Page 70

Hank stopped joking.

Carrick’s voice came through the shimmer. “Bernadette?”

Bernie finally looked at us. “I know that Magic.”

My brain supplied the only useful response. “Well, shit.”

“It’s my father’s,” Bernie said.

Nobody moved.

“You're sure?” Knox asked.

“I know my father's Magic.”

Knox didn't hesitate. “Then that's evidence. Not guilt.”

“That does not prove Fogarty is holding the active end now,” Carrick said immediately.

Bernie nodded. “No. But his Magic is built into the relay.”

Knox went terrifyingly calm. Texas Ranger calm. Evidence-before-rage calm. The kind of calm that made Guy’s face shift like he recognized it and hated every inch.

I squeezed Knox’s hand. He did not pull away. He did not charge for the door. He did not turn himself into a weapon before anyone could stop him.

Instead, he looked at Bernie. “Can we preserve what you found?”

Bernie swallowed, then nodded. “A partial Magical imprint. Enough to compare against my father’s known signature and Carrick’s recovered material.”

Knox stared at the fading projection.

“Good.”

His voice was quiet.

“Now we find out why they chose me.”

14

“Now we find out why they chose me.”

Carrick answered without hesitation. “Then we stop looking at the trap as one piece.”

No one spoke. The communication shimmer above Guy’s kitchen table pulsed with Carrick’s voice, low and steady, washing the scarred wood in silver-blue light. Bernie’s preserved trace hovered beside it, a lavender coil thin as wire and smelling faintly of rain on cemetery stone and hot metal. Guy had already dragged the Ward diagrams back into the projection. Bronze lines flickered over his face like firelight through bars. Hank stood near the counter with both hands wrapped around his coffee, steam curling around his knuckles, looking like a man who had decided daylight was optional, and bad news was seasonal.

Maisie studied the floating fragments of Hell Sorcery, Necromancy, and Dragon runes while dawn pressed gray and thin against the kitchen windows. She lifted both brows. “Nothing says good morning like forensic arts and crafts involving Hell.”

Hank took a slow drink of coffee. “I’ve had worse meetings.”

“That,” Maisie said, “is not the reassurance you seem to think it is.”

Bernie did not smile. She watched the partial Magical imprint she had pulled from the relay before it collapsed. The thing rotated above her palms, thread-thin and trembling, throwing lavender shadows across her cheekbones. The air around it had a cold, mineral bite that scraped the back of my throat. “We separate the layers,” she said. “Only what we know. No leaps.”

I nodded once. My Ranger calm held. Barely. The Hellmark gave one dull throb under my sleeve, like it objected to being entered into evidence. “List it.”

She did. I had been Magically tagged before I fell. Keevandrie had been at the rig in person and had known who I was even though I was undercover. I had stood in the ritual’s required living-anchor position because the ritual had been built around one. Fogarty’s Necromancy was woven into the Topside relay. Mammon had used the Infernal tether for a century. The active end– the hand currently holding the leash– remained unknown.

That last fact sat on the table with the rest of the evidence. Loaded. Waiting.