25. Riley
RILEY
The coordinates won't come loose, and I've been prying at them since the lamp guttered low somewhere past midnight.
Gabriel caught us at the county line in a white SUV, and a tank full of gas. Cassandra was already in the passenger seat, case across her knees, burner pressed to her ear, looking like sleep had personally offended her.
"Nice of everyone to show up for the family disaster tour," I said, climbing into the back.
Gabriel looked at me in the mirror. "I brought wheels, papers, weapons, and coffee."
"Proposal accepted."
Nico slid in beside me before the door had finished shutting.
My father's last message keeps looping while we move.
He never spoke of poetry when a riddle would do the same job better.
I've got what I wrote down from the recording spread across my lap, Cassandra's copied archive leaves clipped beneath it, and the obsidian relic wrapped in my scarf between my boots.
I'm doing the thing he drilled into me before I was tall enough to see over the kitchen counter.
When I was seven he used to hide my birthday cake.
He'd hand me a battered children's atlas with the page numbers inked out, a list of stars printed beside it, and I had to match each constellation to its latitude until the digits resolved into a place — usually the bakery where the cake already sat boxed and waiting.
I despised those games. I have also never forgotten a single one of them, which I suspect was the entire point.
"You're smiling," Cassandra says from the front passenger seat, not bothering to turn around. "Is that very good news or are we all about to die."
"Both, probably." I tap the seventh entry on his star list. "He buried the latitude in the order he named them. Not the constellations — the order. Dad never cared what the stars were. He cared which one you looked at first."
She leans over, amber eyes moving down my scribbled columns. For a vampire who has catalogued contested history before, Cass has a rare talent for letting a human finish a thought, and she holds her tongue while the last figure clicks into place.
Fifty-six degrees north. A hundred and twenty-nine west. A spine of mountains nobody bothered to settle, three days' hard travel above the last paved road in British Columbia.
"There's nothing out there," I say.
"There's Sablecrest." Cassandra goes rigid. "It isn't recorded anywhere. The archives whisper about it. A redoubt the old builders raised when they still feared the daylight more than they feared each other. We treated it like old keeper folklore."
I should feel triumphant. I solved it — the last riddle of a man who hid an entire life from me.
Instead what rises is older and harder to name, the particular ache of being loved in code.
Every clue I've chased was a letter he never trusted me enough to send while he was alive.
He taught me to read clues so that one day, long after they put him in the ground, I could find my way to the thing I think he died protecting.
It is the most elaborate apology I have ever received, and I am still not certain I forgive him for it.
But my hands keep working anyway. They always do.
I drift off on Nico's shoulder as our long journey to the location carries on.
British Columbia closes around us, we have been driving for three days in ugly shifts — Gabriel at night, Nico through the worst roads, Cassandra awake whenever records need translating, me sleeping in twenty-minute scraps with my father's words chewing holes through every dream.
The last paved road ended an hour ago. There is a smell of ice, diesel, and decisions nobody wants to make.
Now the SUV crawls between black pines and old avalanche scars, dirty pockets of snow still trapped in the shadowed cuts, the mountain ahead rising like a locked jaw.
Gabriel slows at a washed-out logging turn. "Company," he says. "Two convoys behind us. Lucien's people on the lower road. The quiet lot taking the ridge. Professionals."
The satellite phone chirps from the cup holder before anyone answers him. No name on the screen, but I know anyway. Sabine has been a thorn in my heel since Prague.
"You're walking into a grave," Sabine says.
Her usual amusement has been scraped clean.
"I got hired to make sure nobody leaves Sablecrest with anything useful.
Casimir's leftovers pooled their money with something hungrier, and I took the contract because the number was obscene.
" Wind claws across her end of the line.
"Then I read the small print. They don't want the vault contained.
They want witnesses erased after it opens.
I don't burn libraries, Harrow. I steal from them. "
"So don't take the shot," I suggest.
"I haven't decided who deserves one." Static cuts through her breath.
"Professional courtesy: Casimir's men aren't collectors anymore.
Lucien's people got to them first, and now they believe they're saving history by owning it.
The ridge team has eyes on you. Watch the high ground.
" She cuts the call before I can press her, and I set the phone down slowly, trusting the warning about as far as I can throw the mountain. That's not very far.
Nico has been silent beside me through all of this, his focus fixes on my face as if every flicker matters. The rubber mat below me is frosted from the obsidian.
"They'll expect us to keep climbing. We need to stop.
" I spread the copied survey map across my knees and drag a finger along the river cut east of the ridge.
"This meltwater channel runs under the approach.
Steep, miserable, glacier-fed, cold enough to punish anything with a pulse.
Lucien will likely burn time on the logging road.
Casimir's faithful watch the obvious pass.
We come underneath. Gabe scouts the tree line and lays false tracks east. Cass keeps feeding me old protocol names.
If Sablecrest was built to keep us out, it has doors that answer to old habits, and I want every one before I'm touching stone.
" I look at Nico. "I lead. I read the locks.
You guys keep teeth off me while I do it. "
For the space of a breath nobody speaks. Then Gabriel laughs, delighted, and taps the steering wheel. "Centuries alive, and the human has turned us into a burglary crew. Excellent."
I brace for Nico to correct me. Instead something eases at the corner of his mouth, the approval he rarely lets become words.
"She's not wrong," Nico says.
It isn't praise. It's better than praise. It is him taking my idea seriously in front of everyone.
Gabriel studies the map in the mirror. "If I cut north first, they'll follow the tire marks before they check the river."
"Do it," Nico says.
Cassandra folds one archive sheet against her knee. "The dead mission matters. Sablecrest may not answer to the obvious entrance."
My throat tightens around the fear. "Then we don't use the obvious entrance."