Parker nodded toward the exit. Go. Process what you learned. I’ll handle containment here and brief Lord Raynoff on the vampire delegation.
We portaled directly back to the royal dorm common room—our makeshift war room where maps and intelligence reports already covered every surface.
Mallory Ellis, Elio said, pulling up guard records on his tablet. Berkeley portal mage. Disappeared four months ago. Isolated, struggling—perfect vulnerability profile.
Which means his intel is likely accurate, I said, spreading our existing wellspring corruption map across the table. Sixty-three total. Fifty-eight corrupted. Five remaining.
We worked for hours, cross-referencing corrupted wellspring locations with astronomical alignment data and ritual geometric patterns. The calculation was complex—astronomical data crossed with wellspring positions crossed with geographic coordinates.
But eventually, we had it.
Five wellspring locations. Three in North America, two in Europe. Each positioned precisely to complete the sixty-three-point geometric pattern Mallory had described.
I marked them on the map. These are his remaining targets.
We stared at the marked points.
We can’t defend all five simultaneously, Cyrus said flatly. Not with four people.
Then we prioritize, Marigold suggested. Fortify what we can, disrupt what he’s already corrupted. Two-pronged approach.
Risky, I observed. If we choose wrong…
Everything’s risky, she countered, but at least this gives us initiative.
We need more resources, Elio said. Guard coordination, faculty support, international contacts. This is beyond four heirs.
Carefully, I cautioned. The master infiltrates through vulnerability. Anyone we bring in becomes a potential target.
Then we vet carefully, Cyrus said. He paused, the words clearly costing him. And maybe we work with Parker’s vampire contacts to see if they can identify corruption better than we can.
Marigold’s hand found mine on the map’s edge. One crisis at a time. Right now, we plan. Tomorrow, we move.
Eleven weeks until solstice.
Starting tomorrow, we’d make them count.
15
Marigold
IN THE DAYS AFTER SAN Francisco, everything accelerated.
I kept turning Parker’s words over in my head, my father’s ring cool against my collarbone as I tried to make them make sense.
She’d pulled me aside that evening with something odd from the guards’ analysis. The corruption patterns are identical across continents. Same signature. Same progression rate. Down to the minute.
Meaning?
Meaning either he’s controlling every outbreak personally with impossible precision. She paused. Or it’s something else. Something we’re not seeing yet.
I filed it away.
We’d had Elio’s ritual geometry—the sixty-three-point pattern, the astronomical alignment, the mathematical certainty of which sites were load-bearing for the ritual’s architecture. We’d been cleansing with it as our targeting map through Lyon and the sites that followed. What we hadn’t had was reach. Four people could only be in so many places.
We spent the first week changing that. Keane expanded the portal system across six continents—checkpoints near every geometrically significant node, timed and calibrated, each one tested before we trusted it. I trained twelve regional detection teams in necromantic signature reading, teaching them to recognize corruption before it fully embedded. They weren’t expected to cleanse on their own; that still required us. But if they caught it early enough, we could portal in before it became irreversible.
By the end of that first week, we had a network. Not a solution—not yet. But the infrastructure to operate at the scale the problem actually required.
