Page 17 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

The winged lion finds us before we find it — carved over a low water-door beneath a bridge, one paw on a closed book, half its face eaten by salt. Below it, an inscription runs backward, the letters reversed.

"Mirror script," Nico says. "Meant to be read in the water."

"Convenient. The water's filthy."

"It's meant to be read at the right level." He crouches at the canal's edge, where the late light lies flat across the surface, and the reflection catches the carving and flips it true. Words surface through the gloom.

He starts toward the left arch of a door, the one the inscription names. I don't follow because something about the stone isn't right. There's a band across the wall above his head — darker, crusted, where centuries of high tides left their mark. The permanent line. The reflection only reads true when the water touches that band. Right now the canal sits two feet lower, the stone beneath the tide-line bone-dry.

"Nico."

"I have it."

"You have it at high water." I grab his sleeve. "Look at the line. The reflection's lying to you. Read it now, at this level, and the arches swap. Your left is the wrong one."

He goes motionless, every muscle deciding at once. He studies the dark tide-band, then the dry stone, then the left arch — and through the gap in it I see what he didn't: a slit in the far wall, angled, and beyond the slit the canal, and beyond that, the dropping sun. A few more minutes and the light would skip off the water, through that slit, and lay a stripe of late sunlight straight across the floor he was about to stand on. For me, a sunburn. For him, worse.

"Built for someone like you," I say. "Someone who'd trust the symbols over the city."

For a second he doesn't move at all. Then: "Right arch."

We go right. The door gives onto a narrow shelf, and there — set in a niche, dry, waiting — is a disc of dark glass with the next fragment etched across it. Map and a marker. A real one.

That's when the bells start. Not church bells — close, loud, deliberate, the kind that drown a scream. Three boats slide into the canal mouth, blocking it, and a woman steps onto the bridge above us like she's been there the whole time. Cropped black hair, blue eyes that don't waste a blink. I know that face.

"You," I say.

The short-haired woman smiles like we're old friends. "You found the correct arch. I had money on you drowning the vampire by accident."

"Cute. Do you rehearse that, or is murder banter part of the uniform?"

"Professional courtesy." She angles her head at the case. "Hand it over and you both walk."

"Counter-offer," I say, and throw it.

Not the disc — a fistful of canal grit, straight at the nearest mercenary's eyes. The alley erupts. Nico becomes something fast, terrible, and quiet, and three men go down before the third clears his weapon. I'm already moving — low, sideways. The woman doesn't chase the disc. She watches me, calculating.

The obsidian freezes against me, and the canal's reflection breaks apart — the doubled city smearing, the painted masks above us warping in the black water. Every sound smears with it, the bells folding into one low note, and a symbol I haven't seen flickers and is gone. Nico sees it. Across all that violence, he sees it, and whatever's on his face isn't fear of this woman.

A blade comes for my back. He's there before it lands — not blocking it, taking the man entirely, slamming him into the stone which cracks. His hand closes around my arm and pulls me through the right arch, fast, and his grip is hard.

"Move," he says. The word comes out wrong — too low, scraped raw.

We move that fast; we surface three canals over in minutes, soaked and breathing, the bells gone behind us. The woman hasn't followed. She has what she wanted, which was to see how we work. She'll be back.

"Sabine Ward," Nico says.

"You know her?"

"By reputation."

"Of course you do. Why would the woman be the first mystery you actually explain?"

He doesn't say anything, we just keep moving.

We reach a shuttered boathouse, and Nico finally lets go of my arm, leaving finger marks that will bruise.

"You're cut," he says, and reaches for my temple — gentle now, careful, a contradiction to the hand that just left bruises.