The city hadn’t changed as much in fourteen years as Hastur might have expected, though there was a chance his impression was being colored by Mike’s memories. He’d been here the whole time, after all, and his memories had remained after he left so everything felt normal to Hastur. Expected, even.

He’d had this problem when he first arrived on earth, too. Particularly once the war had ended and they’d all been shipped back to the states— to Mike’s hometown where everything was familiar and yet so very, very strange to the man living in Mike’s body.

The change was less extreme this time, at least. A new shop here, an expanded street there… not much to write home about, to be honest, just… unsettling.

Leaving the area around the watch house as quickly as he could without drawing attention, Hastur still allowed himself time to take in the sights a little. He’d missed the architecture of his home country more than he’d realized. Detroit had been all bricks and glass, concrete and steel… impressive to be sure but lacking in the charm and beauty that came with old stonework and aged timber. The sloped roofs, covered stairs, and brightly painted onion domes so many of the buildings sported brought a smile to Hastur’s face as he walked along increasingly busy streets.

It faded when he reached the salt road and came to a stop at the corner to take in the city below.

The salt road ran all the way from the docks at the city’s lowest point up to the ducal palace high above above. Hastur could see the ocean from where he stood at the top of a hill around the road’s halfway point, but more eye catching than the distant blue waves was the sprawl of the city itself.

Ashtown had expanded significantly in the last four years, growing to surround the west side of the docks and curve out along the base of the hill. As the section of town where the very poorest people of Vorslav lived, Ashtown had always been fairly large, but to Hastur’s eye now it seemed to have doubled, tripled even, in size. He frowned at the realization and, on reflex, cast his gaze back up the hill towards the ducal palace, though he couldn’t actually make it out from between the large, prosperous buildings that surrounded him here so close to the market district.

Just what the hell had his father been doing the last fourteen years?

Not much, he realized with a start as Mike’s memories suddenly came to him. Duke Rurik Fane had stepped down some five years before and ceded control of the duchy to Hastur’s younger, legitimate brother, Raivis. Introverted and inclined to secluding himself as he was, Mike didn’t know much more beyond that, though. Hastur had never been much for politics either but he still found himself cursing his body’s former guest for not paying more attention to what was going on in the duchy around him.

The sound of rapidly approaching horses made Hastur step back from the street’s edge on reflex and duck into the shade of an awning in time to see a dozen or so members of the Red Guard ride past in a hurry. With their bright red overcoats and impressive armor, the guard drew the eye and sent people scatting to get out of their way in a rush, nearly causing a panic in the busy street. Hastur grimaced at the sight, not least because they should have known better, but also thanks to another wave of unfortunate memories from Mike.

Hastur had been a promising young lieutenant in the Red Guard and Mike hadn’t just panicked, he’d completely abandoned Hastur’s career in the guard and fled all the way to Ashtown to avoid his former comrades when he found himself in Hastur’s body.

The secondhand embarrassment made Hastur sigh heavily and pinch the bridge of his nose as he leaned back against the side of a building and waited for the crowd to thin out some. Did it count as secondhand if it was technically his life that had been totally botched? He wanted to be angry about it all, but Hastur couldn’t manage it. It was difficult to be angry at someone when you’d literally lived inside their head for over a decade. He and Mike had never actually met but he still knew the man better than anyone across either of their worlds.

He wasn’t a bad sort. Mike just… well, he was aggressive as a soft-boiled egg and a self-preservation instinct that put the wiliest of rabbits to shame, if he was being frank about it. It really was a blessing he’d quit Hastur’s job rather than embarrass both of them trying to carry on like he was someone he wasn’t. Thinking on it, Hastur was impressed Mike managed to dodge his fellow guards when they’d come looking for him to discover why he’d quit long enough for them to give up.

Mike had since moved out of Ashtown and into a little place a stones throw from the market district. Not exactly a well-to-do part of town, but respectable enough, and a good deal safer than Ashtown, which was all Mike had really wanted.

Unfortunately, Hastur was going to have to leave it behind.

The chance that Count Tsarkaya was going to let things go with just a jail cell beating was quite slim from what Hastur could recall from Mike’s memories. The old man was nice enough when you were on his good side, but downright cruel when he felt he had been wronged by someone. The cruelty was only amplified if the one who had wronged him was someone the count considered below him, too.

Something Hastur definitely was given his status as a failed Red Guard and a bastard son.

The houses here were quite small, all cramped together almost wall-to-wall in rambling rows, but they were tidy in their own way. Mike had made fairly decent coin working as the count’s librarian so he’d been able to afford renting a home all to himself and been quite pleased with the fact. Looking up at the place from the street, Hastur’s heart gave a little pang of sympathy for the man that had lived here. He remembered Mike’s pride when he’d settled in and made it his own after the unsteady start he’d made on landing in this strange new world.

There’d been many nights when Hastur had wondered just why he had wound up on Earth in another man’s body— and what had happened to that same man. Now he knew what had happened to Mike but the why of it all still remained a mystery…

Hastur shrugged off his pointless, circling thoughts and made his way up the creaking, wooden steps to the front door of Mike’s home. When he reached out to unlock it with the brass key in his pocket, however, his hand brushed the knob and he paused.

His skin buzzed subtly where his knuckles had come into contact with the cool brass fixture and Hastur immediately thought of Reeve Branimir. More specifically, he thought of that hair-raising feeling of raw potential— of something out of sight waiting to be wrought into a new form, waiting to be used.

Senses honed by years of living on the edge of the law and on the battlefield made Hastur withdraw his key without turning it then carefully press his fingertips to the knob, heart pounding.

Could it be? Was he really able to sense magic?

Hastur’s first instinct was to cast the idea immediately aside as impossible— while his father was a powerful magic user Hastur had never manifested any magic of his own and the ability to sense its presence was something even the most powerful casters spent decades trying to master. Most of them never did.

And yet…

Hastur withdrew his hand and went around to the back of the house where, according to Mike’s memories, there was a second door. He checked this one too and frowned when he felt the same warning tingle he had on the front. It didn’t take a caster to figure out someone must have left some sort of alarm spell on both entrances to the house— and Hastur knew for a fact it hadn’t been Mike’s doing.

The man grimaced and withdrew his hand. Just how pissed off is the count to drop the coin for a caster to put alarm spells on the door? Well, Mike was tumbling his wife, I guess…

So, ‘pretty pissed’ was probably the answer. Assuming this tell-tale tingling wasn’t all just a figment of Hastur’s imagination.

A healthy dose of paranoia had kept Hastur alive this long, however, so he decided to trust his instincts and turned to the nearby window instead. He found no sign of magic in its frame or glass when he touched it so he gave it a sharp bang along the left side where Mike’s memories told him there was a fault in the sealing around one of the panes. It popped free and tumbled onto the table below it, giving Hastur just enough space to stick his hand through to unlatch the window and open it wide.

Some undignified grunting and wiggling later and Hastur made it inside, hopefully without anyone the wiser.