Chapter 7

Kael caught the look on Lyra's face before she said a word.

"What."

"Your mother just said Ronan's name."

He didn't ask if she was sure. Lyra didn't have a reason to invent something like that, and the particular stillness that had come over her, the way her eyes had gone wide and fixed on the wall like she could see through it, told him everything he needed to know about how certain she was.

He pushed the records room door open hard enough that it hit the wall behind it.

The hallway was empty. Seraphine's voice, the one Lyra claimed to have heard, had already gone silent, and by the time Kael made it to the comms room two doors down, his mother was sitting at the monitor bank with her hands folded on the desk in front of her, composed in the particular way she only got when she was hiding something badly enough to need the extra effort.

"You said her name." Kael didn't bother with a greeting. "Ronan. Lyra heard you."

"Lyra has excellent hearing for someone who isn't supposed to have any of her abilities confirmed yet." Seraphine didn't look up from the monitor. "That should concern you more than it apparently does."

"Don't deflect. What's happening with Ronan."

His mother was quiet long enough that he knew, before she even answered, that whatever she said next was going to be a version of the truth and not the whole thing. She'd done it his entire life. He'd learned to read the gap between her words a long time before he'd learned to read anything else about her.

"There was a disturbance reported near the Vale property forty minutes ago," she said finally. "I'm looking into it. That's all I know right now."

"That's not all you know." Kael's voice had dropped into the register he used on people he was about to stop trusting. "You knew the name the second it left your mouth. You reacted before I even said anything."

"I reacted because an old friend might be in danger, Kael. Forgive me for having a human response to that."

"An old friend." He let the words sit there, heavy, daring her to keep going. "You've never once mentioned Ronan Vale to me in twenty four years. Not once. And the first time her name comes up, you already know exactly which disturbance it connects to."

Seraphine finally looked up at him, and for one unguarded second he saw something underneath the composure that looked almost like grief.

"We don't have time for this conversation right now," she said quietly. "Go. Take two vehicles, not one. If it's what I think it might be, you don't want to arrive without backup already in motion."

"What do you think it is."

"Go, Kael." Her voice cracked at the edges, just barely, just enough. "Please."

He'd never once heard his mother say please like that. It scared him more than anything that had happened tonight, more than the creature in Lyra's apartment, more than the blade work at the window, because Seraphine Arden did not beg, not for anything, not ever.

He went.

Lyra was already by the door when he got back to her, jacket zipped, Kael's spare shirt still hanging loose on her frame, his borrowed boots two sizes too big laced tight around her ankles. She didn't ask what Seraphine had said. She just looked at his face and read the answer there well enough that she didn't need to.

"How bad," she said.

"I don't know yet."

"Kael."

"I don't know yet," he said again, firmer, and took her hand without really deciding to, pulling her toward the garage before either of them could stand still long enough to think too hard about what they were driving toward.

The ride out of the city took thirty-one minutes. Lyra counted every one of them out loud in her head because it was easier than sitting with the silence, the dark highway blurring past the windows, farmland replacing streetlights the further they got from Ravenmere's center. Kael drove with both hands locked on the wheel, jaw tight, saying nothing, which somehow scared her more than if he'd filled the silence with reassurances she wouldn't have believed anyway.

The second car, two Nightguard agents she didn't recognize, stayed close behind them the whole way.

They turned onto the gravel drive leading up to the Vale property a little after one in the morning, and Lyra's stomach dropped before her eyes had even fully adjusted to what she was looking at.

The porch light was on. The front door stood wide open, swinging slightly on its hinges in the wind. And scored deep into the wood of the doorframe, exactly at the height Ronan would have been standing, were four long claw marks that hadn't been there the last time Lyra had come home.

"Stay in the car." Kael was already out, blade drawn, moving low and fast toward the house.

She didn't stay in the car.

She was two steps behind him by the time he reached the porch, and three steps behind when he stopped so abruptly she nearly ran into his back, every line of his body gone rigid in the doorway.

"Kael." Her voice came out barely above a whisper. "What is it. What do you see."

He didn't answer right away. When he finally spoke, his voice had gone flat in a way she'd never heard from him before, stripped of everything except the effort of staying steady.

"Don't come any closer."

But she already had, close enough to see past his shoulder into the front hallway, where the floor was scattered with broken photo frames and overturned furniture, and where, at the center of it all, a single dark red handprint was smeared across the wall at exactly Ronan's height.

Ronan herself was nowhere in sight.