Read Chapter 15: The Grimoire's Map

The parlor clock chimed four in the afternoon, but Julien barely heard it. He sat at Mireille's kitchen table with the Mirror of Blood open before him, its pages thick as vellum and smelling of copper and dust. Section 13's classified files lay in neat stacks around him—Romy had smuggled them out in a baker's bag, crusty baguette and all, and the counterfeit smell of flour still clung to the folders.

"You're going to burn through your grandmother's patience before we even find the seam," Romy said from the doorway. She'd taken off her coat but kept her gloves on, fingers restless.

"Then she should have given me more than crumbs." Julien's finger traced a line of faded ink. "Étienne Moreau, 1874. Bound the Cormorant of the Seine. Died forty-one days after the binding, cause listed as heart failure."

He flipped the page, matching it to a file Mireille had pulled from a steel lockbox beneath her floorboards—a copy of Section 13's internal records, decades old. "But Section 13 lists Étienne as *missing*, presumed dead. No body recovered. No autopsy."

Romy leaned over his shoulder. "The grimoire says he died. The file says he vanished. Which one's lying?"

"Neither." Julien's voice went flat. "They're describing the same event from two angles. The grimoire records the blood truth. Section 13 records what the Watcher allowed them to see."

He opened the grimoire to its index of names, each entry embossed in silver that had oxidized black with age. Julien ran his thumb down the list, counting under his breath. The shard in his coat pocket pulsed warm against his chest, as if urging him faster.

"Seventeen Moreaus since 1602," he said. "Every single one has a corresponding Section 13 file. Every single one is marked resolved—a monster stopped, a boundary sealed, a haunt dispersed. And every single one—" he struck the table, "—every single one died or vanished within three months of their binding. Not one died of old age. Not one retired. My grandfather wasn't an exception. He was the rule."

Romy pulled the grimoire toward her, scanning the chronology. Her brow furrowed. "Julien, these dates. They're not random."

"I know. I'm counting them."

"Seventeen bindings, but look at the gaps." She tilted the book so he could see the pattern. In the margins, Mireille's ancestors had noted the dates of each binding: 1602, 1701, 1798, 1902, 1974. "They cluster around the turn of each century. Sometimes a few years early, sometimes a few late—"

"Because they were chasing the entity's cycle, not the calendar." Julien's blood went cold. He remembered his mother's face in the mirror shard, her lips pressed against glass. *Find the book before coming for me.* She hadn't meant the grimoire. She'd meant *this* — the pattern that would tell him what was coming.

He pulled a folded paper from his pocket—his own list, scribbled in the warehouse's dying light. Section 13's case numbers, cross-referenced with obituaries and police records he'd dug from the prefecture's archives. He spread it beside the grimoire's timeline.

"1974," he said. "My mother's file says she died in a traffic accident on the Pont Neuf. But the grimoire says she performed a binding on the winter solstice of that year. And her name disappears from the family ledger three months later—same as every other Moreau."

Romy's voice went quiet. "What was she binding?"

The grimoire had no answer. The page where his mother's name should have been was blank—not erased, but smudged, as if a hand had wiped wet ink across the vellum before it dried. Julien turned to the final page of the index, where the names continued into the present.

His own name sat at the bottom, written in a hand he didn't recognize. *Julien Moreau, b. 1989.* The binding was listed as "unassigned."

Below it, in smaller script, a date: *Winter solstice.*

Julien's stomach dropped. "That's this year."

Romy took the grimoire from him, turning it toward the window light. "Six weeks from now."

"Every hundred years, a sacrifice." Julien heard his own voice as if from a distance, cold and clinical. "The books say it's a binding—the Moreau who carries the weight of the bloodline seals the entity until the next turn of the century. They stop it from waking. They keep it asleep beneath the city." He swallowed. "But the seal doesn't hold forever. It holds for a hundred years, and then the entity stirs again, and the next Moreau has to be ready to take the burden."

"Your mother was the last one," Romy said. "1974. She bound it, and it cost her—"

"She didn't die. She's still alive. The shard showed her. She's in the Harbinger's Chapel, trapped on the other side of the glass." Julien's knuckles went white on the table's edge. "So the binding didn't kill her. It *did* something worse. It put her where she could watch the next one come."

"The next one." Romy's gaze dropped to his name on the page. "Julien—"

"Every Moreau who performed a binding disappeared or died within three months. But my mother didn't die. She's been kept alive, behind glass, for fifty years—because the binding wasn't finished. She bought time, but she didn't seal it. She was holding it until I could take her place."

The words hung in the air, heavy as the dust that moted through Mireille's parlor.

Romy sat down hard on the chair across from him. "That's why the mirror shard told you to find the book before coming for her. She wants you to understand what you're walking into. She doesn't want you to rescue her blind."

"Or she wants me to finish what she started." Julien touched the ring on his finger. The guard crest pulsed under his thumb, warm and alive. "My cousin at the auction wore this ring. He wasn't trying to kill me—he was trying to warn me. He said my mother's death was deliberate. But it wasn't death. It was *selection*."

"Selected for a ritual she could only postpone." Romy shook her head. "And now you've got six weeks until the winter solstice, an internal review at two o'clock that could get us both kicked out of Section 13, and a Watcher breathing down your neck because you've got two of its artifacts sitting in your pockets."

"Three," Julien said, feeling the shard's warmth against his ribs. "If you count the blood the shard took."

The clock on Mireille's shelf struck the half-hour. Julien looked up, and through the kitchen doorway, he caught a glimpse of the parlor—and the black cloth still draped over the mirror. The fabric was no longer smooth. It had lifted at one corner, and beneath it, something pale pressed against the glass.

"Your grandmother's mirror," Romy said, following his gaze. "It's watching us."

"No." Julien stood. "It's watching *the book*. Every time I get closer to the pattern, it gets closer to me."

He crossed the room and pulled the cloth away. The mirror's surface was dark, starred with cracks that ran like veins through silver frost. But at its center, a reflection that should have been his own showed something else—a workshop filled with clocks, pendulums swinging in furious unison, and a woman with dark hair braided over one shoulder, her back to him, working at a bench.

His mother.

She turned, as if she could feel his gaze through the years and the glass. Her lips moved.

He read the words by shape alone: *You have six weeks. Do not come for me until the seal is ready.*

The image shattered. The mirror cracked from corner to corner, and Julien was left staring at his own wide-eyed reflection in the broken pieces.

"Ready?" Romy repeated, her voice thin. "Ready for what?"

Julien looked down at the ring on his finger, at the grimoire open on the table, at the dying light through Mireille's window. Six weeks to the solstice. Six weeks to learn a ritual that had taken seventeen generations of Moreaus to understand.

"I don't know," he said. "But I'm going to find out."