**Interlude

  Dixie: The Smell of Broken Light

  Nolan falls like a book pushed off a shelf.

  Not gracefully. Not neatly. All thud and breath and silence.

  I’m on him before the leaves settle—nose to his throat, ear to his chest, claws flexing against the dirt because if I don’t knead something I will rake the world open. His pulse stutters in a rhythm I do not trust. It feels like a metronome set by a drunk. It smells—

  Gods. It smells wrong.

  Void has a scent. Witches like to pretend it doesn’t. They talk about “pressure” and “absence” and all their elegant little words. But to me?

  Void smells like paper after rain, like cold coins, like the moment a candle goes out and the smoke forgets which way is up.

  It stinks on Nolan now. On his shadow most of all.

  I bare my teeth at the place where his outline touches the ground. The edge of him shivers. The outline is thinner there, like someone erased and redrew it with the wrong pencil. I’ve seen shadows with scars. I do not like how they behave.

  “Trixie,” I say, and my voice is not clever or coy; it is brittle glass. “He took a hit for you.”

  Her hands are on his face, on his chest, on his name—because humans keep their names in their chests and in their eyes and on their tongues. Witches weave them in their bones. Either way: if the name frays, so does the person.

  “Bring him back,” I tell her. “Now.”

  “I’m trying,” she whispers, as if the forest cares. As if the void cares.

  The forest only listens when it wants to. The void doesn’t listen at all.

  I expand the radius of my senses, whiskers tasting the air, tail lifting for balance. The Charterwoods are full of ugly breathing—roots snoring, bark muttering, the far-off groan of a shrine remembering it was a mouth. The Hollow King’s echo laps against the edges of my skull like tidewater made of missing seconds.

  He is pleased. I can feel it. Like a hand patting the world’s head.

  I hate being patted.

  I nose Nolan’s jaw, find the place where the void brushed him. His heat has pulled back from that spot, the way moths pull away from glass. I spit a low, steady purr and push the hum into him—a familiar’s vibration, frequency-locked to my witch and those within her chosen orbit. It’s a crude technique for mending pattern-fray, like licking a wound clean. But crude is still alive.

  “Breathe,” I order him. “That’s not a suggestion.”

  His chest shudders. A good shudder. He’s listening to me; smart human.

  Trixie’s fingers glow—blue-white, our color, Bell color—and I want to scold her for using magic so soon after He pressed on her, but we don’t have time for caution or pride. Her light crawls into Nolan’s outline, looking for the tear. Finds it. Fusses at it like a witch fusses at anything that resists.

  “She’s doing fine,” I tell myself. “She’s doing fine, Dixie. Do not bite the forest. Do not bite the void. Do not bite the detective to make sure his reflexes still work.”

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  He groans. Good. I won’t bite him. Yet.

  The stink of void shifts—thins, then curls back, catlike, offended that we’ve smoothed the nap of what it ruffled. I arch and hiss at nothing, because nothing is exactly where the trouble lives.

  “He’s alive,” Trixie whispers, and relief makes her sag in that awful human way that looks like melting. She presses her forehead to his. He blinks up at her, eyes fogged, then at me. I stare back. He tries to smile.

  Do not do that, I think at him. Smiling is for after. Now is for obeying me.

  “Don’t move,” I say aloud, and Trixie echoes me, which suggests we are finally united on the obvious.

  The ground under his shadow prickles. I extend a paw into it and my claws sing—tiny high notes only I can hear—as they skim across the thin spot. There. There it is. A hairline crack in where-his-ness. If I had hands I would stitch it shut with copper. I do not have hands. I have anger.

  Anger will do.

  I lower my head, lay my whiskers across his shadow like a veil, and purr harder. The sound fills the clearing. It isn’t nice. It isn’t soothing. It is a command: Close. Close. Close.

  The crack cinches. Not fully. Enough.

  “Trixie,” I say more gently, because her breath is scraping and I hate the scrape, “he needs sleep. Not here. Somewhere that doesn’t smell like dead trees and old mistakes.”

  “Can he walk?” she asks.

  “He can be dragged,” I answer. “But yes, he can walk, because if he doesn’t I will tell him what I think of his posture and his crowbar and his absurd heroics in language that curdles milk.”

  He coughs a laugh. Good. Laughter is stitches you can’t see.

  “Hey,” he rasps, eyes on Trixie, voice half-sand, half-stone. “You okay?”

  She nods in that witch way that means no. He squeezes her hand anyway, and their fingers remember each other’s shapes and I—fine—my eyes sting. Briefly. I am allowed.

  The Hollow King’s echo prowls the edge of the clearing again, testing the air where Nolan’s shadow met it. I swivel, tail up, ears forward, every whisker a spear.

  “Back,” I tell an ancient thing. “Mine,” I tell it next. “Not yours,” I finish, because sometimes English is the only spell that matters.

  The echo smiles without a mouth. I feel it like frost behind my ears. It says nothing I can translate. It leaks patience. It leaks appetite. It leaks certainty.

  I leak contempt.

  “Up,” I tell Nolan. Trixie helps him. He sways. I circle their ankles like a living ward, brushing each shin, each boot, re?threading our little triangle of we. It holds. It always holds, until it doesn’t; and when it doesn’t, I build it again, and again, and again, because that is what you do when you are a familiar and you love beyond reason.

  We start moving.

  The forest watches, sulking. The shrine snarls behind us, then subsides. Somewhere far off, a Council ward cracks like old candy. None of that matters.

  This matters: Trixie’s feet keep lifting. Nolan’s shadow stays attached. My purr does not stop.

  I press my head to Trixie’s calf as we walk. “Listen to me,” I say without looking up. “He touched you. He touched him. He will try again. We will be there first.”

  “Promise?” she whispers.

  “I don’t promise,” I say. “I guarantee.”

  Nolan stumbles; I slide under his hand so he finds fur, not air. He steadies. He breathes. He lives. Good human.

  At the tree line, the wind brings us a different smell—damp rope, river iron, old salt. Deadwater’s breath, a mile off. The Council won’t like how far we’ve come. The Archivist will. The Hollow King will not care. The Hollow King does not do liking; He does having.

  He will not have this.

  I stop once, just once, to look back at the place where an invisible hand brushed a man’s shadow because he stood between it and my witch.

  “Try again,” I tell the clearing.

  “And I sharpen my claws.”

  Then I follow my people.

  Because that’s the plan.

  Because that’s the job.

  Because I am Dixie Bell, last familiar of the Quiet Line, anchor, menace, and menace’s cure, and tonight I learned the smell of broken light on a stubborn man who will not stop standing between the hollow and my witch.

  I approve.

  Now we run.