“Okay, Brother St. Clair,” the detective’s brows furrowed, “What exactly are we looking for?”

“Uh.” Vincent’s thoughts spun, the wheels rubbed raw from the earlier attempted possession by the demon. “I mean, we’re looking for human hostages, so, uh… anywhere you’d be able to find dozens of human children?”

Noir Detective raised an eyebrow.

“Look man, I just fight demons and witches good. The Brotherhood typically leaves the mission details to the alchemists or the normie— er, Human Law enforcement partner agencies. You let us mission plan and you wind up with an exorcist who takes ten billion years to climb a mansion.”

“Where is your partner, anyways?” Vincent didn’t like the way Manfred emphasized “partner”, but he decided to think that it was just the notion of considering Lucian as actually being beneficial in any way.

“Plotting something.” Vincent shrugged. The two men looked at him, all four eyebrows raised. “Look, I ain’t worried about his ability to figure out where the roof is.”

Assuming, of course, that he didn’t also run into any surprises.

Noir Detective rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Spread out!” He barked. “We’re looking for signs of a concealed entrance, something that would take us to either an attic, or an auxiliary premises.”

Boots stomped across the room, flashlights flickering to and fro across the garbled mess of furniture and creepy dolls. Every once in a while, some idiot would pan his beam across one of the demonic mirrors, light like daggers into Vincent’s eyes. He blinked, to clear his stinging vision with some tears, and felt his eyelids scratch dry across his eyeballs. There was something painful and crusty in the corner of one of his eyes - almost like… flakes of dried blood. Damn, just how close did he get to losing that fight?

A dark form in full combat gear ran into one of the towering bookcases. As the policeman swore under his breath, Vincent watched the pile of dolls quiver their eyes, eyelashes flickering in the eye of the yellow moon. The frequency seemed to match the wobbling of the book cabinet - so everything seemed… normal. Well, normal enough.

He was really not in a particularly good place to think, but think he needed, and faster than whatever this molasses churn was going on inside his brain.

This whole operation was missing something.

Well, it was obviously missing a whole lot of somethings from the start, but in this case, it was something he, specifically, felt like he’d missed. He could feel his pulse in the very front of his forehead, like he was growing a horn there. Where in the fuck was Lucian, when you needed back-up?

He hobbled over to the fireplace tucked in behind an ornate sofa chair big enough to seat a giant (though it seemed bland enough to be human-made, so Vincent figured its maker was going for ostentatious, and not actually trying to cater to an Aberrant demon children clientele). The stone of the fireplace mantle was ice-cold; the floor in front of it clean of any sign of demonic activity. Nothing’s been up and down the grand chimney in quite a while.

At least they weren’t dealing with a demonic Santa Claus.

The problem was, the fireplace in the basement was very much in use, which meant the demon had to have been making the trips somewhere - a different room, with a different fireplace. And the set-up in the room was too obvious to have been a trap. Dragging all this furniture out would have taken a better part of a day - almost like it was prepared for a different activity, and then hastily retrofitted into something resembling a trap, to draw all the attention away from something that was less of an eyesore.

Something you’d just walk by.

The pain in his forehead throbbed.

The creepy narrow hallway full of paintings with dead eyes. It started at the top of the spiral staircase, and only opened up to one set of doors - ones leading into this room. The geometry didn’t add up.

“Yo, Detective.” His own voice rattled his brain. “The hallway. There has to be a concealed entrance behind one of the paintings.”