Caleb walked in the grey daylight of Grimoire. Holding his right hand was Addie, energetically swinging his arm back and forth, while Chelsea was to her right, undergoing the same experience. Above them hovered Chelsea’s owl Summon, relishing in the freedom of Grimoire’s skies.
“Well, I know why I’m so happy,” Chelsea said, wearing the most beautiful smile. “I know why Caleb’s so happy. But why are you so happy, kiddo?”
“The same reason you guys are!” Addie said, humming along as she walked. “I’m so happy you two are getting married!” She said that word with a heavy emphasis, giggling as she said it. “It’s so exciting! And Chelsea’s been waiting so long!”
“You’ve been waiting, too,” Chelsea said, rolling her eyes. “You’re the mischievous scamp who found the ring’s hiding place, after all.”
“It was you?” Caleb asked, staring in shock at Addie. He hadn’t heard that part of the story.
“Hey, I was just trying to find what Chelsea told me to find!” Addie said. “It’s not my fault I didn’t know what that box was.”
“It’s not your fault you’re so curious either, right?” Chelsea asked.
“You’d have done the same thing if you found it,” Addie said, grinning.
“Yeah, well,” Chelsea said, looking up absently at the sky. “Sure is hard to get used to that sky.” Her owl gave a musical trill, and she chuckled. “You don’t mind, huh?”
“Don’t go changing the subject,” Addie said teasingly.
“It is hard to get used to it, though,” Caleb said. But even as he said it, he heard a familiar ringing bell a few blocks over, and smiled. “The trolley’s still running, despite all that’s going on.”
The trio walked northwest, towards the library. They were going to meet up with Lorelei, Gwen, and Will there, then head underground and see all that they’d uncovered beneath Grimoire.
Addie sighed dreamily. “It was such a wonderful proposal,” she said. “It took a lot to keep from jumping out and congratulating you guys right away.”
“The way Lorelei tells it, she had to forcibly restrain you,” Chelsea said dryly.
“Will said the same thing,” Caleb said, chuckling as Addie got flustered.
“Yeah, well!” she said, then trailed off with a sigh. After a few more paces, she spoke up again, her voice small. “What’s… um, I mean… what’s going to happen to me, now?”
Caleb and Chelsea both stopped, turning to face the girl. “What do you mean?” Chelsea asked.
“I just… well…” Addie shifted side-to-side, not looking at the pair, fidgeting nervously.
Caleb looked at Chelsea, and she smirked, then nodded. “Well,” Caleb said, kneeling down to talk to Addie at eye level, “I guess there’s no harm in telling you here.”
“Telling me what?” Addie asked, gazing at Caleb, her blue and green eyes wide with curiosity.
“We were taking you to a special spot to tell you,” Chelsea said, kneeling down with Caleb. “But, what the heck, why wait?”
“We talked about it a lot,” Caleb said, laughing. “Mostly while you were sleeping on long train rides. And, well, after last night, we decided we could finally tell you, or, well, ask you something important.” He and Chelsea held Addie’s hands gently.
“Adelaide,” Chelsea said gently, smiling at Addie. “How would you feel about us adopting you?”
Addie blinked twice, slowly. Her jaw dropped slightly, so that her mouth formed a little “o” of surprise. “You…” she started, her voice trembling, “you mean… I’d be your daughter? And you’d… be my Mama and Papa?”
Caleb felt his heart melting, and he gave Addie’s hand a gentle squeeze. “That’s right,” he said, beaming. “If you’d like that, of course.”
There was another long silence, and then tears started streaming from Addie’s eyes.
“Addie?” Chelsea asked. “Wait, what’s wrong? Did we —”
“I’m just…” Addie started, sniffling. “I’m just… so happy!” Bawling, the girl lunged forward, hugging both Caleb and Chelsea tightly. “I don’t think I’ve ever cried from happiness before. It’s like my heart’s overflowing.”
“Cry all you need, kiddo,” Chelsea said, sniffling softly as she hugged Addie back. Caleb joined her, stroking the girl’s hair, laughing even as he cried with her.
“Yes, please,” Addie finally said. “Yes, yes, please, please, please! I love you both so much! I want to be with you forever!”
“We love you, too,” Caleb said, Chelsea echoing him. Addie cried and hugged them back, burying her face in Chelsea’s shoulder, sniffling all the while.
“Are you snotting up my jacket?” Chelsea asked.
