The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 710

The airport wasn't a terminal. It was a stone platform open to the sky — and before Alex caught the smell of wild magic Beatrix had promised him, a shadow slid across the tarmac, three full seconds ahead of the sound.

He looked up. Wings longer than the runway banked once over the rooftops and vanished, unhurried, like a hawk over a field it already owned.

Nobody else looked up.

A woman walked past with a fox-sized creature draped over her shoulder like a scarf. Six eyes blinked at him, one after another, as they crossed paths. A cart rattled by — something ox-shaped and beetle-plated, hauling crates, answering its handler in clicks that weren't quite a language.

This city was built around something Alex didn't have a name for yet. He figured he'd have one by nightfall.

Beatrix's directions took him through the merchant quarter and down into streets that got older with every block — buildings sagging, signage faded, the crowd thinning to nothing. Willowmere, the locals called it. The tail end of the old caravan road, where it dead-ended into the Feral Line. Cheap rent. He'd learn why.

He found the shop by the hole it left in the street.

Every other storefront on the block had something alive chained in the window — advertisement, service, both. His had nothing. Boarded glass. A sign hanging by one chain — REAGENT Branch — swinging just enough to mark time like a clock nobody had bothered to stop.

The spare key waited exactly where Beatrix said it would, under a loose paving stone by the back door. That told him everything about how quietly this branch had actually died.

He let himself in.

Dust. A payment-tile gone dark. Shelves stripped to bare wood. In the back room, ledgers had gone soft with damp, the last column of numbers trailing off mid-row — like whoever was writing them had stood up one day and never come back to finish.

A voice cut in from the alley door. "You're not supposed to be in there."

A woman stood in the frame, sixty-some, sleeves shoved to the elbow, a crate braced on one hip. She looked him over the way this whole city seemed to — already three conclusions ahead of him.

"I own it," Alex said. "As of this morning."

"That's what the last two said." She set the crate down hard. "Hargrove's men. Walked in, poked around, did the math on rebuilding a name Hargrove spent a year burying — and decided it wasn't worth the trouble." A humorless almost-smile. "You'll last a week."

Alex did not know that.

The reagent group had been struggling for two years.

Maybe at one point the Beatrix family, her uncle for sure, had even considered taking over the shop—or selling it off—but after a closer look they found nothing left that was worth the trouble.

"I'm not Hargrove's people."

"Then you're worse. You're new." The almost-smile again. "Monica. Ran the counter here six years, before it went under. Noodle stall's mine now, next door — if you're hungry and not picky."

That's when he heard it. A sound from the yard out back — low, wet, barely there. Breathing through something broken.

Monica's face changed. "Leave that be. It bites."

He went anyway.

Chained to a post in the weed-choked yard was something that might have once been magnificent — a massive dog, shoulder-high, with a heavy frame and fangs like carved bone.

"Because if word gets out there's a healer in Willowmere who can do—" she waved at the hound, now leaning its full weight into Alex's leg like it never planned to move again "—that, Kell and Bush are going to have a very bad month."

“I’m not opening a clinic for beasts,” Alex said flatly. “Humans, maybe. Beasts? Definitely not.”

He hadn't come here for that. He needed a way into the Empire — which meant staying quiet, gathering information, blending into the wallpaper. In Willowmere, he'd already heard, even asking the wrong question about Empire routes could get a man disappeared.

“Who knows,” Monica said and walked away.

Alex looked around the ruined shop — dead ledgers, stripped shelves, that sign still swinging on its last chain out front — and something settled into place that had nothing to do with magic.

If this place was going to be his cover, it needed to look lived-in. He'd need help for that.

He'd barely started on the back rooms when the door creaked open again.

Monica walked in first. Behind her, an old woman carried a fox draped across her arms like a heavy, limp child.

"Healer," the old woman said, voice cracking, "please help my friend."

Alex rolled his eyes.

Which part of "I'm not healing beasts" had these people missed?