The Pendulum had swung east two hours ago. Across the street, Seraphina’s mansion loomed above one of the Catacombs’ larger entrances, its crumbling fa?ade still committed to the performance of neglect despite having lost its audience some time ago.
Isabella was leaning against a lamppost. She looked like she’d been there a while.
“What took you so long?” she said. “It’s getting late.”
Lambert stood with his hands clasped at his back, studying the Catacombs entrance. “New stonework,” he said, by way of not answering. “That wasn’t there before.”
Wylan had noticed it too, though his attention kept drifting to the archway’s geometry. Someone had reinforced it recently, and not subtly. He filed that alongside the other things he was trying not to think about and pulled his coat tighter. The cold found the gaps and moved in with no intention of leaving. He shifted his satchel against his chest, felt the weight of what was inside it, and tried to look like someone who was merely cold.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Laila asked Isabella.
“Tomorrow,” Isabella said. She pushed off the lamppost. “Let’s get this over with.”
The illusion of neglect ended at the threshold, as it had the first time. Wylan stepped through and the cold followed him in, then thought better of it.
The court was smaller tonight. Fewer attendants, fewer of the sheer-draped figures who had made his first visit such a comprehensive education in where not to look. The chandeliers still burned. The air still carried that sweetness, old wine and something underneath that made him want to breathe more slowly.
His hand found his satchel, brushing past instruments and notebooks to the small glass vial he’d spent the afternoon on. He could feel the warmth of it through the glass. The blood was his own. The rest was not.
Augustine detached himself from a column near the entrance with the unhurried confidence of someone who had been watching the door all evening. Blond hair catching the candlelight, all angles and attention.
“What are you doing back here?” he said. “You have not been invited.”
“And yet here we are,” Lambert said. “We need to speak with Seraphina.”
Augustine’s gaze moved across the group and stopped on Wylan. The smile knew it was being smiled. “Since you’ve come here unbidden, we absolutely insist you become caught up in the festivities.”
Last time, that line had preceded a dance Wylan still couldn’t fully account for. He’d replayed the evening afterwards with clinical detachment and concluded that he’d been enchanted, which was a perfectly adequate explanation for why his pulse had done what it did.
He drew the vial from his satchel and uncorked it.
The effect was not subtle. The liquid inside was gold, his blood refined and catalysed with compounds he’d spent the afternoon calibrating. The scent hit the air and Augustine’s pupils blew wide.
Several heads turned across the court. One of the attendants swayed. Augustine took a step forward that he clearly had not authorised, and caught himself with visible effort. His composure didn’t crack so much as rearrange itself around a new and urgent priority.
“What,” he said, and his voice had lost its music, “is that?”
“An experiment,” Wylan said. He corked the vial. His hands were steady. The rest of him was not, but his hands were steady and that was what mattered. “I wanted to see if the theory held.”
Augustine stared at him. The charm, the poise, the practised menace, all of it had been stripped back to something simpler. He looked, for the first time, surprised.
Good, Wylan thought, and had no idea what to do with that.
Seraphina’s voice cut across the room like a blade through silk. “Augustine. That is quite enough.”
The court stilled. Augustine stepped back with the reluctance of a hound called to heel mid-hunt. Wylan pocketed the vial and tried to remember what his face was supposed to be doing.
Seraphina swept the room with a look that emptied it. Attendants found the walls and the lesser vampires found the doors, both with the haste of employees who recognised the mood. She regarded her grandchildren with the warmth of a headmistress who has been interrupted during something important.
? There exists no formal manual of vampire court etiquette. Several have been attempted. The authors, without exception, failed to survive the peer review process.
“Come, then. And do try not to make a habit of this.”
The auditorium was as Wylan remembered it: a room that couldn’t decide whether it was a council chamber or a den of indulgence. Seraphina cleared it with a wave, sweeping aside a handful of lounging vampires and one mortal with the dazed look of a willing volunteer.
Seraphina settled into the room’s only chair that could reasonably be called a throne and regarded them.
“Why have you come here on such short notice?” she said. “This is not our appointed time.”
Isabella offered a smile. “My apologies, Lady Seraphina, but we’ve encountered some pressing questions that require your particular expertise.”
“Don’t you always.” Seraphina’s gaze cut sideways. A vampire in the far corner had picked up the hookah and was examining it with the idle curiosity of someone who had been alive long enough to have tried everything at least twice. “Hettie. Put that down. It is not a plaything.”
