His gaze landed on me and then on the destruction Raven had left behind. Is anyone else injured?
Keane answered.
Good. Morrison’s jaw clenched. Raynoff will want a full account. Be ready. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, You did well containing it.
A second portal shimmered, and Lord Raynoff stepped through, also flanked by Shroud Guards. His gaze swept the scene. When his eyes found Cyrus—found all of us—something tight in his expression eased fractionally. Alive. We were alive.
Then the Lord Raynoff who ran the emergency council snapped back into place.
Report. Not: Are you hurt? Not: What happened? But his hand briefly squeezed Cyrus’s shoulder as he passed—the only acknowledgment that this was personal.
Cyrus’s voice was clipped, emotionless. Corrupted witch. Confirmed the master influence. Direct targeting of Miss Grimley. Subject escaped via blood magic transportation.
His father’s expression didn’t change. Casualties?
Two injured. Lucas Maddock. Librarian Tasmin. Portaled to medical center. No corruption detected. Stable condition.
He nodded once and then turned to coordinate with the Shroud Guards securing the scene.
Cyrus stood rigid beside me, watching his father work. The man had spent eighteen years believing lies and the last month trying to make it right.
Come on, Keane said quietly, his hand finding my elbow. Let’s get you somewhere safe.
I let him guide me toward the portal, Elio falling into step on my other side.
Cyrus hesitated and then followed—close enough to protect yet far enough away to maintain the distance he clearly still needed.
And somewhere out there, the master had Raven.
He’d taken her to prove he could reach anyone I cared about.
To prove that nowhere was safe.
That no one was safe.
4
Keane
I RUBBED MY TEMPLE WITH one hand—an old habit, leftover from when my thoughts weren’t always my own—as I tapped my pencil against the notebook.
The map on the table was three weeks old. I’d started it over winter break, when the campus was quiet and I had no reason to go anywhere and nothing to do but think.
Raynoff had returned the Last Witness’s records without ceremony the day after everything collapsed. The evidence the heirs had gathered to take down the council—Levon’s documentation, the practitioner reports, the anomaly records—had passed through the emergency proceedings and come back to the table in front of me. Raynoff had just set them down and said, I don’t know who else to trust with this now. Then left.
I’d added Grimley’s research to the pile. The materials from the hidden compartment in Alstone’s lab—crystal recordings, corruption documentation, eighteen years of work protected by blood magic until Marigold could open it. And Alstone’s own monitoring logs, swept from his lab and home after his arrest. The council had been tracking wellspring stability for years without understanding what they were actually measuring.
Three sets of records. Three different vantage points on the same thing.
So I’d read, and I’d mapped, and I’d opened portal windows.
Not full portals—those cost energy. A window was something quieter, something I’d been doing since I was twelve without a name for it. I slid my awareness into the space between portal endpoints, feeling the ley line’s energy current without committing to crossing it.
Over the break, I’d learned I could follow a ley line outward from Wickem and feel the energy moving through it. Clean energy felt like water—fluid, warm, responsive. The Wickem wellspring felt that way now, after Marigold’s work. But at the edges, where Wickem’s ley lines connected to the broader network, I felt something else. A drag. A faint, oily thickness, like the flow was moving through something it wasn’t meant to move through.
I’d felt that texture before. Not from outside—from inside, during the stability sessions, when my uncle had run corrupted wellspring energy through my portal pathways and used me as a conductor to test their system. I hadn’t known what I was feeling then.
I knew now.
