Page 42 of He’s A 10 But… He Bites

I have seen that symbol in Boston, half-buried under Thomas' line. The bond drags at me, hollowing my ribs. Somewhere beyond the grinding wall. Her heart is still beating. I take that fact and make myself let it be enough.

"The relic is with her," Gabriel says, voice rough with blood. "So either Lucien doesn't know, or she stole a second with it."

"Riley does not need a second," I say. "She needs a mistake."

The obsidian pulse comes again. Three marks this time, then a fourth that gutters out before it finishes.

Cassandra's face changes. “That is a paired-index sequence. Harrow’s mark first, then the east-stack sign, then the witness glyph. She isn’t pointing to herself. She’s telling us where Lucien took her and what he’s touching.”

The bond drags at me, useless and furious, but this is not the bond. This is Riley doing what Riley does: finding a system, breaking it politely, and leaving the rest of us a map in the wreckage.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning Lucien can carry out pages, but not the ones he actually wants. Not fast. Not clean. Half these records are sealed under dead names, false dates, and keeper masks." Her eyes cut to the blue pulse dying on the arch. "Riley isn’t making the relic lie. She’s making Lucien read it wrong."

"With the relic," I say.

"With Riley," Cassandra corrects. "The obsidian. That responds to her. She’s worked out the archive answers sequence, not desire. If she touches the wrong index marks in the right order, the relic will wake the matching shelves. Lucien will think the stone is guiding him. It isn’t. Riley is."

Gabriel looks past me. "That gives us a room, a line, and one ugly little chance."

"It gives us a hunt, and the direction to start."

29

RILEY

The glacial light in the stone makes everything look drowned. I see that when they shove me down onto the floor of the eastern chamber — not the cold gnawing through my jacket, not the bruise blooming at my side, but the blue glow leaking up through the cracks in the black shelves like the whole room is breathing under ice. Easier to study the light than the men around me. Six of them. No — seven, counting the one feeding brittle pages into a scanner that has no business existing this deep underground.

The relic rests on a table an arm's length away, humming. My hand isn't frozen anymore but three of my fingers are starting to again now that I'm close to it.

"You keep feeding it falsehoods," Lucien says.

He doesn't lift his head from the case he's prying open. His voice is the worst weapon he owns.

"It's a rock," I say. "I'm not feeding anything. You're the one negotiating with office supplies."

"It responds to you. You alone. It barely tolerates me. Curious, isn't it, what your father built with your blood."

That needle slides in clean. I press my palm flat against the obsidian because it's the only move I have, and the thing pulses under my skin — a slow blue throb that climbs my wrist and frosts the hairs on my arm. Inside it I feel the stone like you feel a building in the dark, by its edges. Shelves waking. Cases marked and cross-marked. And under that, faint, a pattern I half-recognize before I can name it.

Then I see it carved into the nearest case frame: my father’s spiral, almost hidden inside a keeper mark. Not decoration. Direction. A signal path.

I press the relic to it once, then to the east-stack mark beside it, then to the witness glyph cut low into the stone. Three points. Three pulses. If the vault carries sound through stone, maybe it carries light too. If Nico is anywhere on the other side, Cassandra will know enough to read it.

It’s the same ugly little pattern my father taught me to love. The light blooms where I aim it, not because the stone understands me, but because the archive does. Shelves wake along the empty stacks, all rot and water-ruined ledgers, and Lucien’s follower turns toward them like I’ve handed him a revelation. A follower drifts toward them, hopeful.

"You think you're protecting them," Lucien says, drifting closer. "The man who hunts you. The leaders who sent him. Let me show you what you're protecting."

He sets an open record in front of me. It's a purge. A village, names listed and then struck — not crossed out for error, erased,. Vampire signatures at the bottom, official, sanctioned. My stomach turns over.

"They did this," Lucien says softly. "And they buried it. Your father helped bury it. He used you to keep it buried, even dead. Doesn't that make you angry?"

It does. That's the awful part. It hits somewhere true, in the same place that's been raw since I learned my father lied to me. Nico has served the people who signed that page. The leaders did hide this. None of it is a lie.

But. I glance at the case Lucien pulled it from, and the case beside it, and the one he ordered left on the cart. Every record he's taking has the same design — the wound, the blood, the clean outrage. And every record he's leaving has a wax treaty seal, or a reconciliation index, or a marginal note that would complicate the story. He isn't taking the truth. He's taking the half that burns.

"You skipped one," I say.