Cedric was not asleep.

And because he was not asleep, he couldn’t truly say he woke up either, but all the same it felt like he was waking up when his body seized forward in a spasm that nearly caused the oil lamp on his nightstand to fall to the floor.

If that had happened, he thought and he knew, the glass would have shattered and the whale oil or whatever would have spread all over the floor and seeped into the rug and the carpet and where the fuel fell, the fire could have followed and—

He didn’t want to think about that.

It was still night in the enchanted tent and he knew that not because of light or clock or birdsong, but because the hallway outside his door was quiet.

When the Mage prepared to leave for the day, the floorboards never creaked because the Mage didn’t stand or walk or make his way over the wood in such a manner if he could help it. But still other things did move and echo through the walls, things like wardrobe doors on their hinges, faucets opening to fill sinks and, as the last sort of morning’s intolerable bugles, the sound of roasted coffee beans being ground and pulverized until they were just short of powder.

So when the house was still and the air heavy with silence, Cedric knew the night was far from over.

And this was how he found himself, one night, one very long night, a night that was very long because it was a thing a young man was supposed to sleep through, and he was not sleeping.

He could not be certain that it was from one cause alone, while he was very certain that it was a whole plethora of things that were all coming together into one bright singular point that stuck in him and nagged at him and kept him awake even when all he desired was slumber.

There was the matter of the caffeine: the chemical that made his whole body shake when he’d had too much of it, and that was the backdrop that made the whole rest of the ensemble resonate and move in turn with an amplitude that got larger and larger the longer the whole lot of it sang together.

Cedric had seen the Book of Life on several occasions by now, but when he’d seen it opened and enumerating the things it held inside, cracks in the images kept stuttering in his mind as he ran over them.

The little blips in the music stopped being scratches on a disc and started being several bars of the melody taken out, and the bass restrung, and when the music started playing again, the time he’d been keeping wasn’t anymore right, and he had to think, or to not think, to get his own metronome back in tune with the needle.

Adam was gone.

Cedric had a funny mind. And in some ways it probably wasn’t much different than any other mind possessed by homo sapiens or felis catus domesticus or whatever other sorts of things crawled and walked and ran on the Earth.

Sometimes, often, when Cedric saw things, he saw them, and he saw them inside rather than he just sat there seeing the things outside. So when Davian had pulled Niagara out of the Dreamcatcher a long time ago in Manhattan — where Cedric had once never been there, and not even been alive back then at all, there he was, in upstate New York, in the year 1960-whatever, and he stood next to little Lila as his sister and looked up to Davian as his local guide.

But when he was in the Book of Life, he looked to his right and didn’t see Adam where he was supposed to have been.

Sometimes, too often, Cedric didn’t trust himself, and if he knew he needed to find fault in something somewhere in order to make the rest of the world cohere, well, he looked toward the closest thing that could be offending, and that closest thing was usually he himself. And Cedric did that often, and maybe even more often than most young people, or old people, or people that have been made to bear weight above and beyond that for which their shoulders had been specified.

But when Cedric was not blaming himself, he was trusting himself implicitly, and in that instance, when he stood at the waterfall, while not actually being there in the flesh at all, he knew when he looked to his right, he should have seen Adam.

It was easy to blame oneself, and that’s probably in part why Cedric got in the habit of doing it. Because when something is one’s own fault, one can throw a dart into the center of one’s heart and say that the rules have been made whole again, and in that doing, even through whatever pain must be endured, there is a resolution.

But when Cedric looked to the right and did not see Adam where he expected to find him, there was pain, pain he did not expect, and pain that could not be resolved because for whatever reason, he had decided that now was not the time to throw the dart into his own chest.

So Cedric just kept looking and looking and looking, but it was dark and the house was quiet, and sometimes when one goes looking for something, even when there is nothing to be found, the mind makes things whole that are sewn together out of the shadows.

