Nobody warned me about the heat.
Not the textbook kind. The real kind — the sort that wraps itself around you the second airport doors slide open and makes a very personal decision about you. Cairo International was busy the way airports everywhere are busy. But outside was different. Cars moved in patterns that looked chaotic but somehow worked. People walked fast and with purpose. Coffee shops, pharmacies, street vendors. A city of twenty million doing exactly what it wanted, completely unbothered by the fact that I existed.
"Okay," I said, standing on the pavement with my bag over one shoulder. "Wow."
Luna stepped beside me, already scanning the street. Not obviously — she never did anything obviously. Just her eyes moving, quiet and quick, filing things away. "First time out of the country?"
"College budget, Winters. Not everyone gets a gap year."
Something small landed on my left shoulder. Lunox — roughly the size of my hand, wings folded neat against her back, her two-coloured eyes taking in the street below with quiet wonder. To every person walking past, my shoulder was empty. She chose who could see her, and in Cairo that list had exactly three names on it. A cosmic being the size of a sparrow, invisible to eight million people.
"This city is very old," she said softly near my ear. "Beneath all of this. Layer upon layer."
"Good old or complicated old?"
"Both."
"That's becoming your catchphrase."
Sebastian appeared and started walking without a word. No luggage. No tourist moment. Just movement, like he'd been here before and knew exactly where he was going.
He probably had. Multiple times. Across multiple centuries.
We followed him.
He took us off the main roads quickly into streets where buildings pressed together and everything got quieter in a specific way — not less busy, just differently busy. A mechanic fixed a motorbike outside his workshop. Two women talked across a balcony railing three floors up. A kid chased a smaller kid around a parked car while their grandmother watched from a plastic chair with the energy of someone who had witnessed this exact situation five hundred times.
Normal city. Normal people.
Lunox hovered near my ear as we walked. "The trial seal is south-west. Giza, I think."
I kept my voice barely above a breath. "Can you feel how strong it is?"
"Strong enough that others may feel it too."
I didn't love that answer.
Sebastian stopped at a building with a faded green door. Two knocks, a pause, one more. A man in his sixties opened it, exchanged quiet words with Sebastian in Arabic, glanced at Luna and me with a professionally blank expression, and stepped back.
Inside was cool, the walls thick enough to hold out the heat. Tiled floors. Ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. The man led us upstairs, showed us two rooms on the second floor, and left without asking anything.
I respected that about him immediately.
Lunox drifted from my shoulder to the windowsill, peering through the shutters at the street below. From up here she looked even smaller — a tiny winged silhouette against the light, watching Cairo like she was reading it.
"Who was that?" I asked Sebastian.
"A contact."
"Does he know what we are?"
"He knows enough to ask nothing."
Luna leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. "Does he work for you or you for him?"
"He owes me a debt. An old one."
She held his gaze a second longer than necessary. "Cleaning up. Don't touch the map without me."
"I wasn't—"
"You were thinking about it."
She disappeared. I looked at my bag where the map was very obviously poking out of the front pocket.
"I was absolutely thinking about it," I muttered.
Lunox made a sound from the windowsill that was close to a laugh.
When Luna came back I pulled out the map and set it on the table. It warmed immediately. Egypt appeared, the dot over Giza pulsing steady.
The red ring around Cairo was not something I expected.
A faint line tracing the city's boundary. Not a location marker. Not part of any poem. Just a circle sitting there like a warning label with no explanation attached.
"Lunox," I said.
She was already looking at it, her small face serious. "Presence markers. Someone placed them around this city. Recently."
"Crimson Society?"
"Almost certainly."
Luna went very still in the way hunters go still when something clicks into place that they don't like. "They weren't following us. They were already waiting."
"Which means they know about the trials," Sebastian said from the window. "The locations. Possibly the sequence."
I looked at him. "How would they know that?"
"The Crimson Society has had centuries to study the Cain bloodline." Clean. Complete-sounding. The kind of answer that felt like information but worked more like a door closing quietly in your face.
I filed it next to the amulet.
Luna was already building a plan. "We can't go as a group. Too visible. Eli and Lunox find the trial entrance. Sebastian and I deal with the watchers."
"I'm not leaving you two to—"
"Eli." That tone. Patient but done. "I have been doing this since I was fifteen. Let me do my job."
"Fifteen?"
"Sixteen is when I got good at it." Flat. No drama. Just a fact she'd long since made peace with.
I closed my mouth.
"We go at dark," Sebastian said, and moved back to the window.
I lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Normal ceiling. Water stain in one corner shaped like a boat. Lunox floated over and curled up on the pillow beside my head, wings folded, eyes half-closed.
"Lunox," I said quietly.
"Yes."
"If tonight goes badly—"
"It will go wrong in small ways and right in larger ones," she said, with the calm of someone reading from a verified document. "That is how it always goes with you."
"That's either comforting or ominous."
"Sleep, Eli."
I closed my eyes.
Outside, Cairo moved through its evening without caring about any of us. And somewhere south-west, under a darkening sky, something old and patient waited in the stone.
Then my phone buzzed on the table.
Unknown number. No country code. Four words.
We know you're here.
I sat up slowly and stared at the screen.
The red ring on the map pulsed once.
Then went completely dark.