10
Katie was sitting in a chair that looked like royal butts had sat in it, judged queens, and ordered them beheaded. The magical screens cast weird shadows across the room.
Joell tapped the table, and a floating holographic map blinked into existence, covered in graffiti tags and glowing red symbols. Her black cat jumped up on her lap, and she patted it absently.
Katie leaned in. “Oh my god,” she said. “That’s Bushwick.”
Joell nodded. “You’ve seen these?” She zeroed in on some walls with graffiti.
“Yeah. Some of them match my dreams. Like,exactly.That symbol…” She pointed. “It appears on this crumbling wall behind a bodega near Myrtle Ave. But I onlysawit after I dreamed it.”
Victoria frowned. “Dream bleed, and predictive pattern recognition? That’s new.”
Sahara leaned closer to her monitor. “What do the dreamsfeellike?”
“Like running uphill through syrup. Like something’s whispering just out of earshot. And everything’s gray, or so lightly colored it seems gray.”
The air in the room shifted. Not dramatically, but enough that Katie noticed. A shared breath. A collective stillness.
Magda broke it. “You dreamed the Gray before you saw it?”
Katie nodded. “I have heard that some people dream in black and white, but I’m not one of them. I usually have vivid color in my dreams, but not these.”
Joell exchanged a look with Victoria. “No one else has done that.”
Katie blinked. “Wait, seriously? I thought this was, like, an every-Tuesday kind of thing for you people.”
Victoria’s voice was cool. “You’re not supposed toseethe Gray. Not unless it chooses you.”
Sahara added, “And certainly not dream about it first.”
A soft, magical chime pulsed through the table. Joell touched the surface and brought up another screen. This one displayed an old symbol Katie had seen before, a long time ago. But her body responded before her brain caught up. Her heart rate spiked, then chills and vertigo kicked in.
“Does this mean anything to you?” Joell asked.
“That,” she said, pointing. “That’s the first graffiti I ever dreamed.”
Joell looked up sharply. “You’re sure?”
Katie nodded. “Yeah. I thought it was just like… a weird tag, but now I’m thinking it’s more like a ritual summoning glyph rather than political commentary.”
Magda whistled low. “She’s not just a witness. She’s aconduit.”
Victoria’s voice came through the screen like a knife. “If the Gray is showing her that symbol, it’s trying to communicate.”
Sahara leaned back slowly. “Or mark her.”
Joell’s fingers tensed on the table. “Sahara, you have expertise with cursed objects, but those are ancient. I want modern perspectives.”
Katie crossed her arms. “Okay, rude. I’m not a cursed object.”
Joell stood. “I never said you were. You might be a target. And that means you're staying here, under L.A.W. protection, until we figure out why.”
Katie glanced around the opulent war room. “You know, if you wanted to kidnap me into a supernatural Airbnb, all you had to do was ask. This is much nicer than my crummy studio apartment.”
Joell triedto keep the tour efficient.Tried.
“This is the armory,” she said, pushing open a steel-reinforced door to reveal what looked like a very violent Etsy shop. “We keep enchanted weapons here. Don’t touch anything.”
