Page 115 of Veil of Night & Flames

“Helen,” he says quietly.

It takes me a beat, and then it lands. Helen. Griff’s wife. A Hunter, like he was. Killed by a mare long before I met Mr. Griffin.

“It’s the anniversary,” Chase says. “He’s walking the beach. That was their thing.”

“Oh,” I say. “Does he want company?”

Chase shakes his head. “I’m having a drink with him later. I’ll catch him up then.”

I nod and blink back tears. “Okay,” I say. “Tell him I love him.”

Chase just nods. But under the table, he takes my hand and squeezes.

Tia wipes cream cheese off her chin as she points to me. “And even when it sucks, life goes on. Nightmare Realm,” she says. “Tell us what happened.”

“Right,” I say, then take them through all the high—and low—points of the trip, then landing hard on how I left it. Either Adric moves the cross-hairs off the Real, or I’m no longer part of Adric’s life.

“Good for you,” Tia says. “And potentially you,” she adds, with a nod toward Chase as I roll my eyes.

“What about Kali?” Riley asks.

“He said her camp was abandoned by the time his people got there. Stripped clean. So she knows he’s hunting her. And he says she’s actively helping the barriers weaken.”

Tia’s gone very still. “Seriously?”

“His words.”

“So Adric forces cracks, and Kali’s in the cracks, turning them into holes.”

“Pretty much.”

Riley sets her cup down. “Which means we don’t actually have weeks. We have however long it takes her to finish drilling her holes.”

“Right.”

Tia drags a hand through her hair. “And Adric’s solution to that is to go off hunting Kali and just maybe, possibly look for an alternative to the barriers coming down in his free time?”

“He didn't promise that,” I say. “But maybe now he'll actually think about it. Honestly, though? I don’t know if he’ll find anything. He’s been at this for an age. If there was a way, he says he would have already found it.”

“Bullshit,” Tia says. “He’s never really looked. Why would he? But now he’s looking for you.”

“Actually, he kinda said that, too.”

“Well, okay,” Tia says. “That’s something.” She plants her elbows on the table and goes into Project Manager mode, which I’ve learned is her default response to existential threats. “Then we work it from our side. And we try to get it done before the king pulls a rabbit out of a hat.”

“Agreed,” Chase says, settling on the arm of my chair. “What do you want to do?”

“That’s the thing.” Tia looks at me. “I’ve been digging through the Liber Tenebris and the gloss and the older Guardian stuff. There’s a lot in there about how the barriers were built. But almost nothing about how to patch them. Whoever was writing this stuff didn’t even look at the possibility that the barriers would ever come apart. Hubris, probably.”

“Or they had a way to fix things and just didn’t write it down,” Riley says. “Maybe the knowledge was handed down. Father to son. Mother to daughter. The kind of thing you don’t commit to paper because the wrong person could read it.”

I open my mouth to agree, then stop, because something has just gone very quiet inside me.

“Cora?” Tia’s watching me.

“Maybe it wasn’t knowledge,” I say slowly, feeling my way along it. “Maybe what got handed down was the thing itself. Not something you learned, but something you were.”

For a second, nobody says anything.