Dusk came at 4:47 PM, earlier than it should have been, the sky closing like a shutter.
Ro waited at the corner of her street, hood pulled up against the rain that had started without warning—a cold, persistent drizzle that soaked through fabric before you realized you were wet. She'd brought the photograph. She'd brought the money, still folded in her pocket, still unreal.
She didn't bring an umbrella. Umbrellas were for people who planned to stay dry. She was learning that planning was a luxury she could no longer afford.
Caelan appeared at the corner of Holloway Road. She didn't see him arrive—he was simply there, standing under a streetlamp that flickered in a pattern that might have been Morse code or might have been malfunction.
"You came," he said.
"I accepted your money."
"Money does not compel courage. Only action." He fell into step beside her, maintaining a precise distance—not quite touching, not quite separate. The rain seemed to avoid him, or he seemed to avoid it; his coat remained dry while hers grew heavier with every block.
"The woman in red spoke to you."
It wasn't a question. Ro answered anyway.
"She told me about the pharmacy. About the fires. About the man with no eyes."
Caelan's stride faltered. Just for a moment. Then resumed.
"She should not have mentioned him."
"She wanted to frighten me."
"She succeeded."
Ro looked at him. His face was pale in the streetlight, sharp-featured, beautiful in the way that made you want to look away. But something in his expression was different tonight. Tighter. Older.
"You knew him. The dead man."
"I knew everyone who has died in my service." Caelan's voice was controlled, but she heard the control now—the effort it required. "His name was Elias. He had a daughter. She believes he died in a car accident."
"You lied to her."
"I protected her. There is a difference." He turned down an alley, and she followed, her shoes splashing through puddles that seemed too dark, too still. "Elias watched for three weeks. He reported nothing unusual. Then he stopped reporting. When I found him..."
He stopped walking. Stood in the alley's shadow, and for a moment he looked—not fragile, never that. But worn. Used. The way antique furniture looked when you'd stripped away the polish and found the scars underneath.
"I have lived three centuries," he said. "I have learned that there are worse things than death. The manner of it matters. The knowledge of it matters. Elias knew something, at the end. Something that made his death necessary. And I do not know what."
Ro stood beside him, rain dripping from her hood, and felt the wall between them crack—not breaking, but admitting light. He was frightened too. Not of dying—she understood that instinctively. Something else.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you need to understand that I am not protecting you out of charity, or even obligation. I am protecting you because I failed to protect him. Because the debt I owe is not just to the woman in red—it is to everyone who has served me and suffered for it." He turned to face her. "I am not safe, Rowan Blackwood. I am not good. But I am consistent, and I do not abandon those who trust me, even when it would be wiser to do so."
"It's Ro."
"It was Rowan to him. Elias used your full name. He said it was important—to know the whole of something, even when you only used part of it."
They walked in silence. The alley opened onto a street Ro didn't recognize—not because it was strange, but because she'd never had reason to come here. Residential, quiet, rows of houses that looked like every other row of houses in London.
Except for one.
The pharmacy sat at the corner, brick façade blackened around the windows, police tape flapping in the wet wind. It looked ordinary. Sad. The kind of building you'd walk past without noticing.
But Ro noticed now. The way the neighboring buildings seemed to lean away from it. The way the burned section formed a pattern—not random, not accidental. Deliberate. Shaped.
"Someone drew on it," she said.
"Yes."
"With fire."
"With fire and something else. Something that should not exist anymore." Caelan approached the tape, lifted it without touching it—it rose, held by nothing, until they passed beneath, then fell back into place.
"How did you—"
"Old agreements. Residual permissions." He didn't look at her. "Don't ask questions you don't want answered."
The interior smelled of smoke and something else—ozone, maybe, or the smell of air after lightning has struck nearby. The shelves were melted, their contents reduced to puddles and ash. The register sat in the center of the room, somehow untouched, display showing a single number: 0.00.
"The owners?"
"Gone. Not dead—gone. They knew something was coming. They left before it arrived."
"They knew who was doing this?"
"They knew enough to run." Caelan moved through the ruins with practiced efficiency, touching nothing, his eyes scanning in patterns too quick for her to follow. "Look at the floor."
Ro looked. The floorboards were scorched in concentric circles, each one precise, each one stopping at a precise distance from the center.
"A containment circle. Someone tried to protect the building."
"Failed."
"Not immediately. The circle held for..." He knelt, touched the ash with one finger, rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. "Three hours. Long enough for the owners to escape. Not long enough for the building to survive."
"Who could do that? Create a containment circle that lasts three hours?"
Caelan stood. His expression had closed again, the vulnerability locked away.
"Someone who learned from the same teachers I did. Someone who should have known better than to use this knowledge for destruction." He turned to her. "What do you see that I do not?"
Ro blinked. "What?"
"You are here to observe. So observe. I see the magic, the structures, the patterns of power and failure. But you—" he gestured at the room "—you see the ordinary. The mundane. The things that should not matter but do. What do you see?"
She looked. Really looked. Not at the circles, not at the magic—at the room itself. The scorch marks. The melted shelves. The register showing zeros.
"The cash drawer is closed," she said.
"What?"
"If there was a fire, if there was panic—the drawer would be open. Someone would have taken the money. But it's closed. The owners didn't panic. They left orderly. They locked the register before they ran."
Caelan's eyes narrowed.
"And that matters because?"
"Because it means they had time. Not much, but enough to do things properly. They weren't fleeing—they were relocating. They knew exactly how long they had."
She moved closer to the register, careful of the scorched floorboards. The display was cracked, the glass spiderwebbed, but the numbers were still visible.
"0.00. It's showing zero. Not off—zero. As if someone cashed out before they left."
"Or as if someone made them cash out." Caelan's voice had gone quiet. "A robbery disguised as destruction."
"But the woman in red said—"
"The woman in red sees what she wants to see. She assumes the fires are attacks on neutral ground because that serves her purposes. But you—" for the first time, he smiled, and it was almost genuine "—you see what is actually there."
Ro felt something shift. Not gratitude—she wasn't grateful for being useful to a monster. But recognition. The same feeling she'd had in the diner, when she'd noticed his scar, when she'd catalogued his stillness.
"Someone is using the fires as cover," she said. "They aren't attacking neutral ground. They're robbing it. The destruction is—what? Camouflage?"
"Or punishment. Or warning. Or all three." Caelan moved to the door, looked back at the ruined room. "I need to know who. And I need to know before the next gathering—the market the woman mentioned. If someone is targeting neutral locations for their resources, the market would be the ultimate prize."
"When is it?"
"Three weeks. Christmas Eve. The one night when even the oldest powers lower their guard." He held her gaze. "Will you help me?"
It wasn't the money. It wasn't even the debt. It was the question itself—asked honestly, without the layered meanings and half-truths she'd come to expect from him.
"Yes."
"Then we begin tonight. There is another location—a nightclub in Bethnal Green. The second fire. If we find the same pattern there..."
"We will know it's systematic."
"We will know we are hunting a thief, not a terrorist. And that—" his smile returned, sharp with something that might have been relief "—is a very different kind of hunt."
They left the pharmacy, stepping back into the rain that was now coming down harder, London's sky weeping for something it couldn't name. The tape fell back into place behind them. The building sat silent, holding its secrets.
Ro walked beside a three-hundred-year-old fae lord, and for the first time since accepting his money, she didn't feel like prey.
She felt like a partner.
And that, she suspected, was infinitely more dangerous.