicious.  You take the northwesterly quarter, where the graves are slightly more spread out and, in most cases, quite lavishly decorated.  One woman, you note, who died at nineteen received no fewer than six bouquets of flowers.  A gnomish baker and entrepreneur lay west of her, and another person around the corner from him…

You halt.

A gravesite here, which you came within one misstep of falling into, has clearly been desecrated.  A body lay at the bottom of an open pit, facedown.  Its few patches of remaining skin seem whiter than the bones they reveal.

You read the words on its headstone.

“Bartleby,” you mutter.

You turn the body partially over and look closer, at a particularly gruesome detail.  “Patrick!” you yell.  “Over here!”

Your companion rejoins you within a few grand strides, kneeling beside you.  “The heart.  Someone broke open and drained what was left in his heart.”  You exchange morbid glances.

A thunderbolt rips through your ears with a deafening crash, and huge droplets of rain start to pelt your arms and back.