Chapter 114: Decisions

We left at sunset. The drive to the hills was a long silver thread of road cutting through pines and farms. We kept to backroads, the car low, engines quiet. Elena and Ethan bickered in the front about what music to play and whether Ethan was needlessly cautious. Elena wanted classic rock, loud. Ethan wanted silence and data. Both were right and both were irrelevant.

Rhea slept in the backseat with the journal on her lap like it was a small pet. Mara drove steady, hands at ten and two. Callum rode with us; he was the kind of man who preferred silence stitched with the occasional precise comment. He liked things that had straight edges.

“You know what bothers me?” Elena said suddenly as the road angled into a string of hills. “He called her ‘sister’. He said she was me. How many times do we have to meet a villain who thinks a mirror monologue will change the protagonist’s mind?”

“Too many,” Aidan said, but there was no humor in it. “But his assertion — that Selene is linked to Roxanne — matters less than what she does next. Are the hybrids dying without a Harbinger? Is she making the hybrids dependent on one person? That is actionable.”

We drove into the night, the world closing around us. The monastery was small when we found it: stone, rounded towers, a fenced yard, a low light glinting from one window. It had been renovated sometime in the last decades but kept an older face. No signs. No advertising. And the foundation name matched Ethan’s note.

The gate was locked; Mara hopped out and found a side door that groaned before it opened. The inside smelled like old paper and dust and watered stone. A single librarian-type man looked at us with the tired politeness of someone who’s catalogued grief his whole life.

“You’re not listed as donors,” he said bluntly when we approached the reception desk.

“No,” Aidan answered. “We’re not here for donations.” He spoke quietly, like someone who’d done the job before. “We’re looking for any records pre-dating 1995 related to Harbingers, Selene, or any unusual philanthropic grants made to the monastery.”

The man’s eyes sharpened. “That’s oddly specific.” He turned a key and peered into a back room. “Nobody requests that catalog without a reason.” Then, softer, “We have boxes. Offsite. Do you have clearance?”

“No,” Echo said. “But we have urgency.”

He hesitated, then rapped a phone number with a heavy finger. “Someone will come to speak with you.” He left us in a waiting room that smelled of lemon oil and old dust. We sat in plastic chairs, gills for silence, the journal heavy between us like a live thing.

The waiting felt like a tiny soldier’s march. My hand found Aidan’s across the space of my knees. He looked like he’d sleep at the drop of a hat, but his eyes were bright with a focus that did not waver. It steadied me more than the manuscript ever did.

A thin woman in her fifties arrived, draped in a cardigan like an extra piece of armor. She introduced herself as Sister Imogen — not a nun in habit, but something less severe: a caretaker of books and histories. Her eyes were sharp and tired, but she had one of those faces that had seen hard things and decided to keep going anyway.

“You’re not the first to ask about Selene,” she said without preamble. “But you’re perhaps the first to come here and not speak from a podium or a press outlet. Most people want to write about her. They want drama. You lot look like you want answers.”

Elena harrumphed. “We want Selene’s head on a spike. But I’ll settle for answers.”

Sister Imogen did not smile. “We have old ledger pages. Marginal notes where someone — a monk — transcribed old verses about guardians and bloodlines. Selene’s name appears here as a marginal prophecy. But more importantly, there are records of a family who used the monastery’s refurbished wing for private collections. The Devries. Old European line. They donated artifacts in the eighties. Their ledger mentions 'custody' and a ‘ring’.” She glanced at me. “Shows up again and again in their correspondence.”

“The ring,” Rhea whispered, the words falling out like a prayer.

“Yes,” Imogen said. “The ring. Keep your voices down. People like to pretend these are stories.” She moved like she wanted to keep the fragile paper safe from us and from herself.

Ethan shuffled forward. “Did the Devries ever leave any address? An estate? Shipping logs?”

“They had contracts with a storage facility,” Sister Imogen said. “Once. A small cluster of units. One of them burned in 1993 in a shipment accident. One box survived — badly singed — with a notation in a Devries hand: 'Containment: do not let the Harbinger see.' The ledger has a notation. The monks never wanted to know what the Devries kept. They sent it on, with a letter of admonition.”

“Containment. Do not let the Harbinger see,” I repeated. The words felt like ice.

Sister Imogen folded her hands. “If Selene has access to what the Devries kept, she could be restoring it. She might unbury something meant to be sealed. She might use it to bind. She might not. But whatever else is true, Selene thinks these objects are keys. You need to know what is a key and what is a weapon.”

We chased the thread further. The Devries’ records pointed to a private estate in the next valley: the Halvorsen property. It was an old manor turned quiet retreat, fog-wrapped and guarded by hedges, with a name that flickered on old letters and shipping manifests in the Devries correspondence. A shipping ledger in St. Aelfric’s had a single annotation with a Halvorsen return address. The ring motif — the circle crossed by a slash — appeared in the Devries’ sketches that Imogen allowed us to photograph.

“This is good,” Ethan said after we left the monastery, the car running and the hills swallowing the taillights. “This is a lead we can chase. It’s a physical trail. It ties to a family who had the means and the motive to house artifacts that could… do things. If Selene is trying to construct an army linked to blood, those artifacts might anchor the bond.”

“And if she’s already integrating them,” Echo said, voice flat, “we profit from moving quickly.”

“What do you want to do?” Elena asked. She drove like a woman who had decided she was tired of waiting for the world to make sense.