I’ll let Lord Raynoff know, she said.
And the stuff about Raven? I asked quietly.
That’s for you to decide how to share, she said. Or if.
I thought of Marigold, dealing with hostile students and movement restrictions and the weight of leadership she’d never asked for. Did she need to know that her best friend might never fully recover? That Raven’s consciousness could be permanently fractured?
Or would that knowledge just add another burden to the ones she was already barely managing?
I’ll think about it, I said finally.
Parker was quiet for a moment, still looking at the footage. When she spoke, her voice had shifted into the register she used when she was thinking through a problem rather than managing a person.
I’ve cleared forty-seven guards in the past two weeks, she said. Thirty more still waiting. Every session, I’m in a room with someone who may or may not be compromised, making a call based on what my gut tells me. What I recognize. She paused. What I survived.
I understood the problem without her saying it. Her method worked because she’d been on the inside of corruption. She knew how it moved through a person, what it left behind, the specific quality of someone fighting it versus someone fully taken. But that knowledge lived in her body, not in any protocol anyone else could use. If she got it wrong once, or got sick, or simply ran out of time…
I can put something together, I said. Corruption has signatures that don’t require necromancy to catch, like the way it alters how a witch draws on local ley lines, and small differences in how their magic interacts with containment wards. It tests them differently once it’s embedded, even early-stage. Portal traces, if they’ve moved through corrupted space recently. I paused. It’s not foolproof. Early-stage is harder than advanced. But it would give your people observable markers. Something you could train from instead of something only you can feel.
Parker looked up from the footage. How long?
A few days. I’d want Marigold to review it. Her necromantic read on corruption would help me translate what I understand dimensionally into terms that don’t require either of our specific magic to apply.
Do that. Not a request. I have guards I trust to run the remaining sessions. Once you have a written protocol, I’ll use it to train them—give them a framework instead of just instinct. She closed her tablet. Anything that scales beyond one person in a room.
10
Elio
THREE COUNTRIES IN A LITTLE over two weeks, four trains, seven grim little rooms with zero aesthetic appeal, and one emotionally constipated heir who insisted anonymity mattered more than functioning climate control.
I’d played the role before—the adaptable one, unbothered by discomfort, charming even in squalor. But there was no audience here. Just Cyrus’s restless pacing and the cold fact that we’d failed to get any closer to Raven.
The performance was starting to crack.
I wanted a bath. I wanted sleep. I wanted to stop pretending this was strategic reconnaissance instead of what it actually was—helpless surveillance of a friend being used as bait.
Instead, I had Cyrus Raynoff pacing a dingy hotel room in Salzburg, fire flickering at his fingertips while Ember hissed in quiet agitation. Echo clung to the windowsill, her scales sliding through anxious blues and grays as we both monitored the magical perimeter I’d constructed around the compound three kilometers north.
It wasn’t just the cold or the cramped quarters or the cheap instant tea that tasted like regret. It was the feeling that we were being led.
Anything? Cyrus asked without looking at me.
Same as Vienna. Same as Prague. I let the illusion shimmer around the surveillance map, tracing magical energy lines across our third European site. Security rotations. Wards resetting at dusk. Corruption signature inside—strong, stable, embedded.
His brow furrowed. Meaning?
She’s not just there. She’s part of it now but not fixed. He’s moving her, studying how we track, and how we react. Every place we found her was just a stage. And we don’t even know where his stronghold is, I added. Every location we’ve tracked her to was temporary. He’s not keeping her anywhere we can get to. He’s keeping her visible just long enough to watch us chase ghosts.
That got his attention. He moved closer, heat rising with him.
Explain.
I opened my tablet and flipped to my parents’ research notes. My fingers found the silver rings I wore—three today, the habit I’d never broken. Each one had been a gift from my parents, tokens of performances I’d given.
I twisted them as I explained.
According to them, corruption stabilizes in stages. Early phase is chaotic. Victim resists. Signature flickers. You can intervene. But once the subject passes a certain threshold…
