Page 33 of Paws & Order

"That's a warning if I ever heard one," she says, but she doesn't look worried.

We call it a night after I do two more perimeter checks and set a warding circle of salt around her bedroom door.

Mostly for show.

A little for me.

I take first watch on the couch because Liza insists on "not having a six-foot-eight werewolf looming in her doorway like a sleep paralysis demon."

She does leave the door open, though.

The half-light catches the curve of her shoulder in a way that makes my chest tight.

I stare at the ceiling and count the hours until sunrise.

Enoch arrives at City Hall just after seven, looking like he hasn't slept in a decade.

He's got a box of files under one arm, a laptop under the other, and what appears to be a bottle of coconut water.

No one can explain Enoch's liquid diet.

Not even Enoch.

But I suspect it's a leftover from his time running the occult crime bureau in San Francisco.

"Chief. Liza."

He sets down the crate, pulls out a spiral-bound notebook, and starts paging through it without so much as a preamble.

"I cross-referenced the script from your incident last night with the previous two. The hand is identical. By identical, I mean there's no sign of fatigue, no variation, no deviation in the pressure or slant. Hyperconsistent. Not human."

Liza raises her hand.

"Not even calligrapher-consistent?"

Enoch glances up, pale eyes sparking.

"Not unless the calligrapher was a printing press. It's uncanny. And the language—did you see the words? Dearest. Most beloved. I ran it through a linguistics database. The syntax lines up with late Victorian English, US variant, mid- to upper-class. Circa 1890s."

Liza's eyebrow goes up, then back down.

"So we have a time traveler."

Enoch doesn't even blink.

"Or a resident spirit with an unusually articulate sense of nostalgia."

She leans in, only half joking.

"I'm starting to like this guy. He has a strong gifting ethic."

I try to keep my face even.

"Where does this get us, Enoch?"

He's back to the notebook, fingers drumming.

"Here's where it gets twisty. The copper spiral? Not just a spiral. If you flatten it out, it's a section of an old-fashioned hairpin. Victorian, again. In that period, copper was sometimes used in mourning jewelry. Lovers, family, the very recently passed."