Three Days Later – Birmingham, Winter Creeping
The nights were coming faster now. Bitter winds slipped through alleys like whispers, carrying with them the scent of coal, blood, and something worse—fear. Not the kind that followed gang wars or police raids. This was older. Deeper. The kind that made your soul flinch before your skin.
And Birmingham's underworld was starting to talk.
Something was happening.
Campbell's men—those who once patrolled with impunity—were quiet now, locking their doors before the sun dipped. Rumors flew of strange marks found on precinct walls, of constables waking with bleeding eyes and no memory of how they got home.
James Shelby had begun his war.
But tonight wasn't for fear. Tonight was for preparation.
He stood in a disused boxing hall owned by the Blinders—shuttered since the war. The ring ropes sagged with mildew. Broken bottles littered the floor. In the center, James had cleared space for what he was building.
A ritual.
A forge.
A war room.
Laid out before him were relics smuggled from the corners of the Romani world: bones carved with protective spells, old silver blessed by fire priests in the mountains, and cloth soaked in the blood of a lynched elder.
At the center of it all sat the blade—not metal, not shadow, but something in between. A weapon shaped in the spirit realm. Only he could see it fully. To others, it looked like a shimmer in the air, a heat haze in the shape of a knife.
But to James, it pulsed with one purpose: to find the fracture in Thaddeus Vale's stolen soul.
He wasn't alone.
Polly Gray stood near the doorway, arms crossed, watching him like a mother at a funeral. She'd seen a lot in her life, but what her nephew had become… even she didn't have words for it.
"You're slipping between things, James," she said softly. "Men weren't made to walk both realms."
"I wasn't made for this world," James replied, not looking up. "Not entirely."
She stepped closer. "Do you even know what you're becoming?"
"Yes," he said. "Necessary."
Polly watched him finish laying out the circle. "Tommy wants to talk. He's worried."
"I'm past conversation."
"He says Vale's just a man. That you can handle this the Peaky Blinders' way."
James paused. Looked up. His eyes weren't glowing—but there was a quiet light in them now. Like someone had cracked him open and poured fire inside.
"Tommy's wrong," he said. "Vale's not a man. He's a prison. Built from stolen souls. And he's had a hundred years to become very good at keeping them."
Polly swallowed. For once, she said nothing.
Later that night, James walked the rooftops of Birmingham like a ghost. The city below him churned—factories, clubs, opium dens. Places where the Blinders ruled. But he wasn't looking for money or muscle.
He was looking for Vale's trail.
He found it behind St. Agnes Church.
A fresh killing—no bullets, no blades. Just a Romani girl, maybe fifteen, eyes wide open, no blood, no bruises.
But her soul was gone.
James knelt. The sigil had been burned into the stone under her body—one of Vale's own.
The witch hunter was marking territory now.
He was daring James to follow.
So he did.
That same night, James returned to his war room. He took the blade in his hand—not physical, not visible, but real enough to cut memory. Then he dipped it into a bowl of black water and whispered words passed down through five generations of fire-walkers.
The room trembled.
Across the veil, somewhere between time and night, James's voice reached the spirits of the ones Vale had chained.
"I'm coming," he whispered. "Hold fast."
And far away—very far away—Thaddeus Vale looked up from his own circle of light and smiled, as if hearing a distant drumbeat.
"Come then," he said to the shadows that danced around him. "Let's see how your fire holds up against my cold."