And that was the third thing giving him such complete and utter unrest in those immeasurable hours. There were many shapes and pictures and ghosts floating around in his mind and memories and guesses and weapons and sometimes they got all twisted and wound up together and he wasn’t anymore sure what he was looking at or what he was hearing.

key

And sometimes he thought he knew what he was hearing, and maybe he knew what he was hearing not because the sounds made any sense, but because the sounds were supposed to match against letters and when they matched up to letters that was the only time he thought he had any idea what people were trying to talk about because the sounds can and did sound the same but when the letters came together, the light that looked white split into red and green and

key

Davian had a key and Cedric knew he had a key because he’d seen him slip it into his pocket or his jacket

you gave them the

but that was for the book, the book with the lock and key, not a door, not a house with no key, he didn’t need the book he needed the car because the car was where he knew was the

collar

“Dammit!” Cedric said outloud, and he put his hands over his ears as if he thought that could help him and he turned over to the other side. The pillow was soft but the bed was hard, and he hated every minute of it.

“No! I don’t need it!” he said to no one. “It’s not there!”

So no one responded.

And he laid there for a while, and when he looked to the right, Adam was still not there.

Why did Davian need the Dreamcatcher, he wondered to himself. Couldn’t he get another one? Half the gas stations in the country — probably one not any more too far — who cared about that one, just get another one another

apprentice

if it just needed to be enchanted, well, if the man could fill a tent with a house and a house with rooms and rooms with memories then surely it couldn’t be too hard

where’s the key

“I don’t need the damn key!” he said, shouting, and pulling his mouth shut after he heard himself. “It’s not even fucking there!”

He just wanted to sleep, and he wanted to sleep for many reasons, but especially because when he was sleeping was the only time his stupid voice, whether he could hear it or not, ever fucking stopped talking and going on and on and babbling about whatever stupid shit floated around in it.

The whole house was made of wood and the wood contained the things even if sometimes it pretended it wasn’t wood. There were no windows, only wood. And the wood made the sounds that kept telling him what the house was doing or having done to it. There were doors that went open and closed and if they went open and closed then a person had gone through and maybe that person was him but probably it was Davian because Davian

and sometimes he sat at the desk he opened closed the drawers and maybe he took stuff out or put stuff in but Cedric wasn’t usually sure because when they were in the study they sat ninety degrees off ninety degrees so that they looked at the walls and the wood and the portraits instead of looking at each other and they only looked at each other when Cedric looked at Davian and Davian looked back, but Cedric only knew that if he was looking and he knew that if he wasn’t looking

keydesk

Davian looked at the book when he sat at the desk and he liked the book so he must have liked the desk so

“FUCK!” Cedric said, and he turned over to the other side, and when he did that he was facing the wall, more wood behind the paper, and even if he knew it was there he had his eyes closed shut so that he saw black instead of brown and he liked the black because he knew something about it and it was his own.

key desk key desk key

His heart was beating fast, he thought. Like a rabbit, though he didn’t know why he thought that because he’d never held a rabbit in his whole damn life so how did he have any idea what was like the heart of a rabbit

And Cedric was so damn tired he was exhausted though he hadn’t got out of bed in hours or probably hours or days yes days it felt like days

weeks

“FUCKING FUCK!”

But he didn’t want Davian to come in and he didn’t want Davian to knock on the door and come in so he stopped talking then because he wanted to be alone

in the wooden house

with the wooden desk

key key key key

where’s the fucking key

“I’m not well,” Myrtle said.

Davian had a dark grey sphere floating by one cheek that turned left when he looked, and returned when he didn’t. Wherever Myrtle was, she wasn’t here where could be heard her voice.

“A right dash of bitters you are,” Davian said, eyes on the road. “You said that last time I came to call, and the time before, and dare I say—”

Cedric knew she wasn’t there because he saw Davian from the passenger seat, saw Davian at the wheel of the Silver Wraith, saw him with gloves on his hands.

“This time I’m in the neighborhood, having a bit of an excursion in the fine weather, Sunday though it is not,” he pressed. “Lovely ride. It is something I never would have purchased for myself; Adam knows me all too well. She’ll remind you of the good old days, before the world turned wrong. Handles like a dream.”

Myrtle did not say anything, and the air was thick with her silence before she rephrased Davian’s claim into a caustic, “Drives like a boat.”

Davian laughed. “Ah, there you are. See, don’t lie to me; you really are feeling yourself.”

She did not say anything, so after a moment, Davian kept talking.

“Oh, do humor me and come out; let the wind into your raven hair. I’m altogether feeling quite sorry for myself and I should like a little company to make me feel better; a reason not to drink too much and say too little. I admit I’ve come to cherish hearing the pitter-patter of little feet in my home again. After these years, it is so difficult to endure the silence. Surely you understand.”