Addie sniffled several times before answering with a simple, “It’s okay.”
After a pause, Chelsea laughed, shaking her head. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”
It took a long time for Addie to stop crying, but then, it took quite some time for Caleb and Chelsea to dry their own tears, too. Caleb’s heart was, as Addie had put it, overflowing.
Another promise.
Some might think it’s a weird time for this kind of thing, but…
Caleb smiled as he gazed up at a grey, ashen, foreboding sky.
Just because the darkness is more noticeable than ever doesn’t mean there isn’t any light.
It’s times like these we most need our hearts to overflow.
Addie had already been happy, skipping and humming along as they’d walked, but when they started back up on their path to the library, she was constantly giggling, occasionally crying again, clenching Caleb and Chelsea’s hands tightly as she walked between them.
They reached the library, and Lorelei, Will, and Gwen met them outside. Addie couldn’t hold back her excitement and raced up to the trio, announcing with the biggest smile, “I’m gonna be Caleb and Chelsea’s daughter!”
Hugs and congratulations went around, but they didn’t linger on these celebrations. After all…
“You don’t mind if I hold back on proper celebrations right now, do you?” Deirdre had asked Caleb and Chelsea the previous night, after they returned from the proposal. “It just… wouldn’t feel right without your father here. And besides, I want to enjoy his reaction, too. He has so much to be excited about and surprised by.”
So they’d all agreed to postpone the celebration they all wanted to have, for the sake of making the best party that they could.
You’d better hurry up, though, Dad. Take too long, and Chelsea and I’ll be leaving again.
There’s still a lot that needs to be done, once we’ve properly recovered.
“Isla was supposed to be here, too,” Lorelei said as she led the way into the library. “But she’s been bogged down by all sorts of Council work. Still, make sure to thank her when you get a chance.”
“She was your ace, huh?” Caleb asked.
Lorelei smiled. “That she was. Did a great job, didn’t she?”
“The best,” Chelsea said.
Caleb murmured his agreement. He’d seen Illusion Magic used for lots of different purposes, but he’d never seen it used to transform a place into a haven of light and beauty. For that small moment of time, he and Chelsea had been transported out of the gloomy darkness of Grimoire and into a reminder of what Grimoire once was, and could be again.
The library was still partially serving its purpose in lending books, but about half of the ground floor was taken up by Hunters and Investigators to serve as a communications center and staging area for the expeditions going on underground. But there weren’t just Hunters and Investigators. With them were also Octavian and Desmé, former Royal Guards of the Radiant King, who had turned on him with Hestia, Artemis, and Galahad, and joined Grimoire’s forces in the battle against the Radiance and Blaise’s Shadows. While Hestia, Artemis, and Galahad had left after that battle, Octavian and Desmé remained behind, serving as strategists, coordinators, and support for Hunters and the Council during all the shakeups in Grimoire since that battle.
Down into the library’s depths Caleb, Chelsea, Addie, Lorelei, Gwen, and Will went, passing numerous checkpoints and operating bases as they descended and moved outward. Chelsea’s owl bristled at the more confined spaces, but took solace in perching on Chelsea’s shoulders, nestling against the back of her head.
“We’re getting close to the Bay by now, aren’t we?” Caleb asked, running his hand along the smooth wall of the tunnel they were in. “Are we gonna go under it?”
Will held up his phone, displaying a message:
“Oh, just you wait.”
“Hey, how come you’re not talking anymore?” Addie asked, frowning.
“I lost my voice.”
“But you were talking just fine yesterday!” Addie pursed her lips, eyeing Will suspiciously.
“I have very frail vocal chords.”
“Nuh-uh you don’t!” Addie said. “And if you didn’t, Lorelei would take care of them, because she’s an awesome Healer.”
Will bowed his head, his Firrin Summon poking its rabbit-eared head out from the hood of his coat. He held up his phone with a new message:
“It’s a serious injury. There’s no healing of it, magical or otherwise.”
Addie gasped, covering her mouth, and then walked up and took Will’s free hand in both of hers. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize. I thought you were just being weird, and all this time you’ve been hurting.”
The little girl was completely oblivious to Caleb, Chelsea, and Lorelei’s desperate attempts to hold back laughter. Caleb was more impressed with how well Will kept a straight face through this. And then Will held up his phone with a new message:
“Your kindness is all I need, little one. Thank you.”
