**Interlude

  When She Fell

  Nolan Pierce did not scare easily.

  Not when a suspect pulled a knife. Not when a case went cold. Not even when he first realized Salem wasn’t just quirky — it was dangerous.

  But when Trixie’s knees buckled in the Ledger Room and her eyes rolled back with that eerie, hollow glow—

  He felt real fear. The kind that makes your ribs ache.

  He caught her before she hit the floor.

  Her body was warm, trembling, breath shuddering in sharp little bursts. Her pulse hammered too fast beneath his fingertips. Her hands twitched like she was trying to hold on to something slipping away from inside her own head.

  “Trixie,” he said, voice low and urgent. “Come on. Stay with me.”

  She didn’t answer.

  The violet light from the cracked Sigil Spine washed over her face, turning her freckles gray and unreal. For a second — just one, horrible second — her expression went blank.

  Not unconscious.

  Empty.

  His gut seized. He pulled her closer.

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  “Don’t you dare,” he whispered. “Don’t you dare leave me alone in here.”

  Dixie was snarling, pacing, tail puffed like a bottlebrush. “He touched her mind — the Hollow King’s pressure brushed against her pattern. We have to move her now.”

  “I’m trying,” Nolan said, voice shaking more than he wanted.

  He’d carried bleeding victims, unconscious partners, traumatized kids — but this was different. Trixie wasn’t hurt physically. Something was happening in her head. Something he couldn’t see. Something he couldn’t punch or handcuff or reason with.

  He hated it.

  “Trixie,” he tried again. “Look at me. Please.”

  Her eyelids fluttered.

  She whispered something he couldn’t make out — a breath of sound, too faint to be language.

  Then her eyes opened.

  They weren’t her eyes.

  For a fraction of a heartbeat, they were too still. Too bright. Too reflective — shining with a thin ring of violet like a ripple behind the iris.

  He froze.

  “Trixie?”

  She blinked once. Twice. The violet flicker vanished like a dying spark.

  Her breath shuddered.

  Then she collapsed fully against his chest, arms limp, head against his shoulder.

  Nolan held her tighter.

  He didn’t care that his hands were shaking. He didn’t care that his throat felt too tight. He didn’t care that the Ledger Room around them was collapsing like a bad dream.

  All he cared about was the woman in his arms.

  Dixie leapt to his side. “We need to move. Now.”

  He scooped Trixie up without a word, cradling her like something fragile. Not because she was weak — she wasn’t — but because she mattered.

  And because for the first time, he understood what the Archivist had been trying to tell him:

  Some people go into witch business and never come back out the same.

  But he didn’t care.

  He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Not without her.