He waited for her this time, and her careful questioning came through the speaker.

“…Then,” she asked, “he’s gone?”

“Oh, not at all,” Davian said. “No, he’s not gone yet, but he will. He’s become as he does before he turns away: sour; rather like an old lemon. He hasn’t gone yet, but he will. It is only a matter of time before he does not show up for dinner.”

“…I,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that, Davian.”

“It is my own doing,” he said, a little too quickly, and a little too remorselessly. “I do think I was forthright with the lad, perhaps overly so, and I said something that upset him. Children can be so sensitive; it is of the utmost import we guard our truths as keys to the safe until the day they can hold them in their entirety.”

“It’s all rather difficult being a parent,” he said. “I’m sure you realize. At one glance they’ve scant enough wit about them to cross the street without clinging to your coattails, and the next they’ve grown hair upon their chins and they’re looking into your eyes with cruel rebuke.”

Myrtle was quiet.

“Yes, well,” Davian said. “It is my own fault, thinking him a man when in his heart and mind and soul he’s still but a boy; always…”

He added something then, more to himself, matching with conviction what he removed in volume. “Always my little boy.”

He changed, then.

“I’ll give you one last chance, my dear, before I cross back and go and leave my fool’s errand for another day.”

“You’ll really not come with me?” he asked, a twinge of something rare in the voice. “She turns on a dime, purrs like a kitten,” he said of the car.

Myrtle didn’t say anything, and then the room was quiet for a moment before she said, “I’m sorry Davian. I… I cannot.”

He was silent, and then said quietly, “…hope springs eternal.”

Davian was at a desk, and he was writing a letter, a letter in his own voice.

6th October, 198—

My esteemed friend,

I have recently returned from an evening that has only served to remind me of the improbability of chance, or, in other words, the tidy nature of a universe in which God either plays dice, or takes a willing gamble by never touching the things. I prefer the paraphrase offered by the man nearer and dearer to my heart.

Indeed, nothing can be a mystery behind a curtain of chance because a certain beautiful woman appeared at my local tavern not once not twice but three times this week, at the same hour each time, and moreover in precisely the same seat, all arranged so that I might not escape with my ignorance intact; as if the porcelain skin and ruby lips could evade my notice. I have known few creatures so dedicated to their patterns and predilections and those that I have known to have such compulsions revealed themselves to be possessed of unimpeachable character and still more depth than their regular mannerisms once suggested.

So on the fourth night that this lady put herself precariously into my field of view, I did what she would not and introduced myself, though it was quickly apparent that she knew my name and reputation despite my pitiable ignorance of hers.

Do tell me, what your Miss C—— knows of me because I cannot and will not believe that you have not had a hand in this. I shan’t ask what Goro was paid, though I am perfectly aware some things are more than worth their weight in gold.

That being said, I am not altogether too aggrieved because the two of us have made an appointment of finding each other at a certain tolling of the hours and I am finding myself in dire need of companionship. If it is indeed true that you and she are indeed already acquainted, I take it as proof that I’ve no business doubting your fine taste, a conclusion that has long been a personal conviction of mine now in the over sixty years I’ve been honored to count you among my closest friends. I do hope you will not fault me for seeking to occupy more of my evening hours with the light our Miss C—— has brought into my life. As you know, my apprentice has taken leave of his temporary lodgings and where I once found a close associate in Myrtle, she has lately become quite dreary and morose. I suggest you pay a visit as she has lately been refusing to return my calls.

Yours,

D.

Cedric believed by this point to have seen the full gamut of Davian’s emotional range, and yet the sheer childlike joy he wore on his face when he cuddled the tiny auburn puppy in his hands was something like he had never before seen. Truly it was as if the Mage had become younger still, if such a thing were possible, and when he held the small dog in his hands, he reflected that innocence in the brightness of his eyes.

It was the same dog Cedric knew as Sam, and not because he’d ever seen a picture on the Mage’s mantel (because he hadn’t), but because the visions that had been coming at him by way of night’s quiet came together over and over again, and whether this was how the dog had looked and precisely appeared in shapes that repeated and formed knowledge, this was the dog that had become pressed into Cedric’s memory as the good dog Sam.

And a good dog he was, yes, like all sweet tender good little dogs are good. And still yet he was bad like all good little dogs are sometimes bad, and with those little teeth in their little mouths, little teeth that sometimes found their way into Davian’s fine leather shoes, into plastic garbage bags meant to conceal and contain, and onto fingertips that probably never should have been teased as toys.