Caleb was biting his lip so hard he thought it might bleed, and his eyes watered with the frustration of unreleased laughter. Chelsea buried her face in his shoulder, hugging his arm and trembling with barely contained giggles, and Lorelei up ahead was leaning on Gwen, shaking her head, her shoulders shaking with her own inner battle against laughter.
Thankfully, before the situation could get too out of hand, they stepped through an archway and into a sight that took Caleb’s breath away.
A vast, domed chamber surrounded them, its high ceiling supported by six pillars to the right and six pillars to the left. Other than that, the chamber was empty, and at the far side a tall, arching doorway led into a new passage. The stone itself was aglow with rippling, aquamarine light, having no need of added light from the Hunter groups exploring these tunnels. The sound of rushing water echoed throughout the chamber, clear but subdued, and yet despite the sound there were no signs of actual water.
“Are we…” Caleb started, scarcely believing it, “under Grimson Bay?”
“You got it,” Lorelei said. Chelsea’s owl leapt from her shoulders with a musical trill, flying circles around the vast space.
“It’s so pretty,” Addie said, craning her neck back to stare at the ceiling. “Like the walls are made of shining water.”
“There’s a clear shift starting here,” Lorelei said. She pointed back at the doorway they’d come through. “That tunnel was once sealed, higher up. Not just locked by a door, but completely covered over, sealed by both stone and magic.”
“Though they still called it a ‘door’ in some places,” Gwen said.
“ ‘They’?” Chelsea asked.
“Come on,” Lorelei said, leading to the far doorway of the chamber. No door stood here to bar the way, but ruined hinges told a tale of what once was. The passage beyond had the same glowing ceilings, walls, and floors. Long tables ran down the center, each with models of a grand city.
“This is what we were starting to talk about yesterday,” Lorelei said, gesturing to the first model. “Notice anything familiar?”
Caleb stared at the model for a while. After a bit, he tilted his head to the side, then walked around it, then tilted his head to the other side. Slowly, his eyes widened. “The Grimson Bay ruins,” he said softly.
“But before they were ruined,” Lorelei said. She pointed out different features, including The Gate near the far end of the model, unbroken and beautiful, and beyond the gate were still some more towers out a short ways into the ocean. Even in this model, the Bay was very much a bay, filled with water, and yet these buildings stood unbroken, not ruined, rising up pristine and whole from the depths. And looking at the model in more detail, it was clear that the underwater areas were heavily used, with many glass tunnels branching between towers and other domed structures underwater. There were even underwater gardens in glass rooms. What was most astonishing was the scale of it all — though much of the buildings were visible above water, more of their structure and stories lay underwater, giving a proper sense of size and grandiosity to what Caleb knew only as ruins poking up just a short ways past the surface of the water.
There’s so much to them beneath the surface. More than I ever knew…
“But wait, hold on,” Chelsea said. “This means… there was a city here before Grimoire. An entire city, and… this is wildly advanced architecture. But Grimoire was founded hundreds of years ago.”
“When the Lunar Architects arrived, the city was still standing and whole,” Gwen said. “There are many inscriptions here you can read for more detail. But despite the city’s pristine state, it was entirely empty, abandoned.”
“When the Architects found the seal, they broke it,” Lorelei said. Will held up his phone:
“And when they broke it, the city started to fall into ruin.”
“That’s why?” Chelsea asked. “But what was behind the seal? Why isn’t it still ruining things?”
“The city’s still decaying, only much slower than it started,” Lorelei said. “As for what was behind the seal… that’s the dark secret behind Grimoire.” She started walking farther, stopping a few tables down. Each model along the way showed the Grimson Bay city in a rapidly progressing state of destruction. “Before the Lunar Architects, a whole other civilization lived here. We haven’t been able to uncover much about them, because they were gone before the Architects arrived, and they only left the tiniest clues behind. But those people are the ones who created the seal. We guess that they left after sealing it, and there are some faint signs here and there of some kind of conflict, as if there were some among them who rejected the seal. It’s likely that, after those who created the seal won over the ones who rejected it, they decided to leave entirely.” Will held up his phone to add:
“Likely in the hopes that what they sealed would be forgotten, a secret never uncovered by anyone else.”
“But then the Architects arrived,” Gwen said. “And, curiosity and excitement at their new discoveries taking hold, they broke the seal.”
“We found out that the Architects were refugees,” Lorelei said. “Apparently the city they came from, a city that was destroyed, was also called Grimoire.”
