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Carrick came through next, his voice quiet enough to make my spine tighten. “Maisie, when you crossed the Wards, did they fight you?”

Maisie’s humor vanished.

I watched the memory move across her face. Fog. Light. The ice-curtain sensation she had described with too many jokes and not enough fear. The impossible way she had crossed into Arrhythmia and couldn't get back out.

“No,” she said slowly. “They let me through. I couldn’t get back out, but getting in wasn’t the problem.”

The silence that followed was not empty. It was crowded with every terrible possibility none of us wanted to name.

My stomach dropped.

Carrick said, “Then the Hellmark has just cataloged the Magical signature of someone who crossed the Arrhythmia boundary without being rejected.”

“That doesn’t mean my Magic is why they let me through,” Maisie said.

“No,” Bernie agreed. “And it doesn’t mean the mark can reproduce what happened.”

“No,” Carrick replied. “But it means we have to assume it may test her signature against the boundary.”

Maisie looked at me.

I looked at the Hellmark.

The damned thing pulsed.

Not hard. Not painful. Slow. Measured.

Hell had spent a century learning how to use me.

Tonight, it had started learning Maisie.

That ended now.

11

For approximately four seconds after I kissed Knox MacAllen, my entire nervous system stood on a chair, waved both arms over its head, and screamed, KISS KISS KISS KISS like an unsupervised drunk bridesmaid near an open bar.

Unfortunately, it was inconvenient, considering there were still Demons or Ghoulies or whatever Hell had wrought outside, a Hellmark inside the room, and a very real chance my next major life decision would involve either dying heroically or being remembered as the woman who flirted during an active supernatural incident.

“You kissed him,” Neysa said.

There are Demons outside, Neysa.

“And yet, somehow, you found time.”

“Priorities.”

Knox stood a few feet away, sword still in hand, Hellmark still pulsing beneath Guy’s borrowed flannel. He looked exactly like a man who had just decided that caring about me was no longer something he could grit his teeth and deny out of existence.

The change was not dramatic. No beam of heavenly light. No thunder. Definitely not any violins and fat babies in diapers with wings. No sudden declaration that he had been emotionally repaired by one extremely ill-timed make-out session. He was still Knox– scarred, guarded, and stubborn enough to argue with a locked door if it looked at him wrong.

But the wall between us had shifted. He was no longer pretending caring about me was some weakness he could starve until it went away.

Carrick’s communication shimmer crackled from the table before anybody could say something emotionally inconvenient.

“Nobody tests the boundary with Maisie,” Carrick said.

“Thank you,” I said. “I was hoping tonight would not include voluntarily running face-first into the invisible cattle prod again.”