Elara Thomas did not wait for an answer. She strode forward, her gaze locked on the case. The shimmering dust on her cardigan ground moonstone and charged silver, Alaric noted, drifted in her wake like a tiny, rebellious galaxy.
"Don't just stand there like relics in the vestibule," she snapped, waving them deeper into the archive. "If it's truly Carmine, it needs a tertiary containment field. My lab. Now."
She led them through the staggering space. The Arcanum was less a library and more a cross between a museum vault and a high-energy physics lab. Glass cases hummed with containment fields, holding objects that defied simple categorization: a helmet that seemed to cast a perpetual shadow, a quill that wrote in blood-black ink on empty air, a sphere of what looked like captured northern lights churning silently. The air thrummed with a baseline of dormant magic, a symphony of sleeping powers.
Kael's nostrils flared. "Smells like a lightning strike in a library."
"That's the ozone from the Faraday cages around the volatile Celtic artifacts," Elara said without turning, weaving around a trolley stacked with lead-lined boxes. "Try not to sneeze. The Breton curse-tablets in sector seven are highly allergenic to shifters."
Her 'lab' was a glass-walled enclosure at the heart of the chaos, scrupulously neat in contrast to the surrounding disarray. A central workbench of white stone, etched with concentric circles of copper and obsidian, dominated the room. She pointed to its center.
"There. Gently."
Kael placed the case on the stone. The moment it made contact, the etched circles began to glow with a soft, blue-white light, rising to form a faint cylindrical barrier around it.
Elara immediately began circling the case, not with her eyes, but with a slender brass rod tipped with a quartz crystal. It emitted a high, thin whine that fluctuated as she moved. Her earlier irritation was gone, replaced by a fierce, total concentration.
"Dacian substrate confirmed," she muttered, reading a dial on the rod's handle. "Not just leather. Human skin. Treated with pine resin and something ferric. Blood-iron. The binding is a soul-stitch. Nasty, pre-Christian work." She glanced sharply at Alaric. "You said it was Sorina's?"
"You know the name?"
"Every Keeper of the Arcanum has to memorize the Progenitor casualty list. She's filed under 'Theoretical Primogenitors, Fate Unknown.' Most assume she was disintegrated in the backlash." Elara's quartz wand passed over the lock. The whine spiked into a pained screech. She jerked it back. "And there's the ghost. A memory-knot. A psychic echo of the last person to open it, keyed to well, to you, I'd wager. Touch it with intent to open, and you'll get a face-full of someone's final, terrible moment."
Alaric felt a chill that had nothing to do with the lab's climate control. "Can you diffuse it?"
"Diffuse it? I want to record it. This is a pristine historical record!" She caught his look and sighed. "Yes, yes, I can bypass it. But carefully. It's booby-trapped with more than sentiment." She rummaged on a shelf, pulling on a pair of gloves that looked woven from spider-silk and platinum wire. "Kael, you might want to step back. If this goes wrong, the feedback loop could trigger your lycanthropic reflexes. Last thing I need is a werewolf shredding my ISO-7 clean zone."
Kael took two deliberate steps back, crossing his arms. He looked profoundly unimpressed with the 'clean zone.'
Elara's approach was not one of brute magical force, but of delicate, precise unraveling. She produced a vial of clear liquid distilled water from a Glastonbury spring and began tracing symbols in the air above the case, her movements swift and sure. The water hung where she painted it, glistening. She was singing under her breath, a tuneless series of old Welsh phonetics that sounded like wind over rocks.
The air around the case grew thick. A scent emerged, cutting through the ozone and dust, damp earth, crushed yew berries, and a metallic tang of old, old blood.
Then, an image flickered into existence above the case, hazy and monochrome. A woman's hands, stained dark, desperately pressing the book into a cavity in a stone wall. Not a Carpathian stone. A different granite. The hands were younger, red-haired. The same tattoos Kael described snaked up her wrists. A voice, choked with terror and grief, whispered in Gaelic-inflected English: "For the old one in London. He must remember. The Nemeton stirs." Then, a shadow fell. The image dissolved into a silent scream, and the scent of burning heather.
The ghost-image vanished. The case's lock clicked open.
Elara let out a shaky breath, lowering her hands. The hanging water droplets fell, sizzling slightly on the stone bench. "Well. That was unambiguous."
"The girl from the shop," Kael said, his voice a low growl. "That was her memory. Her death."
"Recent. Very recent," Elara confirmed, her professional detachment fraying at the edges. She looked at Alaric, her grey eyes wide. "Someone killed a witch to use her death-impression as the lock's trigger. That's... deeply cold. And they wanted you to see it. A message within a message."
"A demonstration of their seriousness," Alaric said, the cold knot in his gut hardening into ice. "And a timeline. This is not an ancient threat reawakening. This is a current, active campaign."
Elara, with gloved hands, now carefully opened the case lid. The grimoire lay within. In the lab's pure light, its true nature was clearer. The skin-binding was indeed etched with the angular Dacian script, but overlaid, scratched almost vengefully into the surface in a later hand, were Ogham markings—the old tree-alphabet of the Celts.
"Fascinating," Elara breathed, leaning close but not touching. "It's a palimpsest of magical traditions. The original Dacian blood-matrix has been grafted onto a Celtic ley-line cartography. See here?" She pointed with a stylus. "This Dacian symbol for 'root' is tied to this Ogham stroke for 'ash tree.' Someone has been trying to translate Sorina's work, to map it onto the Nemeton network of Britain."
She looked up at Alaric, the last of her irritation replaced by dawning, horrified understanding. "This isn't just a history book, Valerius. This is a manual. A theory of magical fusion. And someone in Scotland has been using it. They've connected your origin point to ours."
The implications unfolded in Alaric's mind like a poisonous flower. The Nemeton, Stonehenge was the most famous, but it was just one node in a vast, living network of power lines across Europe. If Sorina's Dacian magic, the root of the Progenitor curse, could be intentionally tied to the British nodes...
"They're not just stirring the Nemeton," Alaric said, his voice hollow. "They're trying to re-create the original accident. Here. On a ley line convergence. They're trying to make a new Progenitor."
The silence in the sealed lab was absolute, broken only by the faint hum of the containment field.
Then, every alarm in the Arcanum began to scream.
Red light strobed through the vast archive. A calm, automated voice echoed from hidden speakers: "Breach detected. Sector Four. Magical signature: Eastern European vampiric. Classification: Hostile. All Keepers initiate lockdown protocol."
Kael was at the glass wall in an instant, peering into the flashing red gloom of the main archive. "We've been followed."
Elara slammed the case shut, her face pale but set. "Impossible. The wards on this place."
"were designed to keep things in," Alaric finished, his senses stretching out, tasting the air. He caught it now, beneath the ozone and alarm: a familiar, cloying scent of bergamot and grave dirt. Lucian's preferred signature. "Not to keep a determined Progenitor's personal retinue out. They didn't track the book. They tracked me."
Shapes moved at the far end of the archive, graceful and swift as shadows, dislodging artifacts as they came. The air grew cold.
Elara looked from the precious, terrible book to the approaching threat, then to Alaric. "Right. You've brought a Code Carmine and a vampire hit squad into my archive." She snatched the case from the bench. "You owe me a new career. This way. Now."