Sam grew, as dogs and children and even men are wont to do, and as he grew perhaps Davian got a little less cheerful and a little more weary because when dogs and children and men grow and soon grow up, it is because they are learning the things they once didn’t know, reaching the things from which they’d formerly been estranged, and getting closer to the day when all the energy and hope and love they had and believed limitless will be gone and gone for good.

But for a while, Davian was happy, quite happy, and Sam was happier still. Sometimes when a man is smiling, it is an untrue thing and somewhat of a lie, despite all the best intentions, because on the inside they are weeping and knowing that forever is a falsehood. But that is a way that dogs are different from people, because people live in yesterday and today and tomorrow all at once, and dogs do not live in tomorrow when today is all around them.

Cedric watched for a while, watched the man and his dog turn today into tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. And the dog grew bigger and stronger and maybe if it had been the dog looking, he might have said the man was getting smaller and older and weaker instead, but Sam was a good dog, and because he was a good dog he did not think like that.

And if thinking the one who’d given him the collar older and weaker and more tired was a thought the dog could not bear, still more was it intolerable to the Mage, who at this point in his life had already lost a good deal more beautiful things than only the little dog trotting alongside him.

Dog is a thing that accepts, by and large. A dog who is chained to the fence whines for reunion just as readily as the primped and perfectly pampered. And Sam, because he was a dog, and a dog that was good, did not think anything of himself, and even less of how the days grew shorter and shorter as he slept more and more. And when the food he had once devoured in delight and rapture never lived up to what it had been yesterday, he ate what he could, and drank what would go down, and found a warm place to rest the bones he noticed more and more than he ever had before.

And though the dog slept more soundly than he ever had done as a tiny young thing, the Mage was getting to be troubled again, because he knew the way of the world, and he knew if he did not bare his teeth and brandish the magic that came from his hands, what had happened before was soon going to happen again.

“He’s ready for you to take him home, but he’s still recovering from the anesthesia. Take care to watch him, try to encourage him to take in water, and, when he will, food, though you may need to encourage him. Let him sleep. Though the medicine will dull the pain for a while, he—”

“Yes, yes,” the Mage said. “I do understand the procedures. The concerns. What to look for. We’ve been here before.”

The veterinarian looked at Davian again. Though the Mage had probably tried his damnedest to appear normal, even in linen and wool he was a relic from a bygone era.

“Yes, that is true, and keeping that in mind—” the other man said, still clad in a surgeon’s white coat. He was trying to measure his words carefully, because as strangely as the brown-haired man before him appeared, this situation was far too familiar to him and his profession, and he lowered his voice gravely. “There is something I must make clear to you.”

Davian pursed his lips.

“Yes, we have been here before, and now for the third time. We’ve bought Sam some time, but… these cancers are very aggressive, and they are particularly worse in the pure breeds. Once the tumors start to grow, we can cut them out where we find them, but even with a margin, they—”

“Perhaps you’ve not been taking enough,” Davian said, barely containing his contempt. “Perhaps you’ve not found everything.”

The veterinarian hardly moved as he breathed. “I take as much as I can while keeping in mind the health of the animal and the recovery afterward. Sam isn’t a young dog anymore, Mr. Winchester.”

Davian winced.

“I take great care to try to help my patients and the people that care for them. And when we get to the point where the recovery after surgery is long and painful, and the time between interventions gets shorter every—”

“What are you suggesting?” Davian said, composure breaking into violence. “That we just give up? That we just lie there and let him die?”

The man in the white coat did not say anything for a moment, and the two just looked at each other, and one side was not at all like the other.

“…Sometimes that’s the greatest kindness we can give.”

“I refuse to accept that!” the Mage spat. Davian was furious, but he held it in for a moment, until he erupted, shouting, “Charlatan!” at the doctor, who stood there silent, probably because he too had been here before, many many times on this side, usually this side, and had learned what people said when grief overflowed their cup.

“Give me my dog!” Davian said bitterly. “Give me my damn dog!”

