Read Chapter 16: The Century Deadline

The internal review meeting was a farce. Verne sat at the head of the table, stone-faced, while a thin woman from the Ministry of Occult Affairs flipped through a dossier that listed more of my family history than I'd ever known. She asked about the warehouse, about the mirrors, about Claire Delacroix. I answered with the carefully edited truth—the one Verne had coached me through before the door closed.

"Your record is... unusual," the woman said, closing the dossier. "But given the extenuating circumstances, and Detective Verne's commendation, we've decided to place you on conditional status. Pending review in six weeks."

Six weeks. The words hit me like a physical blow. The solstice was six weeks out.

I sat through the rest of the meeting on autopilot, nodding where appropriate, shaking hands when offered. When the door finally clicked shut behind the Ministry woman, Verne caught my arm in the hallway.

"Buck up, Moreau. You're still standing."

"Six weeks," I said. "That's all I have."

Verne's brow furrowed—just a twitch, barely visible. He opened his mouth, then closed it, and the familiar weight of his forbidden knowledge settled between us. "Go see Romy. You look like you've seen a ghost."

I found her in the records annex she'd claimed as her unofficial office, surrounded by stacks of Section 13 archives. She took one look at my face and pushed a cup of coffee across the desk.

"Bad news?"

"Good news, actually." I sat, gripping the mug like a lifeline. "I'm not suspended. Conditional status. Review in six weeks."

Romy's eyes narrowed. "And the bad news?"

"The review date. It's the solstice. December twenty-first." I met her gaze. "The day the grimoire says I'm supposed to die."

Romy was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood, walked to the door, and locked it. When she turned back, the skepticism that usually guarded her face was gone.

"You believe this. The curse, the binding, all of it."

"I saw my mother trapped behind glass in a chapel that shouldn't exist. I held a mirror that drank my blood and showed me her face." I set down the coffee, felt the shard pulse against my chest. "I believe it."

Romy pulled a chair close to mine and sat. "Then we need to know what the ritual actually requires. Your grandmother gave you the grimoire. Verne has the files. But the mechanics of the binding—the specifics—those are in Claire's research, aren't they?"

"The cracked mirror. In the warehouse." I'd been trying not to think about it, about the Watcher's agent that had escaped through that wall, about whatever might still be guarding the ruins. "She keyed it to something living."

"Then that's the play." Romy found a notebook among the clutter and flipped it open. "But first, we need to understand what we're looking for. You said the grimoire has blank pages—the ones that refused your grandmother."

"They filled in when I touched them," I admitted. "But I only saw the surface. Names, dates, bindings. I didn't have time to study them."

Romy produced a magnifying glass the size of her hand and slid the grimoire toward herself. I'd brought it without thinking, still wrapped in the protective cloth from Mireille's apartment. The moment her fingers brushed the cover, I felt the shard in my chest seize—like a cramp, cold and sharp.

"Stop," I said.

Romy pulled her hand back instantly. "What?"

"The shard. It reacted." I pressed a hand to my chest. "The book doesn't like being touched by outsiders."

"Lovely." Romy sat back, studying me with fresh intensity. "So how do we get the information out of it without dying?"

"We use me as the key." I unwrapped the grimoire, watching the cover gleam under the fluorescent lights. Black leather, no title, no symbol—just the faint impression of a hand pressed into the hide, larger than any palm I'd ever seen. The Moreau ancestor's mark, Mireille had called it. The first guardian's claim.

I touched it. The cold sensation spread up my arm, and the blank pages at the back of the book rippled like water. Words appeared, ink bleeding up from the page—not French, not Latin, something older. Romy leaned in, reading over my shoulder.

"Can you understand that?"

"Not all of it." The words shifted as I watched, forming shapes I recognized from the family grimoire's opening pages. "But some. It's describing a location, underneath the city. Underneath the Palais."

"The Palais de Justice?"

I nodded, reading further. "There's a vault. Something sealed beneath the foundations—a name. It's the thing the original guardian bound." The ink twisted, forming a word I could almost grasp, a name that made the shard pulse hot against my sternum. "It's called the Devourer of Names."

Romy's pen scratched across paper. "And your ancestor—the original guardian—he bound it there. With what?"

"A ritual. A sacrifice." I kept reading, my voice getting thinner. "It requires a pureblood descendant of the original guardian's line to renew the seal. At the turning of a century. On the winter solstice."

"At the turning of the century." Romy looked up from her notes. "But every hundred years? Your ancestors—"

"Died within months of their bindings." I closed the grimoire, the words fading back into blank parchment. "The seal holds for a century, but it consumes the guardian. And when it breaks—"

"When does it break?" Romy asked.

I did the math in my head to be sure, then wished I hadn't. "The records show the bindings are always on a winter solstice that falls in the final year of a century. But this one—" I'd compiled the dates this morning, cross-referencing the grimoire and Section 13 archives. The pattern had been so clear, so relentlessly geometric, that I'd checked the numbers four times hoping I'd made an error. "This one was supposed to be my mother's. She was supposed to complete the binding at the turn of the millennium."

"But her binding was incomplete. Your grandmother said so."

"Which means the seal has been fraying for twenty-five years." I stood, pacing the cramped office. "It never reset. Whatever's down there has been straining against the old binding, getting stronger, and the last guardian to touch it died without finishing the job."

Romy set down her pen. "How strong is it? Could it get out on its own?"

"The grimoire didn't say. But my mother is still alive in the Harbinger's Chapel, which means she was bound to the seal but never fully consumed. She's been holding it partially closed for decades." I stopped, facing Romy. "And now the archives show activity. The mirrors. The Watcher. Someone is moving pieces, and it's not just the Ministry."

"Then we're going to the warehouse," Romy said. "Now. Before your conditional status gets pulled, before someone else finds Claire's research first."

"You don't believe in the curse. You told me so, the day we met."

"I don't have to believe in curses to believe in you." Romy shoved her notebook into her coat pocket. "And I've seen what you can do. If your blood is the key, then we use it—carefully, together, before whatever's under the Palais decides to write its own ending."

The shard against my chest grew warm—approving, I thought, or perhaps just hungry. My mother's voice echoed in my memory: *Find the book before you come for me.* I'd found it.

Next was the mirror.

Outside the annex window, the evening sky had gone the color of old bruises, and in the glass of a jeweler's shop across the street, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection just a half-second too slow. The figure in the glass smiled before I could turn to see who it was.