We marched in the late afternoon’s cool air, as the last of day gave out its last gasp.

  Zorka limped but grinned through it. Lily had her chin high, pockets heavy with markers. Sélis split into two bodies, one humming, one silent, both unsettling. Eury’s eyes caught the light and held it, even dulled from the burn.

  Behind us came the rest: SilentWatcher clutching arcane notebooks, Axemaster69 hauling a chest of weapons, Tin Can rattling his shopping cart like a parade float from hell, and Willard with his procession of rodents.

  And that was just the start. Our call had gone out across the whole city, and Jade’s call had traveled even farther. The result was a gaggle of trolls, gargoyles, fae, kids with runes scrawled on their jackets, and a dozen other things, yet uncatalogued.

  They were our army.

  Halfway down the block, I spotted Greg, my manager at Elysium Solutions. He looked like he always did, with a starched office shirt, tie slightly crooked, and protein bar frozen halfway to his mouth.

  Like many others on the street, he’d stopped to watch our madcap procession, so when I got close enough, I plucked his half-eaten protein bar out of his hand, snapped off a bite, and nodded. “Thanks. Protein helps me kick supernatural ass.”

  His jaw worked soundlessly.

  “Oh, before I go… I might not make my shift today, Greg,” I told him, chewing. “I’m off to fight an extra-dimensional evil with my friends here.”

  One of the gargoyles hissed for punctuation, teeth gleaming.

  Greg nodded once, then again, but slower. His hand stayed frozen in midair like he still held the protein bar, even though I’d already taken the last half of it.

  I clapped him on the shoulder and kept walking.

  Traffic stopped as we spilled into the street, horns blaring, headlights catching faces that shouldn’t have existed outside nightmares. Some drivers cursed. Others just stared, wondering where the costume party was.

  And we kept marching.

  The little league diamond waited a few blocks away, grass cold and brittle. I carried my old bat wrapped with Elly’s runes, ready for something bigger than little league.

  For the first time since she’d been taken, I believed the Curator might actually have something to fear.

  We weren’t sneaking. We weren’t hiding. We were marching to war.

  The little league diamond looked like it hadn’t seen a game since the Bush administration. The chain-link fence sagged, the dugouts were graffitied with half-baked love confessions, and the infield dirt was cracked from too many summers without rain.

  It was a perfect place for a war at any age.

  The bleachers were already packed—if you could call what we’d assembled an army. Most were supernatural, a few were human, and all of them were either insane or desperate enough to follow me.

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  Zorka leaned on her pipe like it was a crutch and a sword all at once. Sélis stood in stereo, two bodies going in and out of sync like glitching video. Lily hummed under her breath, perfume curling through the cold like courage in vapor form. And Eury—Eury was marble and rage, gold eyes glowing faint even through the fog.

  The rest of our motley Alterkind mob spread across the field’s perimeter, an urban mosaic of trolls in leather, fae in hoodies, graffiti mages, supernatural buskers, and a family of gargoyles that perched on the scoreboard like winged vultures.

  Tin Can and Willard stood by the backstop, surrounded by a furry congregation of rats. SilentWatcher lingered on the bleachers; the outlines of his wraith form were indistinct. Along with them, a collection of strange shapes and shadows haunted the dugouts and the fringes of the diamond alike.

  And in the center of it all, I stood with my bat—the same old aluminum one Elly had rune-scribed and burned her initials into for luck. The bat had survived everything else. Maybe it would survive this too (along with me).

  The sun hadn’t gone down yet, but a strange twilight hung over everything, where shadows are too long and color feels wrong. The world itself was holding its breath.

  “Any sign of them?” I asked.

  Willard tilted his head, eyes half-shut, listening to things only rats could tell him. “They’re close. We can sense them. They’re... cataloguing us.”

  “Let them take attendance,” I muttered.

  Zorka spat on the ground, a gesture not in keeping with her cutesy floral dress, Doc Martins notwithstanding. “They’ll regret signing the roll call.”

  Eury crouched, pressing her fingers into the dirt. Her hair stirred faintly under her scarf. “They’ll come from the other place. They always do. The ledger likes symmetry—enter from elsewhere, archiving outward.”

  Lily cracked her knuckles, lips curling nearly as much as her fiery hair. “So, we dig in?”

  Sélis smirked—four different grins somehow, spread across multiple faces. “Or we make them come to us.”

  “Curator, come out to play-ay-ay?” I offered to the evening.

  A hum filled the air. Not electricity, not wind. Something older. Deeper. Like paper stretching in all directions. The scoreboard flickered, its numbers twisting into ominous symbols that hurt to look at.

  The chain-link fence began to rattle, though there was no breeze.

  Then they came.

  Collectors—dozens of semi-mechanical machine men servants—each phasing in from elsewhere, their chests yawning open like mail slots, blank slips fluttering inside. Their movements were smooth, mechanical, ritualistic. They stepped onto the diamond in unison, the sound of their feet like stamps hitting documents.

  And in their center came the Curator. Still immaculate. Still smiling. His bowler hat perfectly straight, cane gleaming with quiet malice as his inhuman eyes found me immediately.

  “Ah,” he said, voice echoing across the field as if the world itself carried it for him. “Mr. Mercer. You brought more friends. It makes the collecting easier.”

  “Yeah,” I said, raising the bat, “but we’re not on the menu tonight.”

  He chuckled softly, the sound dry as an old library. “Everyone is on the menu. Even you. Especially you.”

  Lily stepped forward, chin high. “You took someone from us, and you will give her back.”

  “All creatures live on borrowed time,” he corrected. “All items eventually return to the collection.”

  “That’s funny,” Zorka growled, “because we came to repossess our little elven buddy.”

  The crowd behind us murmured, energy rippling through the ranks—magic crackling, boots shifting, wings flexing.

  Elly wasn’t here, but her runes were. The entire team wore scraps of her work—charms on sleeves, ink along forearms, a glow beneath every collar. Even the air smelled faintly of ozone, mint, and lavender. It was like she’d walked with us anyway.

  The Curator planted his cane, and the ground trembled. “How quaint,” he said. “A rebellion of anomalies. I should be flattered by your patchwork troop.”

  He wasn’t flattered though. He was hungry.

  “On my mark,” I whispered, glancing at Lily, Eury, Sélis, and Zorka in turn. “Remember the plan. No magic in the front line. We’re ghosts on paper.”

  They nodded.

  The Curator raised one hand, as if to signal a choir. The Collectors’ slots snapped open.

  For a heartbeat, everything went still.

  The bat hummed in my hand, wards flickering alive. Behind me, our army spread like wings. Humans and Alterkind both, standing shoulder to shoulder, our collective breath steaming in the chill air.

  “Now,” I shouted.

  The air filled with a blizzard of paper. The first notes of the ledger-song began—a noise halfway between chanting and the sound of typewriters sinking into mud.

  And then—like the world finally remembered how to move—everyone charged.