“They named this city after their old home…” Chelsea said.
“So there may have been an element of desperation, or hope, in their breaking of the seal,” Gwen said. “This was the new land they discovered, the new hope they’d found. Why would they hide from anything contained here?”
“And yet in breaking the seal…” Lorelei said, “they unleashed what one of the Architects, Rebecca Alister, called the ‘unspeakable shadow.’ They didn’t understand the living darkness, had never heard of it before.”
“But then how come Grimoire isn’t infected with it?” Chelsea asked. “We saw the Library of Solitude. Why didn’t it end up like that?”
“Rebecca’s inscriptions say that the shadow ‘seems to delight in our presence’,” Gwen said. “Though it seemed to play a hand in the decline of the old city into ruin, it didn’t hinder them from climbing above and building a city there. If you go farther, you’ll learn more. The longer they lived there, the more they built, the more the shadow receded, going deeper underground, consolidating in more secret places.”
“And over time, they forgot about it,” Lorelei said. “Or, well, the Architects never told anyone outside of their circle. As Grimoire’s population grew, as their hopes for a new home became more real, they took the shadow receding as a sign of them making the right choice. Why trouble the rest of the people with talk of evils that are more distant than before?”
“But… then the darkness is still here?” Addie asked.
Lorelei nodded. “When we defeated Kaohlad, a wave of darkness attacked us,” she said. “We managed to escape, but it pursued us almost all the way up to the surface. But just before it reached the library’s service tunnels, it stopped, like it came up against some kind of barrier.”
“But there’s that much darkness here in Grimoire?” Chelsea asked, fear and rage flashing in her eyes. “Are we even safe this far underground?”
“We’ve expanded our search very carefully,” Lorelei said. “There were a few scares, but… well, it’s exactly right to call the darkness ‘living’ darkness. It has a mind of its own, a personality, a will. When we defeated Kaohlad, it was enraged. But since then… it seems cautious. Like…”
“Like it’s waiting,” Will said, his gaze dark as he ran his hand along one of the tables where a worn inscription could still be read. “Waiting, like it was before the seal was broken. Like it was all these centuries as a new city was built around it, as new people filled the place.”
Addie opened her mouth to say something, staring at Will in surprise, but then closed it. A sly smirk crossed her lips, and she rolled her eyes, looking away from Will.
“Waiting… for what?” Chelsea asked. She looked over at Caleb. “You’re awfully quiet.”
Caleb had been taking the entire conversation in, but he was also staring at the models, unable to turn his gaze away from them. “It’s just that…” he started, finally nodding. He’d been staring so long because he wasn’t sure he was right, and then realizing he was right was too shocking, but now he’d finally accepted it. “It’s just that… these ruins. The parts of the city that are underwater specifically… they’re one of the places I saw in my trial. One of the places I need to go.”
Those ruins had always seemed faintly familiar to him, but he hadn’t been able to place it. Because the vision in his trial had been as if he was looking up at them from underwater, a view he’d never seen before. But there was no mistaking it now that he could see all that lay beneath Grimson Bay’s waves. These were the ruins. One of the places that he needed to be.
“Which part?” Chelsea asked.
“Well… that’s kind of tricky,” Caleb said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s… around here.” He pointed to a spot that was towards the center of the city, in a glass tunnel that fed into the base of what was once the city’s tallest, largest tower, and likely its most central location aside from The Gate.
“Can we even go out there?” Chelsea asked.
“The path up and out to the Bay is sealed,” Lorelei said. “We’re hesitant to open it, because if it isn’t safe… we’re flooding this entire passage and probably ruining everything. They’ve got divers checking it out, but it’s a slow process, since there’s so much else everyone has to juggle.”
“I might be able to help them out,” Caleb said, thinking about his own abilities and their potential usefulness to that situation. “But until we know how I can get there, sorry.” He shook his head. “Kinda derailed things a bit there. Chelsea, you were asking about the darkness?”
But this is a wild coincidence. Mister Midnight suggests I go back home, and it ends up being one of the places I need to go? Those ruins were the one place he couldn’t pin down a possible location on, either.
Now the list is complete.
“What’s the darkness waiting for?” Chelsea asked.
“We’re wondering if it might have something to do with Sal,” Lorelei said. “From what little we know from you, he has incredible command over the darkness.”