Hettie put it down. She put it down with the exaggerated care of a child placing a stolen biscuit back on the plate, rose with immaculate poise, and drifted from the room as though departing had been her idea all along.
Seraphina returned her attention to the family without so much as a blink of transition. “Go on, then.”
“We have reason to believe that some of these questions may be of benefit to you as well,” Laila said.
“You have at least intrigued me.”
“Do you recall where the Sepulchre is?” Isabella said.
Seraphina’s intrigue evaporated. “I am no longer intrigued. Yes, of course I do.”
“We believe Father Esteban has taken refuge there,” Laila said. “We need answers from him. Regarding Aeloria, and the curse laid upon Aurora.”
Lambert stepped in. “We need to know where the entrance is. Could you direct us?”
“I can,” Seraphina said, in the tone of someone who had not yet decided whether she would.
“We have the means of gaining ingress as it is,” Lambert added.
That changed something. Seraphina’s stillness shifted quality. “Pardon?”
Lambert reached into his coat and produced the obol. He held it up, turning it between his fingers. The omega symbol caught the low light.
“Information for information,” he said.
Seraphina’s gaze fixed on the coin. She didn’t move from the throne, but something in the room’s gravity shifted toward her. “Where,” she said, her voice almost sweet, “did you come across such an item?”
“It’s ours,” Lambert said. “We’d rather not part with it if that’s what you intend.”
Seraphina studied the coin from across the room, the calculation visible, the effort of not reaching for it even more so. She rose from the throne with a composure that was almost convincing.
“Come with me,” she said.
She led them out of the auditorium, through the mortuary, and into the night. The cold hit them again at the threshold, but Seraphina moved through it without acknowledgement. She crossed the grounds toward the Catacombs entrance Lambert had been studying earlier, past the two vampires stationed at the archway, who stepped aside with the synchronised deference of doormen who had not been informed there would be guests but were not about to ask.
No ceremony, no theatre. Whatever game Seraphina had been playing in the auditorium, she had dropped it the moment she saw the coin.
“Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” Seraphina said, without looking back.
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“I think hope abandoned us quite some time ago,” Lambert said. “But yes, do carry on.”
The air changed within the first dozen steps. Not just colder but thicker, as though the air itself resented their presence. The lamplight Seraphina carried barely reached the walls, and what it found there made it wish it hadn’t bothered.
Bones. Stacked with a precision that suggested either deep reverence or competitive instinct. Skulls set into alcoves at regular intervals, each one facing outward with the hollow patience of a very old audience. Femurs laid in radiating patterns between them, geometric and deliberate, the work of craftsmen who had long since stopped thinking about what they were working with and had started thinking about symmetry instead.
? The geometric bone arrangements follow standards codified in 1423 by the Confrérie des Ossements, who maintain that a femur laid at anything other than forty-five degrees is an insult to the dead. The dead, consulted on the matter by a theurge in 1597, expressed no opinion.
Wylan’s boots found wet stone. The sound came back wrong, too many echoes, arriving at intervals that didn’t match the geometry of the corridor. A footstep returned as two. A breath came back as something that wasn’t quite a breath.
Wisps of black miasma snaked along the floor, curling around their ankles before retreating into crevices in the bone-stacked walls. Wylan watched one thread itself through the eye socket of a skull and vanish. The skull did not seem to mind.
Seraphina moved through the labyrinth without hesitation. Left, left, right, through a passage that narrowed until his shoulders nearly brushed the stacked dead on either side, then opened into a chamber where the bones had been arranged into vaulted arches, ribs and spines forming a ceiling that curved overhead like the nave of a cathedral built by people who had very different ideas about building materials.
He tried to track the route. Lambert was counting under his breath. Isabella was doing something similar, her eyes marking junctions and alcoves. After the seventh turn, she caught Wylan’s eye and shook her head slightly. Don’t bother.
Without Seraphina, they would not find their way back.
She led them deeper. The corridors tightened, widened, tightened again. The bones gave way to raw stone, then to something older, carved surfaces worn smooth by water or time or fingers that had not needed light to find their way. The air grew heavier, dense with moisture and the faint mineral tang of earth that had not seen the surface in centuries.
They descended a final staircase, the steps cut deep into the rock and emerged into a grotto that silenced all of them.
The ceiling vaulted high enough to swallow the lamplight before it found the top. Water seeped down the walls in thin, glinting threads, feeding patches of moss that glowed faintly in colours Wylan had no name for. The stone here was different, darker, veined with something that caught the light and held it, as though the rock remembered light from some older source.
