His reflection stared back from the dark monitor screen—jaw tight, shadows under his eyes. He pulled up the case file he'd started: CODEX MYSTICUS ACTIVATION EVENT. Typed three sentences. Deleted two.
The evidence bag on the corner of his desk held a fragment of the page that had drifted free during the library incident. He hadn't logged it yet. Hadn't touched it since it landed on his sleeve and burned warm through the fabric, printing a name he recognized.
His mother's maiden name. Holloway-Cross. Listed in an 1847 census of Assjacket's original magical families.
In the smalloffice behind the library's reference desk, Mrs. Shufflewick's tweed blazer had given way to an Elizabethan ruff.
"Two hearts that beat as one... but soft, what light through yonder window breaks..." She pressed her fingertips to her temples, swaying. The costume flickered—ruff to bonnet to feathered cap—cycling through romantic heroines faster than her conscious mind could track. Her pen, moving of its own accord across a legal pad, scratched out names and dates in handwriting that wasn't hers.
Pembroke-Holloway resonance: confirmed 1847, 1952, projected present day.
Pattern interval: guardian partnerships activated in response to Collector-class threats.
Previous partnerships: successful containment. Current threat: escalation beyond historical precedent.
The channeling broke. Mrs. Shufflewick blinked, adjusted her reading glasses, and looked down at what she'd written. The ruff dissolved back into her cardigan.
"Oh dear," she murmured, tapping the legal pad. "Oh dear, oh dear."
She reached for the phone on her desk and dialed Hazel's number. It rang twice.
"Hazel, darling. I need you to bring Mr. Holloway to the library first thing tomorrow morning. And bring the Codex." She paused, reading the final line her channeling hand had scrawled. "It seems your families have been doing this together for quite some time. And the reason they stopped is not a happy story."
4
A PORTAL, A PROPHECY
The morning brought weak tea, no sleep, and a legal pad full of questions Hazel had written at three a.m. with increasingly jagged handwriting. She'd pinned the list to the refrigerator, stared at it while the kettle boiled, then unpinned it and shoved it into her cardigan pocket because looking at it made her stomach clench.
Nate arrived at the library at eight-fifteen. She knew because she heard his boots on the marble steps—measured, deliberate, the gait of a man who'd been running his own diagnostics all night and hadn't liked the results either.
They spent the morning in the restricted archives with Mrs. Shufflewick, cross-referencing the family tree the Codex had revealed. Every hour uncovered another branch, another connection, another reason their partnership wasn't coincidence. By noon, Hazel's wire-rimmed glasses had migrated to the top of her head three separate times, and Nate had run his hand through his hair so often it stood up like he'd touched a Van de Graaff generator.
By two o'clock, the main reading room had settled into its usual afternoon lull. Three college students hunched over textbooks at the long tables. Old Mr. Fenwick dozed in theburgundy leather chair by the east window, his newspaper tent-peaked over his chest. Mrs. Shufflewick presided at the circulation desk in her standard tweed, her channeling episodes mercifully quiet since lunch.
Hazel was shelving returns in the fiction section when the barometric pressure dropped.
Not metaphorically. The tall gothic windows rattled in their frames. The brass reading lamps flickered. Mr. Fenwick's newspaper slid off his chest and hit the floor with a sound like a gunshot, and every book on the nearest shelf leaned two inches to the left.
Nate materialized at her elbow, hand already reaching for the detection wand on his belt. "You feel that?"
"The building just inhaled."
Purple smoke detonated through the front doors.
Not crept. Not drifted.Detonated—a concussive bloom of violet and magenta that smelled like ozone and expensive perfume and something older, something that made the Codex flare hot against Hazel's hip where she'd strapped it in its leather carrier. Sparkles whirled through the smoke like a galaxy being born in the reference section. The college students grabbed their laptops and bolted. Mr. Fenwick woke, saw the purple maelstrom, and moved faster than Hazel had ever seen a man with two artificial knees move.
At the circulation desk, Mrs. Shufflewick stood bolt upright. Her tweed blazer shimmered, reshaped, and became a court dress of midnight blue velvet with gold brocade trim. A herald's tabard materialized over it. She lifted her chin, and when she spoke, her voice carried the resonance of cathedral stone.
"Her Most Powerful Magnificence, the Thrice-Crowned Sovereign of the Eastern Wards, She Who Has Walked Between Worlds Since Time Immemorial, Keeper of the Eternal Flame and Protector of the Seven Seals?—"
The smoke parted.
The woman who stepped through it wore shoulder pads that belonged in a 1986 power ballad music video and acid-washed jeans tucked into rhinestone-studded boots. Her blonde hair cascaded past her waist in waves that moved independent of any breeze. She was stunningly, almost painfully beautiful, and the air around her crackled with a gravitational authority that made Hazel's knees want to bend.
Baba Yaga surveyed the library. Her gaze swept the fleeing patrons, the rattling windows, the flickering lamps, and landed on Mrs. Shufflewick with visible delight.
"Oh, Ilikeher! She knows her history!" Baba Yaga's smile was radiant and slightly terrifying, like staring into a sunrise that could decide to become a supernova. She snapped her manicured fingers—each nail painted a different shade of purple—and the smoke condensed into a single hovering orb that followed her like a lost puppy.
