As she pranced around, pretending to be as sloshed as the others, the dhampir picked up different whispers that could be useful. Rain pounded the glass above like it was trying to get in—like it wanted to listen too.

  “Trust me! We want refugee labor—but no one’s saying how they’ll be paid.”

  That was the dwarves. Always looking for extra hands, whether for apprenticeship or just plain grunt work. Dwarven forges didn’t run themselves.

  One of them in the conversation looked her way mid-rant, his gray eyes narrowing sharply.

  Evie easily slinked in between two of them.

  “Enjoying the party, boys?” She whistled and held out her hand. A shadebound unwrapped itself from the floor to put a bottle of red in it.

  “Uncle Sully told me to get you fine gentleman the good stuff.”

  She used it to refill each dwarven cup at the table, label up. It took twice as much alcohol for them to even get close to being tipsy.

  Since they were still talking about work, they clearly didn’t have enough yet.

  She’d give them a bottle of green, but apparently having them drunk and high was a “breach in decorum”.

  A few eyebrows raised and some of them laughed at her nickname for her kin, but thanked her all the same for the top off.

  “Enjoy!” She flashed her fangy smile as she clinked her own wine glass against one of theirs like a badge of diplomacy.

  “Now that’s a fine lassie right there!” She heard one of them say, which put an extra skip in her step for the rest of the night.

  “The refugee encampment might affect the leyline currents—no one’s tested mana absorption on that scale.”

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  A human said that—though Evie had no idea which one. If it had been Oliver, he’d know who said what, where they were sitting, and the exact table number. Evie could remember what’s being said, the gist, the tone, but Oliver was a whole other kind of freak.

  But back to the topic at hand… They sounded more than concerned. The leylines were always forced to work at peak capacity 24/7, but she didn’t know anything about mana absorption. For now, she deemed it not pressing.

  So she continued, prancing along to the tune of the band.

  The orchestra had long since given up on subtlety. Strings sharp with celebratory fervor bellowed with the winds as if to drown out the barbed diplomacy.

  “Have ya’s heard about Mana Ports 7? Absolute shitshow’s. Towah mages are quacks! Can’t even fix the leakages.”

  Ah, the goblins. Evie adored their bluntness. Crude, direct, hilarious—and usually right. The Tower Mages were quacks.

  They had blocked her uncle’s infrastructure plans on more than one occasion. Apparently the glyphwork needed “revisions”.

  “Chief Vrig’s been sayin’s it’s because they’s wanna tie up the boss as much as possibles.”

  Came the reply of another goblin. To Evie, that was nothing new. Sullivan, the boss, had been fighting tooth and nail to get the electrical grid up to code for years.

  Leave it to the Magic Tower to keep moving the damn goal post.

  "The refugee encampment proposal includes mana sensors at every checkpoint. The Glass Chapel says it's for safety."

  The snort that escaped Evie could’ve shattered bone. She hated those leech hunters. Always up her ass during delivery runs for the Sanctum. Worse if the Sheriff was with them.

  Evie was the only one allowed out—being half-human made her just harmless enough to pass, but still worth stopping. Still worth frisking. Like she was some kind of fugitive.

  They were half right. Due to the blood sanctions, she had to lurk around the black markets because the Sanctum had a lot of mouths to feed and not enough willing veins to feed them.

  She placed each slip of information in her mental bucket. She wasn’t as good at recall as Oliver, but she could give Sullivan the gist whenever he asked.

  “Paris’s been buying silver futures. You don’t do that unless you expect war.”

  Now that was juicy. Evie perked up. Paris Jones—a name she recognized. Her uncle Sullivan complained about him all the time. A silver-tongued politician with a nose so brown from ass-kissing, you’d mistake it for a birthmark.

  She edged closer, hoping to pick up more intel—but the conversation shifted. Talk of the newlywed couple overtook everything else.

  Useless.

  Except… now that she thought about it, Evie realized her uncle and his new wife were in every conversation she passed. Whispers threaded through every table like veins—his name, her name, the Forest, the treaty.

  No escape. And nothing juicier to compete.

  Worse, none of it was in good faith. No talk of compatibility. No wishes for happiness. Just vultures picking at the scraps of whatever Sullivan had wrangled from the Crystal Forest.

  Not that she could blame them. It had already upended the status quo inside Sanctum Vespertine—and now, it looked like the ripple was spreading to the city at large.

  So, as the night dragged on, once-respectable discourse dissolved into the kind of bawdy tavern banter that always preceded political bloodshed. The bride—still a mystery—sat swathed in lace and silence, posed like a prize at the end of a long and bloodstained table.

  And apparently, she was ripe for the pickings.