At the centre of the grotto, half-reclaimed by the earth, stood a fa?ade. A face set into the rock, carved pillars flanking an archway that led to nothing visible, the stone above it worked into shapes that shifted depending on where he stood. Script ran along the lintel in a language he didn’t recognise, the characters dense and recursive, each one building on the last. The omega symbol was carved into the keystone, larger than his fist, and even in the dim light it seemed to pull the eye.
The air in front of the archway was wrong. Not cold, not warm. Still, in a way that air in an underground grotto should not be still. As though something on the other side held its breath.
Seraphina approached it and brushed centuries of dust from a small plinth at the base of the right-hand pillar. Beneath lay an indent, coin-shaped, etched with the same omega symbol.
She turned to them.
“The obol,” she said. Not a request.
Lambert looked at Laila. Laila gave the smallest nod.
He crossed the grotto and placed the coin into the indent.
It fit perfectly. Of course it did.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then Wylan felt it, a vibration, not in the stone but in the air itself, a low harmonic that he felt in his teeth and behind his eyes. The script along the lintel flared, briefly luminous, each character igniting in sequence from left to right like a fuse being lit. The omega symbol pulsed once, twice, and the stillness in the archway deepened from absence into presence. Darkness, but not empty darkness. Darkness that knew it was being looked at.
Then it faded. The script dimmed. The air settled. The coin sat in its indent, unmoved by the whole affair.
Seraphina exhaled. It was the first unguarded sound Wylan had heard her make. She reached down and lifted the obol from the plinth, turned it over in her fingers, then held it out to Lambert.
Lambert took it. Or tried to. Seraphina’s fingers didn’t release.
“You understand,” she said, her voice light and conversational, “that I could simply take this from you. Right now. By force. And there would be very little any of you could do about it.”
The grotto was very quiet.
“However,” she continued, and her smile widened, “notice how I am bargaining, yes? Like family.”
She let go of the coin.
Lambert pocketed it without looking away from her.
“You have the key,” Seraphina said. “And I have the way.” She traced the edge of the indent with one finger. “We can strike a deal, you and I. I will tell you how to enter, if you give me the means to enter myself.”
Wylan shifted. “You want to come with us?”
“Not necessarily with you.” Seraphina’s smile was thin. “I would simply like the obol when you’re done with it. Consider it a fair trade.”
Laila looked between them. “What do you intend to do with it once you have it?”
“What do you intend to do?” Seraphina returned.
Lambert glanced at the others. “We seek Father Esteban. We need answers from him. And,” he paused, “information about Lampetia.”
Seraphina’s eyes lit with something that might have been humour. “Ah, yes. Lampetia.”
“I think our goals align,” Lambert said. “Perhaps we could journey together, with you guiding us through?”
“For such guidance, I will certainly require the obol. I believe that is more than fair.” She paused. “There is no deadline per se, but the value of the way in diminishes with every night that passes.”
“Before we agree,” Wylan said, “there are some other questions we need answered.”
Seraphina regarded him. The obol sat between them, undecided.
“Such as?” she said.
“Aurora,” Isabella said. “She was cursed shortly after her birth. We need to understand what it might mean.”
“Aurora was born while I slumbered,” Seraphina said. “I have not met her. She is Maximilian’s child, yes?”
“She has a Brand,” Wylan said.
Seraphina’s reaction was not what he’d expected. There was no surprise, no shift in composure. Satisfaction settled across her features.
“Three of you,” she said. “And now a fourth. The line breeds true.”
He kept his face neutral.
“There’s something else,” Lambert said. “The spark carries traces of draconic fire. Flecks of it, woven through the Brand.”
That gave Seraphina pause. Not the Brand itself, but the nature of it. “Draconic,” she repeated.
“And she’s never been exposed to the Umbra,” Laila said.
The miasma at the edges of the grotto thickened, tendrils curling closer to the Sepulchre fa?ade. Seraphina moved to the carved wall, trailing a finger along its edge. “The flame that exists within you exists in balance against the Umbra. Light casts shadow. Shadow defines light. You have all been baptised in darkness, and the fire holds because the darkness holds it in check.” She turned back to them. “I do not know what would happen to a dragon fire in a child that has never been baptised in shadow. But I suspect that perhaps this is Aeloria’s attempt to create a dragonborn without relying on her egg.”
