"Jinxie knows where it's coming from," Raven said quietly. "She's known for weeks. And none of us were listening."
Raven didn't wait for the weight of that silence to settle.
She launched from the reading table, landed on the windowsill nearest the entrance, and pressed her nose againstthe glass. Outside, perched on the library's lowest stone step like she'd been waiting for an invitation, sat Jinxie. The calico's mismatched eyes—one blue, one green—tracked something invisible in the air above Main Street. Her remaining three legs were tucked beneath her in that impossibly balanced way that made Fat Bastard sigh every time he saw it.
"While everyone's been mooning over the three-legged saint," Raven said, her tail curling tight against her body, "I've been tracking whoever's been watching us. Found traces of ancient magic—older than this town."
Hazel set down the spectral wand. "How much older?"
"Old enough that the residue doesn't match anything in your grandmother's grimoire. Old enough that it burned my whiskers when I got close." Raven turned from the window, and the bravado cracked just enough for Hazel to see what lived beneath it—a raw, electric fear her familiar had been carrying alone. "Three locations. The rooftop across from Hazel's apartment. The oak tree behind Zelda's shop. And the drainage culvert that runs beneath this building's east foundation."
Nate's hand stilled on the map. "Surveillance positions."
"Triangulated ones." Raven's chin lifted. "Professional. Patient. Whoever set them rotates between the three on a schedule—dawn, dusk, and midnight. I've been mapping the pattern for six days."
Six days. Hazel's chest went tight. Six days her familiar had been prowling surveillance points alone, saying nothing, burning her whiskers on magic that predated their entire community.
"Raven—"
"Don't." The green eyes flashed. "I needed to be sure before I brought it to you. I needed it to berealand not just—" She stopped. Her gaze flicked toward the window, toward Jinxie, and something complicated moved across her face. "Not just metrying to prove I'm more useful than a cat who finds things by sitting on them."
Mrs. Shufflewick had reached the bottom of the stairs. Her tweed blazer was gone. In its place: a khaki vest bristling with pockets, cargo pants tucked into field boots, and a pair of binoculars hanging from a leather strap. She adjusted them with the practiced ease of someone who'd spent decades in a blind, watching something with teeth.
"The alpha female demonstrates classic protective territorial behavior when sensing threats to her community." Mrs. Shufflewick crouched to Raven's eye level, her voice dropping into the measured cadence of a nature documentary narrator. "Note the dilated pupils, the rigid spinal posture, the systematic patrol patterns. This isn't rivalry display. This is a sentinel who identified a predator before the rest of the herd."
Raven blinked. Her rigid shoulders dropped half an inch.
"Show me what burned your whiskers," Hazel said.
Raven led her to the circulation desk and jumped onto its surface. From beneath the keyboard—where she'd clearly stashed it days ago—she dragged out a small, dark object with her teeth and dropped it between Hazel's hands.
A feather. Black as pitch, but wrong. Its barbs caught the light and reflected nothing back, as if the feather existed in a space slightly adjacent to the room they occupied. Hazel's fingertips hovered over it and the Codex, two floors below in its warded alcove,screamedthrough their bond. Not pain. Recognition.
The sigil burns on the floor blazed amber.
Outside on the steps, Jinxie stood. Both mismatched eyes fixed on the feather through the glass. She opened her mouth in a silent, urgent meow.
"That feather," Mrs. Shufflewick breathed, the wildlife expert falling away to leave just Dorothea, wide-eyed and pale,"belonged to something that hasn't walked this plane in eight hundred years."
6
FABIO'S MUSICAL MADNESS
The shark head bit Gerald Flemming on the nose at precisely seven forty-three in the evening, which was unfortunate because Gerald had just opened his mouth to hit the high C in "Fins of Fury (A Love Ballad)."
Hazel heard the scream from two blocks away.
She and Nate had been crossing the town square, the black feather sealed in a warded evidence bag between them, when the Assjacket Community Theater's front doors burst open and a man in a foam dorsal fin costume sprinted into the street trailing sparks and profanity. Behind him, the building's classical columns shuddered. The gilded marquee—SHARKNADO 2: THE MUSICAL REVIVAL – DRESS REHEARSAL TONIGHT—flickered like a dying heartbeat.
A second actor followed the first. Then a third, this one wrapped head to toe in what appeared to be a tentacle that had developed opinions about personal space.
"That's Fabio's production," Nate said, in the tone of a man recognizing an oncoming train.
They found the main theater in a state that could only be described as artistic apocalypse.
The stage was a battlefield. Three mechanical shark heads—constructed from papier-mâché, Christmas lights, and what Hazel recognized as genuine enchanted copper wire—had broken free of their rigging and were dive-bombing the orchestra pit with single-minded fury. The lead shark, a magnificent twelve-foot monstrosity painted in silver and scarlet, had cornered two sopranos behind a fake palm tree and was snapping its jaws in approximate rhythm to the accompaniment track still blasting from the speakers. The track, Hazel noted, was a power ballad about forbidden love between a marine biologist and a Category Five weather event.
Fabio stood center stage in a captain's coat with epaulets the size of dinner plates, his dark auburn hair magnificent despite—or perhaps because of—the chaos. He gestured at the rampaging props with the passionate authority of a man who would rather die than cancel a show.
