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Maybe Fenrir was still out there, waiting for another chance. Maybe the fleet’s charge was a diversion meant to convince Sanctuary they’d won so Fenrir could swoop in at the last possible moment, like the heroes in the storybooks he’d read. Or maybe Fenrir had allowed himself to be captured last night. Maybe he was here now, in a cell a few doors down from his, chewing through his bindings so the moment Atticus showed up he’d burst free and overwhelm him, come to Orpheus in the dead of night so they could steal away together, under the velvet cloak of a protective darkness.

Or maybe it was finally Orpheus’ turn to rescue Fenrir, because even if he survived the power cell’s attack, he may still be captured, and for every reason Atticus had to keep Orpheus alive, he had just as many to see Fenrir dead.

This was Orpheus’ best chance. To save himself and now Fenrir, too.

Night passed in scorching flares, Sanctuary burning into the dim dawn light. Voices rose and fell on the smoky wind. Screams of grief, calls for help, and along the horizon, a distant moan howled, the wind or perhaps something worse. And all the while, he scoured the pages of the grimoire, absorbing the information in quick passes, the theorems and experiments and sigils the Architects had tested and those they had not. Some notes were new. Others were ancient. Wherever this book had come from was older than any of them: him, the Architects, and the ancestors they’d all descended from.

Perhaps older than Sanctuary itself.

He found it, somewhere near the end. The spell that would save his life.

I believe the key to understanding Necromancy is that the condition of life is the sum of many parts, yet one stands above the rest. Isolated, it could theoretically be transferred to an alternative host, whether organic or inorganic, possibly absorbed by…

Orpheus read the chapter once, twice. By the third time he’d identified the holes in the mage’s logic. By the fifth he’d already devised an alternative sigil to the one he’d been working on for weeks. He may not be transferring a soul, but the intention was the same. A vital life force, taken. Re-purposed in a new and different host.

Am I really going to—

Shut up. He shoved the voice away, grabbing one of his notebooks and flipping to a clean page. The pen he picked up was chewed into pits at the end, the ink blotting black when he placed the nib to the paper and his hand began to shake.

Don’t think about it.

One rune for flesh. The second for spirit. The third for Netherflame, mirrored by a matching set, interconnected by a sum of lines and two circles to collect them, arcs overlapping to create an empty place of possibility in-between.

The pen lifted from the page, hovering over the center where the last line should be.

“A line,” he breathed. “To rebind all three.”

It had to be similar, he imagined, to the spell the hermits had used on him, when the crack they’d placed inside him had moved from an earthly plane to one as intangible as the thoughts in his head, or the dreams of his sleep. It was a spell he knew intimately, in all the ways that mattered. One whose intention was already rooted inside him, a part of him, as indivisible from his whole as the blood in his veins, or the breath in his lungs.

It will be the same for Gwen.

He wasn’t sure if the spell would kill her, but the risk was there, and he knew what death felt like, even if all it stole was everything magic from the world.

When his tears fell he didn’t stop them. He let the ink bleed as if it were the blood he would soon need.

“Told ya, boss. I already checked in there.”

Footsteps echoed up the hall, Serval and Duluth, and now, Atticus.

The door clicked, then banged, banged, banged. When Gwen’s chair cracked and then shattered, Orpheus stared down at the page in his notebook and committed the image into his mind.

Then lurched to his feet to meet fate head on.

“Grab him.”

It was Serval who lunged, rather than Duluth.

“Bind him.”

The cuffs were lighter than the encasements but closed over his wrists like a vice.

“Hold him.”

The collar did not appear like he expected, and something tense inside Orpheus released. No encasements. No collar. No fear that he’d somehow regained his non-existent magic, and that’s all Orpheus cared about right then.

Well, that and Fenrir.

“You got what you wanted, didn’t you?” Orpheus snarled when Atticus stepped up beside him and withdrew a vial from his leather bag. Mere hours ago, they’d been here under different circumstances, locked into an unlikely alliance. Now, they stood apart as enemies again. Paths too diverged for any kind of lasting peace.