Something behind Laila’s eyes locked into place.
“That’s why they tried to take her,” Laila said. Her voice was level. “They need her.”
“I would not go so far as to say she is a dragonborn yet,” Seraphina said. “And I caution you, this is conjecture. But if my theory proves correct, I may have a solution.”
“Yes?” Laila said.
Seraphina’s smile showed teeth. “Bring Aurora to me. I can baptise her in blood and shadow and extinguish the flame entirely.”
“No,” Laila said.
The word filled the grotto. No hesitation. No deliberation.
Seraphina shrugged. “The choice is yours. But this is uncharted territory. The consequences of leaving a Brand to grow wild could be catastrophic in ways neither I nor Aeloria could predict.”
Nobody spoke. The black miasma curled at the edges of the chamber with the disinterest of something that had heard worse proposals and would hear worse again.
Laila broke the silence first. “We have questions concerning Espérant.”
“What do you have to do with him?” Seraphina said.
“He’s been corresponding with us,” Laila said.
Seraphina’s attention moved to Isabella and settled there. Isabella stiffened under it, a gaze with centuries of patience and practice.
“He mentioned something about,” Isabella started, and then finished the sentence differently than she’d intended, “getting rid of Aurora’s curse.”
Her mouth closed. Lambert’s jaw tightened. But the words were already out, and Seraphina had them.
“Fascinating.” Seraphina’s voice went soft. “If Espérant has offered to cure your niece, you must ask yourself: what does he truly believe a dragon curse entails?”
She let the question sit.
“He will want his sword,” Seraphina said. “Which fortunately remains safe in the dungeon where you found me.” Her gaze swept across them. “Do not bring it to the surface. The moment it re-emerges, he will know where it is.”
The miasma pressed closer. The obol. Think about the obol.
Lambert’s face had not moved, though a faint sheen had appeared on his forehead. His brother was standing in an underground grotto with Seraphina giving him far too much scrutiny. His expression suggested nothing more pressing than mild theological interest. The sweat suggested otherwise.
“What happens if he gets it?” Lambert asked. His voice was steady.
“He poured too much of himself into creating that blade. Without it, he is diminished. With it, he would be one step from divinity.” Seraphina paused. “Unlike us, who are merely undying, Valère is truly immortal. R?zvan expended a great deal of his own strength to wrest the sword from him. Even then, it was no small feat.”
Diminished. Wylan turned the word over. Seraphina had not said weakened. She had not said lesser. She had said diminished, which was the word alchemists used for reagents that had been separated from their catalytic partner.
“And in the Umbra?” Laila asked. “If he were to enter it, weakened as he is?”
“He would be weakened further still.” Seraphina’s tone carried the certainty of someone who had considered this from every angle. “In as much as we fear to tread in the light, so would he fear to tread in the shadow.”
Lambert hadn’t moved. But his fingers had found the solar disk at his collar.
“That Church is his project,” Seraphina added. “He built it. I don’t think he likes what it’s become.”
She straightened. “I will need time to prepare for the Sepulchre. When you are ready, send word, and I will prepare the way.”
Lambert gave a courteous nod. “We will send word.”
He paused.
“But first, you’ll have to show us the way out.”
Seraphina led them back through the labyrinth. The route was different this time, or Wylan thought it was. The bones watched them pass, long past curiosity.
They emerged into the cemetery grounds. The night air hit Wylan’s lungs and he took a breath that felt like the first honest one he’d had in an hour.
Lambert and Laila moved ahead, already talking in low voices. Wylan was about to follow when Isabella spoke.
“Lady Seraphina. A moment.”
Seraphina paused at the Catacombs entrance. She turned as though she’d been expecting this. “What is the problem, child?” The warmth almost sounded genuine.
“I have a decision to make,” Isabella said. “By tomorrow. Whether to stay with the family or leave.”
Seraphina studied her. “You’re asking me such an obtuse question. I barely know you, child. Why is my advice useful to you?”
“Because you’re my grandmother.”
“Is Laila not your mother?”
Isabella said nothing.
“You need to figure that out first,” Seraphina said. “Because if she is not your mother, then I am not your grandmother.”
She held Isabella’s gaze for a moment longer, offering nothing. Then she turned and descended back into the dark without another word.
Wylan stood very still. Isabella’s posture hadn’t changed. She had received exactly the answer she’d come for, and wished she hadn’t.
“Isabella,” he said.
“Let’s go home,” she said.