Chapter 134 History of Survival
POV: Silas | The Rookeries
The back room of Silas's shop smelled like old paper and older death, which suited him fine. He had always lived between those two things.
Seven wolves sat cross-legged on the floor in front of him. Young ones, most of them. Two were barely past their first transformation. One still had the confused look of someone who hadn't quite accepted what they were yet. Silas recognized that look. He'd worn it himself, two centuries ago, before he understood that acceptance was the only tool that kept you breathing.
He set a leather-bound ledger on the table between them. The cover was cracked and dark with age, the pages inside dense with handwriting so small it looked like insect tracks.
"Every supernatural death in London from 1817 to present," he said. "Every conviction. Every disappearance. Every extermination attempt." He tapped the cover once. "I've survived five of them. Five times Parliament decided wolves, or fae, or something else that made them nervous needed to go away. Five times they failed."
One of the younger wolves, a girl named Pera who still flinched at the word feral, raised her hand slightly. "How?"
"Same way every time." Silas settled into his chair, which creaked under him like it always did. "They failed because someone knew they were coming. Information. That's the only weapon that doesn't run out."
He let that sit for a moment.
"You want to survive in this city? Don't pick sides. Not Callum's side, not Parliament's side, not the dragons'. Stay useful to everyone and loyal to no one. The moment you become a true believer, you become a target." He looked at each of them in turn. "I'm not saying don't care about things. I'm saying don't let caring make you stupid."
"Callum picks sides," said a boy named Drez. He said it like a challenge.
"Callum is extraordinary." Silas said it without admiration, just fact. "He's also constantly nearly dead. Both things can be true."
That got a few quiet laughs. Good. Tension in a classroom meant nobody was learning.
Silas spent the next hour going through the records. Real stories. The extermination of 1891, when a Parliament hunter unit swept through Whitechapel and a single packless wolf named Delia used two years of accumulated blackmail material to expose three Parliament members, collapsing the entire operation before it got started. The 1934 purge that failed because an information broker named Cutter had documented every hunter's name, face, and home address, and had made sure said documentation would reach the human press if anything happened to him.
"Information as currency," he said. "Information as protection. You document everything. You store it somewhere safe. And you make sure the people who want to hurt you know it exists." He spread his hands. "Nobody kills the librarian. It's bad for business."
The session wound down. The young wolves filtered out, most of them quieter than when they'd arrived, which Silas considered a success. Pera lingered by the door like she wanted to say something.
"Go on," he said.
"Are you scared? Of Mordaunt planning something new?"
Silas considered lying. He didn't, in the end. "I'm always scared. Being scared is what kept me alive for two hundred years. The ones who stopped being scared are in my ledger." He nodded toward the door. "Go. Practice remembering things."
She left.
Callum came in through the back entrance forty seconds later, which meant he'd been waiting for the room to clear. He looked tired in the way he always looked tired now, which was different from how he'd looked tired before prison. Before, tiredness had been something that happened to him. Now it was something he carried on purpose, like armor.
Silas didn't waste time.
"Your new recruit. Sarah." He pulled a secondary ledger from the shelf behind him and opened it to a page near the middle. "She visited Mordaunt's blood club in Soho three times last month. I have the dates." He turned the ledger to face Callum. "The first visit was two weeks before she came to you asking forgiveness."
Callum looked at the dates. He didn't say anything for a long moment.
"You're sure."
"I document everything." Silas closed the ledger. "That's literally what I just spent an hour explaining."
Callum's jaw tightened. The tiredness shifted into something harder. "Does she know you know?"
"No."
"Does Mordaunt know you know?"
"Probably suspects. He usually does." Silas set the ledger back on the shelf. "What you do with this is your business. But I'd recommend doing it quietly. Publicly exposing her gives Mordaunt information about how you handle threats. Quietly removing her gives you nothing but safety." He paused. "Sometimes safety is enough."
Callum stood there another moment, staring at the shelf where the ledger had gone.
"Thank you," he said.
"You can pay me later." Silas sat back down, already reaching for the next record that needed updating. "You always do."