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"That is still the wrong question, and you have very little blood to spend on wrong questions."

Something warm came out of my nose and ran over my top lip.

"Then what's the right one?"

"Ask what he left."

The pages moved again. One, two, and stopped. When I looked down the book was open to a page that had nothing written on it at all. The paper was blank and slightly yellow. Dead in the center of it, pressed into the surface like a maker's mark in the bottom of a clay pot, was a symbol.

It was small. Two lines curving away from a third, with a dot below them.

I had never seen it before in my life.

My pentagram, that little tattoo on the side of my forefinger that had sat quiet as a freckle outside a fallen angel's door, chose that exact moment to flare so hard I yelped and dropped the book.

The blank page glowed for maybe half a second after it hit the floorboards.

Then it was just a book again, closed, sitting on top of a pillowcase in a dark room, being warm and unhelpful.

Nobody said anything for a while. The radiator clanked. Twice.

"Well." Sissily's voice was not entirely steady. She was already digging in the pocket of her cardigan, and she came out with a battered thermos she'd apparently been carrying around all evening on the assumption that this would happen, because she is the best person I know. "Grass juice."

"I hate the grass juice." Foxclove tasted horrid as all poisons do. Well if you take it in large doses. In small doses was actually healing especially for witches.

"Drink the grass juice, Hazel."

It tasted the way a lawn smells. It also stopped the world from tilting, which is the infuriating part. Something so foul should not be so useful.

River had come across the floor without a sound and was crouched in front of me. He took my chin in his cold hand and turned my face toward what little light came in off the window. He was checking my eyes the way he'd done once before in a sickroom with a lie in his mouth.

"Both pupils," he reported. "Even. She's fine."

"I'm sitting right here."

"You're bleeding on your own shirt is what you're doing." He let go. "Do you know that symbol?"

"You saw it too?” When he gave me a flat look I huffed in annoyance. It was a legit question. You never knew who heard or saw what with that cursed book. “No." I answered him.

"Sissily?"

"Never seen it." She'd already grabbed a pen and was copying it onto the back of her hand from memory, tongue between her teeth. "And I've been through more of the coven's grimoires than anybody my age. It's not witch. I'd swear to that."

"It isn't Fae either," River murmured. "I'd know."

The three of us sat in the dark with that.

"Okay," I said at last, wiping my nose with the back of my wrist like a lady that I was. "So we have a mark that nobody in this room recognizes, and nobody in the coven library is going to help me with, seeing as I set the coven library on fire. Great. Fabulous. Cool and normal. Story of my fucking life."

"There are other archives." Sissily blew on the ink. "The Stormbloods have a small one. Delores has a big one, and she owes you her life. There's the Magi Police records, which we can't get into, and the vampires, who I would rather set myself on fire than ask."

"None of those are going to have a strange sigil from twenty-six years ago." I was thinking out loud now. With every word something was surfacing in the back of my mind like a shape forming up under water. Like a memory I couldn’t grasp until I could. I sat up straight. "Sissily, my mother met him here. In this city. Not in some glade in a fairy hill, not in a court or in a realm. He was walking around Cleveland, Ohio, in the nineties. Right here in the human world, long enough for a Byrne witch to fall in love with him and get pregnant and refuse an archdemon over it."

"...Yeah," she said slowly dragging the word with and expectant expression on her face.

"So, he had to eat. He had to sleep somewhere." I was practically bouncing on the spot, and my nose started bleeding again for my trouble. I didn't care even slightly about it anymore. My poor blouse was ruined anyway. "Danika's been searching for him for twenty-six years and finding nothing.” Sissily was frowning at me like I’ve lost my mind. “She's been searching the entire magical world to do it. Every coven, every archive, every seer she could bribe or threaten."

River got there half a second before Sissily did. I watched it transform his face.