So the man in the white coat turned and left and went to go fetch the little auburn dog who’d once been a puppy but was now just an old tired sick and skinny dog who had been sleeping in a cage in the back room. And when the dog came back, he had gauze and tape and bandages around his neck, and a cone overtop of all that, and in one or two places where the cloth was a little thin, there was red and wet seeping into the white and if Cedric knew Davian (and at this point, he probably did), then he knew that the first thing the Mage would do when he got the dog back home was change the dressings and reset the cone because it had become a little askew from the way the dog had been laid in the cage.

When the dog was next to Davian, he looked up, but he was very tired, so then he put his head back down and because he felt a little dizzy, he let his front legs slip on the tile and then he was laying on the floor.

“You’ll be glad to know we won’t return!” the Mage shouted, and then he looked down at the dog who did not want to walk and he picked him up and carried him out of the room.

Cedric just stood there when the Mage and his dog left, and he looked down because he had a sense he was holding something, and when he looked down he knew what it was.

It was the collar, in a brown leather, bent and worn where it had been put into a buckle and had the metal tongue worked into the punched holes. On the other side, it had a plate fixed into it too, and the iron was carved with letters, letters in cursive script, but this time he could read it and he read it and it said,

‘Toujours Ai—

The house was completely quiet when Cedric stirred back into consciousness. And even though he had no curtain through which daybreak could filter, and no clock that was worth its salt sitting beside his bed, he knew very well that he had far overslept his allotment.

Cedric slept in clothes, slept in a way that many others might have considered very nearly fully dressed. He crawled out of bed already wearing a black t-shirt and pants in flannel that had a pattern that went up as much as it went across. So when he slipped his naked feet into slippers lined in shearling, he wore enough to dare tread into the common spaces.

And yet, despite it all, he was far from ready.

When he stepped into the hallway, knowing the ambiance did not match the hour, a deep fear and foreboding crept into his heart and circulated in his veins, because he knew something was wrong, and knew something was very wrong.

Coming out of Cedric’s semblance of privacy, the study was the first thing to be found to the right when the hallway abruptly ceased to be. And there, sitting at Cedric’s desk, the one that faced away, ninety degrees from the one now vacant, was Davian, and the room was dark, and because it was dark, and quiet, Cedric knew Davian had been sitting there, waiting, lying in wait until Cedric chanced to leave his room.

Cedric did not know what to say, but he did know that anything he would say was going to be wrong, and come out wrong, and useless, and he was going to regret anything that came from his mouth. He was no stranger to regret, so when the disjointed knowledge of the night before clambered back into his waking mind, he knew exactly what was coming.

Davian was sitting in the chair, silent, faced away, and the only motion in the room was his back stretching against the burgundy when his lungs were full, and the cloth going just slightly slack when his lungs were empty. And Cedric stood there for what seemed like an eternity, feeling the threat of perspiration twinge in his palms, his armpits, and where his hair met his naked forehead.

And then Davian spoke, slowly, each word like a drop in a bucket long ago overfilled, its water pressed into the temporary lull of a meniscus.

“You didn’t sleep last night.”

Cedric’s heart fell and he didn’t say anything.

“Have I given you so little that your only thought is of what else you can take?”

Cedric’s throat was dry so he tried to swallow but his innards were all pressed up together and—

Davian slammed his fist on the desk and his charge jumped. “Dammit Cedric!”

His face was turned to the side now, so that one eye, his right, could see Cedric, but he still didn’t look at him. And Cedric saw that his eyes were downcast, and looking away, and Cedric shifted uneasily because no way he could stand seemed like the right thing to do.

And then he looked squarely at Cedric, and Cedric saw the darkness and the black in those eyes.

“What did you do with it?” Davian asked. “It doesn’t mean a damn thing to you; why did you take it?”

And Cedric just stood there, saying nothing, confused and not confused, and noticing how very white the Mage’s teeth looked: the only white things in the darkness.

“I…” Cedric stammered.

Davian stood then, and he did what he always did, which was not so much standing as it was rising into the air, above the ground more than he would have been if his feet were flat on the ground, and when he did this, he looked over his nose downward at Cedric, and when he spoke, his voice was curled upward to mock him.

“You…!” he said.

And Cedric frowned unhappily.

“You went looking for the Book!” Davian said, voice growing. And Cedric just stood there, a little dumbfounded, while Davian moved toward the desk that was his own. And he didn’t have to move far, because the two were so close together that if the chairs were pulled out too far, one’s back touched the other one’s side and then they had to pull back away from each other.

