"Something moved through our blind spot tonight. How fast can you get here?"
Twelve minutes later, he walked through the library doors. His hair was still damp from whatever he'd been doing when she called, and his forensic kit was slung over one shoulder. He didn't ask questions. Just crossed to the research table where she'd already spread the theater district maps and bent over them beside her, his shoulder warm against hers.
They worked in tight coordination for the next hour—Nate cross-referencing his magical detection readings from the theater investigation with Mrs. Shufflewick's hastily drawn vulnerability maps while Hazel consulted the Codex for historical patterns of Collector activity. The ancient tome's pages turned themselves beneath her fingers, cold and reluctant, as though the knowledge it offered tasted bitter even to an object without a tongue.
Mrs. Shufflewick had settled into her office on the mezzanine, attempting to channel information about the missing surveillance window. Twice, Hazel heard the older woman's voice shift into unfamiliar accents before falling abruptly silent.
"The spirits grow quiet when I ask about the missing ones," Mrs. Shufflewick called down, her tone stripped of its usual warmth. She stood at the mezzanine railing, glasses on their chain, face pale. "I've tried six different channeling approaches. Every time I reach toward whatever happened in that gap, it's like pressing my hand against a wall of nothing. Not resistance—absence."
Nate looked up from his readings. "Absence of what?"
"Everything. As though certain information has been... removed from the record."
The cat flap banged open. Jinxie came through first, her three-legged gait purposeful and quick, one blue eye and one green sweeping the room with the efficiency of a field commander assessing a forward operating base. Raven followed close behind, and the fact that she didn't immediately put distance between herself and the calico told Hazel more about the severity of the situation than any words could have.
Jinxie jumped onto the research table, planted herself directly on Nate's forensic notes, and fixed Hazel with a stare that held nothing playful.
"Three pairs have vanished from Millbrook in the past month—that's what we got before the network went down."
The room contracted. Hazel felt it in her sternum, a physical tightening, as though the library itself had drawn a sharp breath.
"Vanished how?"
"No trace. Like they never existed." Jinxie's mismatched eyes didn't blink. "Their homes are occupied by other people. Their jobs filled. Neighbors don't remember their names. We only caught it because one of my operatives in Millbrook recognized the scent of a witch she'd been stealing cream from for six years—and followed it to a house where a completely different family swore they'd lived there since 2019."
"That's not possible." Nate's hand had gone still over his notes. "Memory alteration on that scale requires?—"
"More than memory." Raven's voice was quiet. Controlled. "Their magical signatures are gone too. I had Jinxie's operative check the ley-line registry. Those three pairs aren't listed. They're notanywhere. It's not that people forgot them. It's that the world forgot them."
Hazel's fingers found Nate's under the table. She gripped hard. He gripped back.
Three pairs. Six people, erased so thoroughly that reality itself had papered over the holes they left behind.
"The Collector doesn't just take power," Hazel said slowly. "It takesexistence."
Mrs. Shufflewick descended the mezzanine stairs with the careful precision of someone holding herself together through sheer propriety. "That would explain the silence in my channeling. I'm not being blocked—there's simply nothing left to channel. No spiritual residue, no emotional imprint. Those people have been consumed so completely that even the dead don't remember them."
Jinxie's tail curled around her single front paw. "And the three-hour gap in our network gave whatever did this a clear path through the theater district. Right past the artifact site."
Nate pulled up his detection logs, scrolling through readings with a jaw set tight enough to crack walnuts. "I'm seeing a faint dimensional signature from that window. Something transited through."
Hazel looked at their joined hands on the table. Magical pairs. Collected like butterflies, Baba Yaga had said. Pinned and preserved anderased.
She thought about waking up happy that morning. About Nate's smile over coffee. About the life assembling itself around them, fragile and new and precious.
Three pairs in Millbrook. Gone so completely the universe had closed around them like water over stones.
The Codex's pages shifted under Hazel's palm. Not turning—rearranging. Symbols she'd never seen before surfaced through the vellum like creatures rising from deep water, their golden ink pulsing in a rhythm that matched her heartbeat. She opened her mouth to call attention to it, but Jinxie was already there.
The calico crossed the table in two precise hops, planted her single front paw on the Codex's open page, and began to speak.
Not meow. Not chirp. A precise, modulated series of vocalizations that vibrated with harmonic overtones no ordinary cat could produce. Each sound corresponded to one of the surfacing symbols, and as Jinxie's voice touched them, they detached from the page and floated upward like luminous soap bubbles.
"Nobody move." Hazel barely breathed the words.
Jinxie's mismatched eyes had gone distant, focused on something beyond the room. Her paw traced a pattern across the Codex's surface—three circles intersecting, a triangle inside them, a spiral connecting all points. Each stroke pulled another symbol free. They hung in the air above the table, rotating slowly, assembling themselves into a configuration that made Hazel's Guardian instincts sing with recognition.
Fat Bastard, Boba Fett, and Jango Fett had materialized from wherever cats go when they're not being observed. They sat in a perfect triangle around the table's perimeter, ears forward, completely silent for the first time in Hazel's memory. Whatever Jinxie was doing, they recognized it as something that demanded reverence.
