Ezra walked.
Not toward anything. Not away.
Just forward.
The city stretched around him, unchanged yet different. Every street, every building—the same as he had always known them, but now they felt thinner, like paper pressed too many times beneath a heavy hand.
He knew something was watching.
He knew its voice.
And worse—it knew his.
The ink-scrawled writing in the alley still crawled in the back of his mind, the weight of his name carved into brick and shadow.
"He knows you now."
Ezra exhaled, slipping his hand into his coat pocket. The coin he had taken still sat there, warm against his fingertips. The Veilkeepers had given him something, but they hadn't told him what it meant.
Not yet.
The whispers had started the moment he left Hallowmere Cross. At first, just a murmur in the edges of his thoughts—too distant to hear, too close to ignore.
But the further he walked, the louder they became.
Not words. Not yet.
But intent.
Ezra turned onto a quieter street, one of the older roads near the university. The gas lamps flickered as he passed beneath them, their light struggling against the fog curling in from the river.
He stopped in front of a familiar shop.
Bellamy & Co. Rare Tomes.
The lights inside were dim, but the door was unlocked.
Ezra pushed it open. The bell above the door let out a weak chime—or at least, it should have.
But the sound didn't fully form.
Like the air itself had swallowed it before it could reach his ears.
Ezra exhaled. Something was already here.
He stepped inside.
The scent of old paper and dust filled the space. Tall wooden shelves loomed around him, stacked with books that should have been untouched—but weren't.
Someone had been here before him.
Books lay open on the counter, pages yellowed and curling, their margins filled with notes that had been written in shaking hands.
Ezra's eyes skimmed over the ink.
"You must not let it hear you say its name."
"Do not listen when it calls back."
And beneath those lines—a symbol.
Not one he had seen before. Not the sigil from The Hidden Laws.
Something older.
A shape that twisted when he tried to focus on it.
His stomach tightened. Bellamy had been researching something—and now Bellamy was gone.
A whisper curled through the air.
Closer this time.
Ezra turned sharply—
And there, between the shelves, something moved.
A shadow that did not belong to the books.
A presence that did not step, did not breathe, but waited.
Ezra's fingers curled around the coin in his pocket.
And the whisper spoke his name.
"Ezra Lockwood."