But Davian, this time, just made the chair disappear. And then he pulled open the drawer beneath the center of the desk, and he looked accusatorily at Cedric.

“You stood here, like a right fool, and thought you’d find the Book!”

His eyes were a little wild then, and he just kept staring at Cedric while his arms gestured. And he started pulling all sorts of things from the drawer, flinging random small things over his shoulder, far more than could have been held Ordinarily by the thing.

“And you looked and you looked and you kept looking, thinking you would find the Book!”

And he got darker then.

“…But you didn’t find the Book, did you, boy?!”

He had gone looking, yes, and he knew that was true, though he hated himself for it. And while he hated himself for that truth, deeply, and in a very real way, he knew another truth too, and that truth was that while he had gone looking for something, he hadn’t gone looking for the Book.

“Davian, I…” Cedric fumbled.

“Like a dog with a bone, like the damned with a dream, you kept looking, thinking it was here, thinking you’d find it if you just kept looking…”

And Davian kept doing the uncomfortable thing. He kept opening the drawers and throwing things out, all kinds of little things: pens and pencils, notepads and paper, dice—

“And then you found something that wasn’t yours, and you took it and maybe you thought it was your due, thought it was your righting of wrongs, a settling of debts after you thought you’d been cheated.”

Cedric didn’t know exactly which direction Davian was turning, and that was even more frightening.

“Where is it boy? I know you have it!”

Cedric just stood there, stupefied. And for once, he wanted Davian to keep talking so he could figure out what exactly he was being accused of, but Davian just kept staring with his vicious eyes so then Cedric spoke quietly.

“I…” he said. “I didn’t take anything.”

Davian would have laughed, but he was so full of rage that what came out was dangerously both and neither.

“Bloody hell you didn’t!”

He opened one of the drawers and pointed into it, and Cedric couldn’t see, but assumed from inference that it must have laid empty.

“Where is it then?” he demanded.

Cedric just stood there, and he noticed his eyebrows furrow a little, but he tried to stop them from doing that.

“W-what—”

“You know very well what, because it was there yesterday and now it’s gone and I know very well you were looking to go peering into my Book!”

“Davian…” Cedric tried again.

“That square of fabric is older than your grandfather’s father and you know that and that’s why you took it when you chanced upon the lucky find!”

Cedric stood there, feeling tilted like a scarecrow in a field, a scarecrow that just stands there and after a while the birds figure it out and go after the seed that is scattered where the feet never touch the ground.

“Thought you would hurt me?” he demanded. “Thought you would hurt me if you took it? Is that what you wanted?”

Davian’s eyes were getting a little wet, then.

“You shouldn’t have touched it,” he said, standing even in mid-air a little less straight. “You shouldn’t have touched it, a thing like that won’t keep if you handle it; it was mine, of the cat, of the cat, my little cat…”

There was silence in the room then, and it was the worst kind of silence, the kind that isn’t respite but is rather more like plague because it seeps like poison into all the dark quiet safe places until there is no air left.

“Just…” Davian said, looking away, pleading. “Just return it to me.”

And his voice ran against the ground, scattering, like leaves in the autumn wind. “I won’t be angry, I know it’s something I’ve brought upon myself by way of my own actions, but Cedric, I beg you—”

“Return it to me.”

And they were still for a moment, looking in their own ways, and then Davian was gone, gone in the way he was always gone when he teleported to someplace somehow for somereason.

But he was not truly gone in the way Davian was never truly gone, and even more so because one of the portraits on the wall was still looking down on the boy with the hair like dirty straw and eyes like husk on corn that still could not be eaten.

And this had been the face once claimed by the other to belong to Sir Edward Winchester, a father, and maybe a third, but as it too looked over its nose at the apprentice who couldn’t summon, couldn’t invoke, couldn’t chant, it looked more than ever like the man who was no longer in the room.

And Cedric knew, eyes cast into the darkness, that there was at least one thing left in the desk, because while a great many things had been thrown out and onto the floor, one thing had not. And he knew it was there, still there because he had found it when he’d gone looking, and when he’d found it there, he’d left it where he’d found it, and he wasn’t exactly sure why he had left it, because it was perhaps the only thing in the desk that wasn’t Davian’s because Cedric knew to whom it belonged, or had once belonged to, before it had become his.

And it was a folding knife with a three-point-five-inch blade.