Chapter 23 · The Pact Calls Their Names

The third knock did not come from the door.

It came from inside the ledger.

The sound shuddered through the sealed archive, three hard strikes beneath the iron table, beneath the floor, beneath Eve Calder’s ribs. Dust sifted from the ceiling. The lamps along the walls guttered blue, and every clock face in the room turned its hands toward midnight even though the midnight line had already crossed into the forbidden sector.

Kieran stood between Eve and the archive door, black glass key clenched in his right hand. Blood ran from the cut at his shoulder where the key’s edge had opened him. It slipped beneath his collar and darkened the fabric in a slow, spreading crescent.

Sora’s fingers hovered over the brass control panel. None of the dials answered her anymore.

‘That wasn’t the door,’ she whispered.

The ledger’s pages began to turn.

Not from wind. There was no wind in the archive. The pages flipped one after another with wet, deliberate snaps, as though invisible fingers were searching for a particular name. Ink crawled over the paper in thin black veins.