17. Riley
RILEY
"Remind me why the vault crowd loved coastlines so much," I murmur, working the basement lock of an old customs house with two picks and no patience.
"Water moves things without leaving tires," Nico says. "Cargo, records, people. Boston was one of the old Atlantic doors. Nobody questioned a manifest if the right seal sat at the bottom."
The lock gives, and I ease the door open. A damp chill rolls out that is older than the freeze outside, dry and papery, it's not been warm since the city forgot it was here. Metal cabinets line the walls in rows, green paint flaking, drawer labels typed on cards that are now yellow.
"Modern cameras," I say, nodding at the blinking eye in the corner. "Charming. They renovated everything except the part that matters."
"Stay to the wall." He says it like an offer, not an order. I notice the difference. I've been noticing a lot of differences since we fucked, the things we said and didn't say, and since I stopped being able to look at his fingers without remembering them.
Focus, Riley.
Nico moves along the cabinets, stopping at a drawer with a brittle paper label tucked behind cracked glass.
"Here." He points to a customs stamp faded almost blank.
A crescent cut through an anchor. "Night passage mark.
Vampire couriers used it when cargo crossed human ports under archive protection. "
"Cargo like relics?"
"Relics. Records. People who could not survive questions."
I let him have the hidden-world nonsense. That's his language. Mine is the lie underneath it.
I crouch and analyze the drawers like I would before stealing something—not reading, just feeling for the thing that's wrong.
Everything is filed by crossing route. Lisbon.
Boston. Halifax. New York. And then, between two Atlantic entries, a Boston card stamped outbound when it should be inbound.
One direction flipped. Somebody filed it wrong on purpose and trusted nobody would know the route.
"This one," I say. "Wrong direction, wrong drawer. That's not a clerical error. That's a hiding place dressed as paperwork."
It's the kind of trick I grew up around. The kind my father would leave in maps and margins, it meant look closer. My stomach turns over before I understand why. I open the drawer. The relic, riding in my jacket, does it's thing again.
"Nico."
He's beside me at a speed I'll never get used to.
Frost is spidering across the brass nameplate of the cabinet, and the typed ink on the cards is bleeding, letters swimming and re-forming.
Beneath the visible text, other writing surfaces—rust-brown, hand-inked, hidden under the official record like a second skin.
"It's never reacted this hard," he says quietly.
"Yeah, well, it's having a worse night than me." The joke lands like a dropped glass. Neither of us laughs.
I pull the false-dated file. Inside is a thin custody ledger, water-stained, the maritime kind that logs who handed what to whom.
Most of it is shipping nonsense. But the relic hums, low and insistent, dragging my eyes down the column the way a magnet drags iron filings, until they snag on a line of handwriting I would know blind, drunk, or dead.
T. Harrow verified the human-side transfer. Custody mark held. Failsafe viable.
The room spins. I read it again. The loop of the H, the way the r trails like he's already moving on to the next word. My father's hand. On a ledger kept by vampires.
"That's—" My voice does something I don't authorize. "That's his handwriting. That's my dad's handwriting, Nico."
He doesn't tell me I'm wrong. He doesn't tell me it'll be okay. He just stays where he is, close, steady.
"He was a historian. He graded papers. He couldn't program a thermostat." Each word is sharper than the one before. "He had debt. He had a leaky roof. He did not—he was not verifying transfers for your—your secret society of vampires."
"I never heard of him."
"That's not helpful."
"No." He doesn't flinch from it. "But it's honest. I don't know what he knew, and I'm not going to pretend I do. I'd rather you knew that."
I want to throw the ledger. Throw it and walk into the fog and pretend I never opened the drawer. Because if my father's name is in here, then every solid thing he ever was is suddenly fake, and I've spent twenty-nine years believing different.
The overhead lights snap to red. A bolt slams home somewhere above us—heavy, final, the building deciding to keep its guests.
A deadbolt slams somewhere above us. Then another. Then the old pipes rattle awake behind the wall, dragging metal teeth through the building one floor at a time.
I'm moving before I finish being scared, which is the only useful thing fear has ever done for me.
I tear my father's page free, fold it small, and slide it into the lining of my boot where I keep what I can't afford to lose.
Then I pull a blank card from the misfiled drawer, scrawl a route mark approximation, and shove the gutted file back wrong-side-up.
"What are you doing?"
"Leaving a decoy for whoever comes shopping. Let them spend an hour photographing nothing."
Footsteps on the stairs move, and a fog-light catches a sleeve. A mark is stitched there
"Lucien's man," Nico breathes.
"Back stair, harbor side." I'm already at it, picks out.
The man hits the bottom step and Nico crosses the space, a wall of motion, his hand closing on the man's collar and slamming him into the cabinets hard enough to fold metal.
He doesn't kill him. He pins him, leans in, and says something low I don't catch, and whatever it is, the watcher stops struggling.
The service lock surrenders to me on a three-count. Cold air and rot pour through.
"Riley. Now."
We go up into the fog together. Two blocks out, I finally stop and press my back to wet brick and breathe. The obsidian has gone quiet. The page sits against my ankle like a coal.
Nico looks at my boot, then back at the street behind us. "Whatever that page says, someone came for it."
"Not it," I say. My voice sounds raw. "Him."
I press my hand to the folded paper against my ankle. Lucien's people wanted the same page. Which means my father, Thomas Harrow, was not a footnote.
"Okay," I say, to the fog, to Nico, to a dead man with teeth in every secret. "Find the next thing."