Page 36 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

"I can imagine that." Wonder sits oddly in his voice, like he's surprised the muscle still works.

"We just need to survive the week."

"We will," he tries to encourage, and I feel his mouth curve against my hair.

I almost let myself drift. Then my eye catches the table — Thomas' notebooks where I stacked them, the frost-touched one on top, its cover canted open from how I dropped it. And the relic, wrapping beside them, gives a single low pulse. Not the map waking. Just one beat, like a heart turning over in sleep, throwing the faintest cold across the room before it settles quiet again.

In the lamp's weak throw, a mark on the open notebook page catches the light I hadn't clocked before — my father's spiral, but doubled, a second loop nested inside the first, with three short strokes laddered through it. I get up and cross to see it properly.

"Nico." I lift the notebook. "This mark. He never drew it twice anywhere else."

He comes up on an elbow, and the recognition crosses his face. "It's an old keeper's mark."

"Meaning?"

"A dead record," he says carefully. "Something sealed by a person who knew they might not survive to explain it. Your father left a message meant to be opened after he was gone."

His phone — a new burner — buzzes once by my boots. Cassandra, three words, no greeting: Marker authenticated. It's real.

So there's more. A last voice my father saved for the end, waiting somewhere for me to be ready, and Lucien is already running ahead of us by a handful of stolen seconds toward whatever it points to.

24

NICO

Riley has the notebook flayed open under the lamp, the back board peeled in two with the tip of a kitchen knife, and she's halfway through a sentence about her father's parentage that would make Gabriel proud.

"He tucked it in the spine," she mutters, dragging her thumbnail downward. "Of course he did. God forbid my father leave one honest thing where a normal grieving daughter could find it."

The obsidian stays bundled, wrapped tight, and even muffled in cloth it pulls the warmth out of the room a degree at a time. I keep the burner close, Cassandra's line open and low.

"Then don't treat it like a family argument," Cass says, dry as old vellum. "If your father used that mark properly, it's a dead record. Built to open once, then ruin the trail behind it. No second pass. No generous replay."

"How fragile is once?"

"Fragile enough that I'd prefer no one stab it out of spite." A pause, paper shifting at her end. "And before either of you asks, no, that mark doesn't prove who trained him. It proves someone with keeper access trusted him with a protocol most humans were never meant to see."

"Say the rest, Cass." I demand.

"Opening it may throw a signature. Brief, but old records were designed to be witnessed. If Lucien knows what to listen for, you'll light the hillside for him. So open it clean, then leave."

Riley sits back. Beneath the peeled board, set into the spine, is a slim glass cylinder capped in dull metal, and over the cap, a disc of brittle wax pressed with the same twinned spiral. The wax stops me where her father's handwriting never could.

"That's not his," I say. "That's ours. Keeper's wax. He didn't just hide something. He closed it the way my kind close a thing meant to die after it speaks."

"Right." She lifts the obsidian free of its wrapping, and the blue chill off it climbs my forearms. "Your seal, my count. This as the key. Let's wake my dead father and have a chat."

We work it in tandem. I lift the wax along the seam Cassandra named while Riley turns the cap through the sequence — three, two, one, then the deliberate quarter-turn that looks like a fumble and isn't. When she brings the relic flush to the glass, it flares hard and silver frosts up to my elbows. The cylinder hums. A voice climbs out of it, frayed thin, scraped down to almost nothing.

"Riley." A breath dragged over a tired chest. "If you're hearing me, I lost a bet I made with myself, and you found the spiral. Naturally. I'd be livid that you're this good, if I weren't the one who designed it for you."

Her body locks, I shift a half-step in just in case she needs to lean on me.

"There's a vault, kid. Real. Old. Buried by people who only look like people. It was never treasure. What sits in it could turn their world over and ours with it — proof of what they are, and worse, proof of the lies they've told each other for centuries. Sealed, it's history. In Lucien Moreau's hands it becomes a blade, and he'll only ever show the world where it cut. Never the stitching underneath."

"Then you bury it," Riley tells the recording, her voice cracking down the middle. "You expect me to sort your mess."

The dead can't hear. He keeps on, gentle and pitiless both.