“But he can’t possibly be old enough, can he?” Chelsea asked. “Mister Midnight talked about him visiting him, after the Radiant King destroyed Sunset Square. Back then he didn’t have power over the darkness, and the way the timeline works out, the Lunar Architects showed up at least a few generations before Sal was born.”
“And the darkness was here even longer before the Architects,” Will said.
“Still, maybe he took over,” Gwen said. “We’re not sure. That’s… the problem. We really don’t know. But it does seem to be waiting. Aside from its violent reaction to Kaohlad’s death, it’s been avoiding us, vanishing back into whatever depths it came from.”
“And here I thought we’d properly surveyed the Underground,” Chelsea said with a sigh.
“This is beneath the Underground,” Gwen said. “The Underground is a network of planned subway tunnels. These tunnels and chambers, even the ones that led us to this, the oldest section, are much older than the Underground. There’s so much beneath your city that no one ever knew about.”
“Well someone knew, about a billion years ago,” Chelsea said. “If only we could drag a Lunar Architect out and ask them directly.”
“But wait,” Addie said, raising her hand. “Why is the darkness still here? Delilah and Alice and me blew it all up with the Relay.”
“That was a concentrated, manipulated mass of the darkness,” Lorelei said. “Blaise was funneling that into a well, part of his plan to annihilate Grimoire to make way for his new, improved version. So you three still did save the day.”
“The Relay should have purged all of the darkness in this region,” Gwen said. “It’s puzzling that it didn’t. Something is very strange about the darkness here.”
“Blaise told my dad that Grimoire was dying,” Caleb said. “He was more right than we realized.”
“And probably knows a lot about the darkness that’s still here,” Chelsea said. “Why don’t we go ask him about it?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to do the asking,” Lorelei said. “And we likely wouldn’t even be allowed in. But perhaps Mister Crowley could. He talks to Blaise every few days.”
“Or Anastasia,” Gwen said. “She’s closer to Blaise than anyone. And Jacob has been allowing her to visit him more often.”
“Anastasia’s back in Grimoire?” Chelsea asked, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes.
“It’s her home, after all,” Lorelei said. “What’s that face for?”
“Come on, we can’t ask her,” Chelsea said.
Lorelei stared blankly at her for a moment, then lowered her gaze and sighed. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“What is it?” Caleb asked.
“She’s still holding a grudge,” Lorelei said, rolling her eyes.
“So what if I am?” Chelsea asked.
“It’s been so long since you fought her, though,” Gwen said, cocking her head to the side. “Are you really still upset over that?”
“It’s not the fight,” Chelsea said, pointing up at her owl Summon, who glided down to land on her shoulders. “She insulted him!”
“She… oh,” Gwen said, raising her eyebrows. “But… no, no matter how you look at it, that could very easily be construed as a compliment.”
“She said it with way too much sass for it to be a compliment!” Chelsea said, glaring. Her Summon mimicked her grumpy glare, though he was a lot cuter about it.
“She’s the best person to ask to talk to Blaise,” Lorelei said. “We just won’t send you to ask her. I’ll go instead.”
“You really shouldn’t hold a grudge over something so petty,” Gwen said. “I thought we’d both learned to let such things go.”
Chelsea narrowed her gaze. “Maybe I just don’t like her.”
“Maybe you should loosen up a bit,” Lorelei said. “She’s on our side now, and she’s proven to be an excellent ally. And she’s really not so bad when you get to know her.”
“You’ve been palling around with Anastasia?” Chelsea asked, eyes wide. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
“Life moves way too fast,” Lorelei said with a shrug. “You leave home for a few weeks, and everything changes.”
“Um,” Addie said, raising her hand. “I just… if the darkness is so bad here, why don’t we just leave Grimoire? Wouldn’t it be safer somewhere else?”
“That’s really not our style, though, is it?” Caleb asked, chuckling.
“Call it ‘style’ all you want,” Lorelei said. “But it goes deeper than that.” She knelt down to Addie’s level, smiling at her. “In the past, people tried to seal the darkness. And other times they’ve tried to run from it. But we can’t do that. Sealing it is just hiding it away. Running doesn’t fix the problem that’s there. This is our home.” Her eyes gleamed with determination. “Grimoire isn’t going to be a city of darkness. It’s going to be a city of light.”
Caleb’s heart soared at the confident declaration.
This is our home. We won’t abandon it to the darkness, now or ever, no matter how deep the night gets.
