The Sleepy Inn was supposed to be fireproof.
I stared at the smoking crater where my temporary sanctuary used to stand, watching Baltimore's finest pretend they understood what had happened. Yellow tape fluttered around the perimeter like prayer flags for the dead. The fire chief was explaining to a cluster of reporters how a gas leak could create purple flames that burned for three straight hours.
They had no idea what they were looking at. Hellfire left traces, but this was layered, like someone had rewritten an older burn. The scorch marks in the concrete hinted at glyphwork, but the curves were broken, borrowed from multiple dialects and stitched into something deliberately hard to read. It might have been infernal, or someone clever enough to fake it. The ash rose soft on the wind and tasted like roses and regret. Whatever faction lit the match, they’d wrapped their signature in just enough truth to mislead the right kind of witch.
The Auditor's mark beneath my ribs flared as I stepped closer to the ruins, like it recognized the scorched magic. The cursed glyph had been carving itself deeper into my flesh since the Fold's attack, a thorn of pain that served as a constant reminder of how far I'd fallen from professional discretion.
Someone had tracked me here. Either through the connection I'd severed at the inkhouse, or through something else I hadn't thought to protect. The timing was surgical: I'd been gone exactly long enough for a professional cleanup crew to torch the place and vanish before the sirens started.
My room was gone. My backup gear, the spare inks, the emergency ward stones I'd hidden in the heating vent. Of the fifteen grand Darius had paid me, twelve thousand went up with the motel. The last three sat in the Jeep's lockbox like a whisper of what I'd lost, along with my tools, the Codex fragment, and the bitter knowledge that nowhere was safe anymore.
I climbed back into the Jeep and started the engine. The dashboard glyph pulsed amber, then settled into its normal rhythm. Whatever had been tracking me wasn't following now. Either they'd accomplished what they came for, or they were waiting for me to make the next move.
The highway north stretched before me like a question mark inked in asphalt and bad decisions. I'd been avoiding Salem for three years, ever since the last time I'd tried to find answers about my family and ended up running from ghosts I couldn't kill.
But with the Fold hunting me and the Chorus whispering my name, I was running out of safe places to hide. Salem wasn't safe, but it was mine. The house where Camilla Osborn had lived and died, where she'd hidden whatever secrets had gotten her killed.
The radio crackled as I hit the highway, scanning through static and late-night talk shows about alien abductions and government conspiracies. Normal people's problems seemed quaint compared to mine.
Then the static cleared, and a voice emerged from the speakers like smoke from a funeral pyre.
"You're listening to Blood Signal 66.6 FM, broadcasting straight from Perdition's crossroads to your cortex. We don't burn bridges, we brand them."
I nearly swerved into the median. Blood Signal was an infernal station, broadcast from the deep levels of Hell's radio network. I'd heard it before in Pandemonium, but never in the mortal world. The Jeep's radio wasn't supposed to be able to pick up cross-realm transmissions.
Unless something was bleeding through the veil around me.
"This next one goes out to all the Brokers riding the nightshift," the DJ continued, his voice rough as gravel soaked in bourbon. "For those who ink their pain into power and wonder if the cost was worth it. Here's 'The Last Pact Waltz.'"
The music started low and mournful, a steel guitar weeping over a rhythm section that sounded like footsteps on broken glass. Then a woman's voice joined in, raw and haunted:
She wrote her name in demonbone
Inked her sins into the sky
But hell don't read what's overwritten
And love don't bleed dry
So dance the last pact waltz, my dear
Let the ink flow like wine
'Cause the devil keeps all promises
But he don't keep time
The steel guitar sobbed through a bridge that sounded like weeping souls, then the woman's voice returned, deeper now, weighted with bitter experience:
She carved her heart in sulfur stone
Traded breath for borrowed fire
But memory burns in midnight coal
And ash don't satisfy desire
So dance the last pact waltz, my dear
Let the blood run like rain
'Cause the devil keeps all promises
But he don't ease the pain
The song faded into static, leaving me alone with the highway and the weight of metaphor that cut too close to bone. Stories like that didn't get broadcast by accident. I knew that voice. Not the singer, but the story behind the words. It was about a Broker who'd tried to rewrite her own contract, carving her true name into a demon lord's bones to break free from an impossible deal.
