The cool night air was a shock against my flushed skin.
“Selene, please!”
I slammed the door behind me, the sound final and damning. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t.
I stood on the pavement, the familiar quiet of the Old Quarter pressing in. Inside me, everything roared. The newly awakened power buzzed just beneath my skin, a rising storm waiting for a sky to break.
A tremor of dread, or maybe something else—instinct—whispered through the chaos of my mind.
It was beginning.
EIGHT
The taxi dropped me at the mouth of a narrow street that bled into the Low Warrens. I paid with a hand that refused to stop shaking, the notes slick with nervous sweat. Eamon’s voice still echoed in the small space of the cab—the promise to tell me everything, cut short by the roar of the power now clawing at my skin. He’d given me the history, the tragedy, and the lie, but the world had broken before he could give me a name. I was running towards a crime scene with a soul I didn’t recognise and a definition he never got to finish. Who am I.
The moment the car pulled away, the city’s familiar murmur was swallowed by a different kind of sound—a deep, resonant vibration rising from the pavement itself. It travelled up through the soles of my shoes, a discordant frequency that set my teeth on edge.
My jacket was too thin against the damp chill. Every breath was an intake of air saturated with wet rot, rust, and a faint, acrid tang like burnt sugar. The energy Eamon warned me about beat under my skin, a frantic tempo that had nothing to do with my own heart. The scar on my shoulder was a hot coal pressed against the bone.
Dane was waiting, a dark shape leaning against the brickwork ofa defunct pawn shop. He watched my approach, a silent sentinel in the gloom. As the distance closed, the world tilted. The panicked drumming of his heart was audible even over the wind, a counterpoint to the steady shudder beneath my feet. I could smell the leather of his jacket, the rain on his hair, and beneath it, the clean, earthy scent of him—spiked with the acrid salt of alarm.
He pushed himself off the wall as I stopped in front of him. His eyes scanned my face, and the mask of professional detachment slipped for a fraction of a second. I must have looked like a ghost.
“What happened to you?” His voice was low, the usual dryness sandpapered away by something raw.
Words clawed up my throat, desperate to break loose, but they crumbled before I could force them out. I couldn’t explain the emptiness. Not here. Not yet.
“Later,” I whispered, the sound so thin it was almost lost to the wind whistling down the alley. “We don’t have time.”
His jaw tightened. A sign of frustration—maybe doubt—crossed his face before he schooled his features back into a hard line. He looked like he wanted to argue, to grab my arm and demand an answer, but he didn’t. He just gave a short, curt nod.
“This way.”
He turned and led me into the warren of passages. I followed, feeling his presence just ahead of me, a solid wall of concern I didn’t deserve. He kept his pace measured, body angled slightly towards me, a silent barrier between me and the unseen threats of the Lows. He was wary. He sensed it—the wild, unstable energy crackling around me like static.
The alleys narrowed, shouldering out the sky until only a sliver of bruised purple remained visible overhead. Rusty fire escapes groaned in the wind while water dripped from corroded pipes, each drop echoing like a gunshot in the sudden, overwhelming clarity of my own hearing.
The steady drip of a leaking pipe. The frantic flutter of a trapped bird across the street. I heard all of it. Everything was too much. Tooloud. Too bright. The world was no longer a familiar painting; it was a fevered sketch, every line etched and vibrating. The low-grade buzz of illegal magic behind a steel door. The heavy, sleeping minds in the tenement above. The cold vacuum of a dead zone just around the corner.
It was all different. Not just heightened. The very fabric of reality stretched thin, turning transparent. Like I was seeing the code beneath the world.
I stumbled, foot catching on an uneven flagstone.
Dane’s hand was instantly on my elbow, steadying me. His touch was firm, grounding, but the contact sent a jolt through me—a clash of his solid reality against my wavering, unstable one.
“Careful,” he murmured, his grip lingering a moment too long.
We rounded another corner into a cobbled court. A single young officer stood guarding a derelict workshop. His face was pale under the flickering streetlamp, and when he spotted us, he sagged with visible relief.
“He’s in here,”the officer said, voice cracking. He gestured towards the workshop, glancing behind him, expecting a phantom to materialise from the dark.
No ACD yet. Good. A brief reprieve from bureaucratic interference.
I nodded at the officer, a silent acknowledgment of his unease. Dane brushed past me, his torch already cutting a swathe through the gloom ahead. The air bit with the metallic taste of damp rust and something acrid beneath the general decay—a scent I recognised but couldn’t quite place.
We stepped through a gaping doorway, once a loading bay, now just a jagged tear in corrugated iron. The concrete floor crunched under our boots, littered with shattered glass, discarded tools, and unidentifiable detritus. My torch beamdanced over rusted workbenches and machinery hulking in the recesses while dust motes hung thick in the air, swirling in the unsteady light.
“Stay sharp,” Dane warned.
