Chapter 14 – Something Worth Stealing

Power made people pay attention.

But precision? Precision made them afraid.

And I was no longer just powerful. I was precise.

The Chronolock was sealed—silent, contained, waiting. Its purpose was clear: hold time still long enough for me to replace the real Men of Letters key with a forged duplicate as Henry Winchester tore through the veil.

But the anchor was only one half of the spell.

The other half was far more volatile—and far more delicate.

"You've chosen a path no one's dared walk," Maggie said that morning as she handed me a velvet pouch of volcanic ash—one of the preliminary components.

"I'm not walking," I replied. "I'm constructing."

We gathered beneath the moonstone arch in the sanctum's second-floor observatory. The space glowed with layered sigils, old runes carved by monks and reinforced by Voidcraft.

I laid the grimoire open.

On the page, the spell diagram sprawled across vellum like a constellation of teeth.

At the center: a key. Not drawn. Burned into the paper.

"I have five of the twelve components," I said.

Beth stood beside me, her arms folded. "The phoenix feather?"

"Located. Kyoto. The bird died in the 1800s, cremated by its own fire. A temple monk sealed the ashes in an obsidian urn."

"Guarded?"

"Of course."

She smiled. "Want me to steal it?"

I smiled back. "We'll see."

The shifter blood was trickier. Most had killed. I needed one who hadn't.

Don contacted a rare bloodline through a neutral broker in Lisbon.

We offered safety. Coin. A future.

He agreed—on one condition: a life-debt pact for his sister's protection.

I wrote the terms in silver.

The blood was mine.

The other ingredients trickled in over the following weeks. Each transaction was a story, a risk, a small war of persuasion.

And while the magical world turned for me, I made the mundane world do the same.

Columbia

The letter arrived in a long white envelope with the school's seal in royal blue.

Maggie brought it into the garden and handed it to me with a knowing smile.

I slit it open with the blade I used to gut a wight last winter.

Congratulations.

You have been admitted to Columbia University, early entry, under a full academic scholarship. Major: Symbolic Systems, minor: Political Strategy. You will begin next fall.

I folded the letter.

Beth grinned. "Let me guess—next step, the United Nations?"

"No," I said. "Something more efficient."

Don poured a drink that night, sat across from me, and asked what he always asked when I changed the game:

"What now?"

Organization Expansion

I set new branches of Silverhollow in motion.

Not just for magical production and monster-part synthesis.

But for infiltration.

We began placing agents into:

State departments (under clerical and security positions)

Ivy League administrative bodies

Hospitals with high unexplained casualty rates

Research labs studying unexplained phenomena

We created a division called The Hollow Thread—individuals embedded in public life who reported back through coded magical channels.

Our best operatives carried illusions that masked them from hunter divinations and Men of Letters ward scans.

Bela Talbot didn't exist in their system.

Not anymore.

"People like us don't leave ripples," I told Beth one night. "We become the current."

My network grew in silence.

Borrowers began crafting on commission. Naturals ran protection circles across Europe and the Pacific Northwest. Trained humans—veterans of supernatural encounters—filed reports, recruited from disaster zones and paranormal events.

I gave them power. Structure. Profit.

And they gave me reach.

Profit Lines

Silverhollow released a limited series of high-end "elixirs" in Paris—potions marketed as luxury skincare, built from harmless specter extracts and essence-filtered demon bone.

They sold out in three hours.

A rogue branch of vampires tried to steal the next shipment.

We bled them dry and packaged the blood for ritual ink.

Business was booming.

Academic Acceleration

I began courses remotely, under a disguised identity.

My professors assumed I was an eccentric prodigy from a wealthy family.

They weren't wrong.

I excelled at semiotics, neural mapping, and philosophical logic.

None of them suspected I was using their curriculum to build a reality-stable hex loop for a ritual that would manipulate time.

If they had, I'd have offered tenure in exchange for silence.

The Spell of Replacement

It took shape piece by piece.

Each component integrated into the base structure of the Chronolock, but separate—a cloak hidden within a clock.

The spell itself had three parts:

Anchor Freeze (Chronolock core)

Spatial Distortion (to intercept Henry's arrival)

Duplicate Reality Loop (to embed the fake key seamlessly into the timeline)

The magic had to be fast.

Invisibly fast.

Any detection would collapse the timeline fork—and alert the Bunker or worse.

The Void Knows

One night, while I meditated beneath the veil of firelight, I felt it again.

Not just a brush. A reach.

Not the Men of Letters. Not Death. Not even God.

The Void.

Or something from it.

Something that had seen what I was becoming—and reached not to stop me, but to study me.

I did not flinch.

I reinforced my defenses. Engraved Voidscript directly into the bones of my altar. Burned a sealing rune into my skin—hidden beneath my collarbone, where no follower could see it.

If it came for me again, it would find nothing but a mirrored mind.

And a sharpened soul.

Dialogue with Maggie

We stood overlooking the water—the bay behind our newest safehouse near Vancouver.

The moonlight caught in Maggie's earrings, subtle and silver.

"You're not afraid," she said softly.

"I don't have time to be."

"No," she agreed. "But you should know—every power has a cost. Every spell like this moves a piece you can't always see."

"I see enough," I replied. "And I don't regret the price."

She looked at me then—really looked.

Not as a mother.

As a woman who had seen tyrants and queens fall.

And she nodded.

"Then make it worth the blood."

I already had.

Because I wasn't just planning to steal a key.

I was building a kingdom to lock behind it.