——
Maxwell took the wheel, gently steering while watching the console. Piloting his “study” was becoming more and more natural to him, and he smiled.
It wasn’t just piloting that was becoming easier.
“That’s two,” Tock said, checking the pair of watches on her wrist. “And we’re making good time, too. We could go faster, but… I think we’ll be okay.” She smiled, looking over at Maxwell.
I’m starting to get used to having company.
After so much time alone… hmm. Perhaps it’s because it brings back memories.
Yes. Traveling with those two… well. Those were a bit more ridiculous adventures, though. Spurred on by mishap, mischief, and misfortune.
The stakes are a great deal different now. Even so…
She’s quite the delight as a traveling companion.
“Hey now, don’t miss it!” Tock said, pointing frantically at the console. “Earth landings are tricky!”
“Sorry, sorry!” Maxwell said, frantically spinning the wheel one way, then the other. He reached out for a lever, pulled it down, and Tock beside him turned several dials and then hit a big red button.
“There we go,” Tock said, breathing a sigh of relief.
“I thought this wouldn’t be so bad,” Maxwell said, sighing as well, “considering it’s built along a rift between their world and the Dominion.”
“It would be easy, if we were landing at midnight,” Tock said. “But hey, all’s well that ends well. There’s another happy landing. Let’s go!”
She hurried from the study, always the first out the door. Maxwell followed, adjusting his bowtie and pushing up his glasses. Out the door he went, following Tock into unfamiliar territory.
These are…
His shoes crunched on snow, and he looked up at an ashen, dismal sky.
…my first steps on Earth.
“Things are as bad as they’ve been saying,” Tock said with a sigh. “I didn’t think it would be so bad on Earth, though. The Bastions… the entire Dominion… they’re supposed to prevent this from happening.”
“Well, considering our foe,” Maxwell said, “it’s no surprise that Grimoire would be specially targeted.”
Grimoire. A city that held such meaning for the Enchanted, at least as far as Human cities went. Grimoire and Renault, the two great mage cities. Maxwell had heard stories, and had even, at times, when he still had a crystal ball, taken a look at the city, but he’d never realized what it was like, not really.
The ancient home of the Eternals. The birthplace of the Radiant King.
And it’s so…
“It’s kind of small, don’t you think?” Tock asked, one hand on her hip as she looked out at the city. “Kind of weird that they call it a ‘city’.”
“Well, the population is dense,” Maxwell said. “Look how close together the houses are. The streets are so narrow! And I hear they have tunnels everywhere. Most of them live underground. Looks can be deceiving.”
“Oh, so really it’s like twice as big?” Tock asked. “Or three times?”
“Most likely.” Maxwell nodded sagely. He started forward, but stopped when he realized Tock wasn’t following. He looked back, and saw Tock with a strange look in her eyes as she gazed down the hill. He looked with her, and there saw a group of six exiting a rather large building that was labeled as Grimoire’s public library. In the lead was a young man with black hair, save for a blue streak at the front, and shimmering blue eyes that were noticeable even at this distance.
The same shade of blue as Tock’s hair and eyes…
“Tock?” Maxwell asked, eyeing his companion. She stared for several moments longer, before suddenly looking back at Maxwell.
“I, ah…” she started, her voice trembling. She cleared her throat, then shook her head. “Sorry. It’s just that…”
“Do you want to go say hello?” Maxwell asked. “I know that we’re here on business, but surely we could spare the time for —”
“No, no,” Tock said, shaking her head. She looked away, watching the group continue in the opposite direction from them. “No, I just…”
Maxwell studied Tock’s expression. He wasn’t good at reading emotions, but… there seemed to be a great deal going on in Tock’s heart. And even more that she was making sure not to show.
“We have our mission,” Tock said, slapping on a smile as she looked away. “And he has his. When the time comes… our paths will intersect. I’ll be sure to say hello then.”
Maxwell managed a smile, nodding as he turned to lead the way. “Well, all right, then. Let’s go to… what was the building called, again?”
“The Zodiac Building,” Tock said, following after him. “We need to find a member of the Council of Mages.”
“Yes, yes, that’s right,” Maxwell said, nodding.
The next person they needed to add to their growing group. Maxwell couldn’t possibly forget her name. Like him, she didn’t seem to have a middle or last name — just a first. What would she be like? He didn’t know much, but he was eager to find out.
The next person they needed to recruit was a mage named Isla.