The diary had been in code. This was in plain language. And somehow that was worse—because there was nothing to unlock. I could read every word, and still nothing was there.
I sat with that. The coals shifted in the hearth. Scout climbed to my knee, his tiny bones quiet against my leg.
I touched the chain at my neck. Just the chain, not the ring. The ring had been his too—both of them were, the one I wore and the one my mother still had. He’d had them filled with protection magic and sent them ahead of himself because he’d known what he was doing was dangerous and he’d wanted her to have something. He’d never made it back to give them in person.
That was how I knew him. Through objects. Through rooms he’d once occupied that held no trace of him. Through Professor Undergrove’s careful words and Parker’s clipped assessments and Raynoff’s guilt-heavy acknowledgments. Through a few crumpled cipher pages I still couldn’t read.
And now through this—a man’s life work, meticulous and complete, that told me everything about what he’d believed and nothing about who he’d been.
He’d built something that could outlast him. That was its own kind of love, I supposed—forward-thinking, deliberate, a message sent in the only language a dead man has left.
But I’d wanted his voice.
I put the folder on Keane’s pile where it belonged, next to Levon’s records and Alstone’s monitoring logs. Someone would make sense of it. That was the point. That was what my father had understood. You built the evidence, you found the right hands, and you trusted the work to carry itself forward.
Then I went back to bed and watched until the morning light came through the curtains.
From my night stand, Scout tilted his skull as he watched me. His bow tie was perfectly straight. Mine was metaphorical and unraveling.
Yeah, yeah, I muttered, dragging on jeans and an oversized sweater. Some of us were busy catastrophizing our entire relationship history. Living and dead.
I needed something orderly, where effort led to results and the rules didn’t change halfway through. So I grabbed my theory textbook and went to the library—the one place that had never asked anything of me except attention.
When we entered, Scout chittered anxiously, his tiny skeletal form pressing against my neck like he was trying to burrow into my skin. He seemed to be hiding from something he sensed I couldn’t see yet.
I reached out briefly to the dead in the walls. I felt something…but I didn’t know what. They were uneasy. Were my emotions just bleeding onto them?
In the back of the library, my friends had claimed their usual corner like nothing had changed. Aurora sat regally upright even in a worn Wickem hoodie and jeans. Her braid was pulled tight, not a copper strand out of place. Lucas was all elbows and focus, his glasses slipping down his nose as he scribbled in the margins of a thick textbook. Raven hunched over her notes in a vintage band tee and too much eyeliner, her cropped black hair messier than usual and charms glinting from her piercings.
Lucas looked up first, grinned, asked about Albany. I gave the usual answers while his bird familiar watched me from the back of his chair. Aurora said she was glad I’d made it back safely.
Raven didn’t look up.
That was the first sign. Raven always looked up.
The month of silence suddenly felt less like being busy and more like a warning I’d ignored. Unease intensified from the dead around me.
How was your break? I asked carefully, looking between them.
Quiet, Lucas said. I went home for a bit. Came back early when classes started up. He glanced at Raven, concern flickering across his face. You stayed the whole time. Didn’t you?
She didn’t answer.
Aurora frowned, setting down her pen. She’s been like this all morning. Won’t talk to anyone.
Lucas’s frown deepened. I kept asking why she didn’t go home for the holidays, but she said she had ‘research to catch up on.’ Stayed in the library archives practically the whole month. His voice dropped. I should’ve realized something was wrong.
She still hadn’t looked at me. Boris sat beside her notes, his skeletal beetle form flickering with wrongness.
Scout disappeared into my sleeve, his bones rattling softly as he rearranged himself somewhere near my elbow.
Raven? I tried again.
Her head lifted slowly. Too slowly. Like she was moving underwater.
And when her eyes met mine, they were wrong. Not just tired or distant—gone. The rich brown I knew was swallowed by pure black, like staring into a well with no bottom.
What was wrong with Raven? My ring on my neck had gone cold, and the dead whispered warnings.
