Semua Bab Alpha VS Omega' Twin VS Twin (A Dark Werewolf Romance): Bab 221 - Bab 230

POV: Callum | The Feral Den, Sibyl's papersSibyl left papers.This is something Tom told me on the first day and which I filed in the part of my mind that was filing things for later because the first day was not a day for papers, and the second day was not either, and the third day was the day Moira came and asked me where Lucia was and I asked the same question back, and on the fourth day I am asking it of the papers.Sibyl died four months ago, before the facility raid, before the execution, before any of this section of the story that I am living through, and she left her papers to Tom, which is where papers go in my world, to Tom, who catalogs and cross-references and maintains and who brought them to me this morning without commentary because Tom understands when commentary is not useful.Sibyl's papers have the quality of Sibyl, which is the quality of someone who saw things and wrote down what she saw with the specific precision of someone who understood that the seeing was n

POV: Dante | Rookeries, Den and surrounding streetsThe ribs are broken on the left side and the right arm is functional but wrong in the specific way that a joint that has been stressed beyond its tolerance is wrong, which is not broken but altered, and the healer who looked at me two hours after the Parliament steps told me three weeks of rest and I told him I would do my best, which neither of us believed.I walk back to the Rookeries from the Parliamentary medical facility where they brought me after Callum cleared the steps, and the walk takes twice as long as it should because of the ribs and because the specific shock of the afternoon has produced the quality of slowness in me that shock produces, the quality of moving through something thicker than air.I am expecting the Rookeries to have the quality of grief. I lost my sister at noon and it is now ten in the evening and I am returning to the place where she lived and worked and built something, and I am expecting the place t

POV: Edmund Banks | Flat above St. Thomas site, SouthwarkI have lived above the old St. Thomas building for six years and in those six years I have developed the specific relationship with my neighbourhood that marked humans develop with places where the supernatural world is active beneath the surface, which is a relationship of careful not-looking combined with thorough peripheral awareness, the specific skill of someone who can see through the Veil and who has learned that seeing through the Veil and acting on what you see are two entirely different categories of decision with two entirely different sets of consequences.The Veil, for people who cannot see it, is the perceptual barrier that the supernatural world maintains over its activities, the mechanism by which two hundred years of vampires and werewolves and fae have moved through a human city without producing the specific crisis that full visibility would produce. I can see through it. I have been able to see through it si

POV: Mordaunt | Kensington estate, studySix hundred and twelve years.That is the specific number and I am thinking about it tonight in the way I think about very large numbers, which is not all at once but in increments, moving through what six hundred and twelve years contains, the specific accumulated weight of it, what it took to build it and what it has produced and what it is in the process of becoming, which is the thing I have been not-thinking about for the past twelve hours and which I can no longer not-think about because the thing is too present.The blackmail files are public. This is the fact at the center of everything tonight and everything since noon and it has the quality of a fact that cannot be engaged with incrementally, cannot be addressed through the management and control that I have applied to every other crisis in six hundred and twelve years, because the specific nature of a blackmail file released publicly is that the leverage it contained ceases to exist

POV: Callum | Fell's facility, St. Thomas sublevelThe service entrance is the one Ash's escaped hybrid mapped for us, which means the layout we have in our heads is accurate to three weeks ago, and three weeks in a facility being managed by a single obsessive person who killed his last assistant two days ago is enough time for things to have changed, so we go in the way you go into a place where the map might not match the territory, which is carefully and with attention to the gap between expected and actual.Tom goes first at the wards, which is the correct order because Tom's fae ability is the thing that makes the entry possible at all, the wards on the service entrance being the Hermetic Order's standard layered barrier system, three wards stacked and keyed to each other so that breaking the outer one without the second and third causes the whole system to trigger.I watch Tom work the wards in the specific way I have watched Tom work for three years, which is with the attention