She'd succeeded. For about thirty seconds. Long enough to watch her lover die in her place before the contract corrected itself, and dragged her back to Hell.
Someone was sending me a message.
My phone buzzed against the dashboard. Unknown number, but the text came through in Broker cipher: "CAMILLA'S WORDS WAIT IN SAINT ANSELM'S SHADOW. TRADING POST MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE OR STAY IGNORANT. - B"
Saint Anselm's Cathedral had been ruined for fifty years, ever since a fire gutted the main sanctuary and left only the stone skeleton standing. It sat in the dead zone between Salem and Hartford, surrounded by woods that never quite felt empty. Perfect place for an ambush, which meant whoever B was, they either had more balls than sense or they were confident they could handle whatever I might bring to the party.
But they'd mentioned Camilla. My mother's name. The woman who'd died when I was two years old, leaving behind nothing but questions and a reputation among the Broker community as someone who'd played the game too well and paid the ultimate price.
I'd spent years trying to find traces of her work, her contracts, anything that might explain why she'd been killed and who'd ordered it done. The trail had always gone cold at the same point: her last known client, a mortal witch named Rebecca Thorne who'd vanished the same night Camilla died.
If someone actually had her words, her journal or personal notes, it was worth the risk. Worth walking into whatever trap they'd prepared.
The highway stretched ahead, but I could see the shimmer about two miles out. A veil fracture, thin enough to slip through if you knew how to read the signs. I could take the long way, or I could cut through the shallow layers and save time.
The Auditor's mark pulsed as I considered the option, like it could taste the realm-crossing before I committed to it. The Codex fragment in my tool case whispered approval, its voice a low hum that made my teeth ache.
Time wasn’t on my side, but I planned to outrun it.
I touched the spiral sigil on the dashboard and felt it warm beneath my fingertip. The Jeep's engine shifted to a lower growl as I eased off the main highway onto a service road that shouldn't have connected to anything. But roads were just suggestions when you had the right keys.
The world blurred at the edges as reality bent around us. The asphalt beneath the tires became something darker, smoother. The streetlights flickered and died, replaced by the cold phosphorescent glow of brimstone lamps. Trees twisted into shapes that hurt to look at directly, their branches reaching toward a sky the color of dried blood.
We were in the River Below now, the shallow edge where it touched the mortal world. The speedometer kept reading sixty, but distance worked differently here. Every mile covered three in the real world, and the price was paid in memory.
The Auditor's mark throbbed in rhythm with the realm's pulse, like it was trying to sync with something vast and hungry swimming beneath the black water.
I'd been here before. Not in the Jeep, but on foot, dragging myself along the bone-coral banks while my blood mixed with the black water. I was seventeen, stupid with adolescent rage and convinced I could steal from a river demon without consequences. The imp who'd raised me, Kratch, had warned me about hubris. I'd told him to fuck off and gone anyway.
The river demon had been amused by my audacity right up until I'd driven a bone spike through its eye. Then amusement became fury, and fury became chase. I'd barely made it to the mortal side alive, but I'd come back with enough demon essence to ink my first real combat glyph.
Kratch had laughed when he saw the fresh marks on my skin. "Pain's a teacher," he'd said, "but arrogance is a grave. Remember which is which."
I still carried the scars from that night. They'd faded, but in this place they ached like old wounds in winter.
The veil fracture spat us back onto real highway ten minutes later. The transition was jarring; one moment I was driving through a landscape of bone and blood, the next I was surrounded by normal Connecticut countryside. Pine trees instead of writhing shadows, actual stars instead of burning wounds in the sky.
I checked the rearview mirror out of habit and froze.
Someone was sitting in the back seat.
