Caraway seeds in soda bread are a hate crime against the jaw.
Julian knew this before he had teeth, and having three sharp incisors poking through his gums only deepened his conviction. His grandmother kept trying to mash the greyish, crumbly abomination with warm milk. Julian retaliated by spitting it precisely onto the wallpaper behind his high chair, where the faded floral pattern could absorb the grease of her culinary sins.
Aside from the bread and an abiding, cold sweat terror of domestic geese—foul, neck-extending dinosaurs with serrated tongues that patrolled the River Glyde just two hundred yards away—Julian had very few complaints about County Louth. It rained. The grass was impossibly green. The villagers in Tallanstown spoke in a rolling, musical cadence that sounded like stones tumbling inside a wooden bucket. His mother was a red-haired Scottish nurse from Aberdeen with wrists like iron cables; his father was an Irish mechanic who smelled perpetually of copper grease and tea.
Julian was supposed to be a regular infant.
He was not a regular infant.
The cosmic patron who had tossed him into this reality had evidently used a shovel instead of a pipette. The stack of supernatural lineages humming behind Julian’s ribcage felt less like an ancestral blessing and more like a crowded pub where four different rugby teams were attempting to brawl in an elevator. Every time he hiccuped, the air pressure in the nursery dropped three millibars.
Julian gripped the wooden bars of his cot, hauled himself up onto wobbly shins, and glared at the floorboards.
His balance was atrocious. His head weighed twenty percent of his total body mass. Therefore, when he leaned forward to inspect the carpet, he nearly performed a front flip into his wicker laundry basket. He caught himself on the rail with a furious grunt, his knuckles white.
The real nuisance was not the cambion heat simmering beneath his sternum, nor the faint, gravity-distorting thrum of Simon earth-flames that made his stuffed badger float two inches above the duvet whenever he got cranky. The nuisance was the parcel.
It had materialized at the foot of his mattress three minutes after his father had stepped out to fetch a pint of stout from the pub down the lane.
It was not wrapped in brown paper. It was bound in heavy, wax-sealed lead foil.
Julian crawled across the woollen blanket, dragging his knees with deliberate care. He reached out and tugged the lead foil aside.
Beneath it lay four rings and a pair of knitted wool-and-steel mittens that looked absurdly small, accompanied by a leather-bound codex no larger than a prayer book. The codex, despite being shut tight with an iron clasp, smelled faintly of ozone and old parchment. It was heavy enough to break a toe. When Julian pressed a tiny, uncoordinated thumb against the latch, the book bit him.
A sharp prick drew a bead of bright crimson. The latch snapped open.
A flood of script, dense and flickering in Latin, archaic Japanese, and Enochian, unfurled across the first flyleaf. Then it froze, as if waiting for him to grow tall enough to reach the top shelf. There was a hard catch to the magic: it was cold. Accessing even a cantrip dragged the ambient room temperature down until his breath misted in the nursery air. If he pushed harder, frost formed on his dummy. The world did not like unearned miracles; it taxed them in calories and BTUs.
Julian looked down at the rings.
There was the silver crest of the Vongola, crowned with its stylized flame. There was the Mare ring, carved like spread plumage. Beside them rested the heavy, jagged band of the Simon family, dull as river mud, vibrating with the slow weight of tectonic plates.
He picked up the Simon ring. It immediately shrank, snapping down to fit his middle finger like a cold brass nut.
*Thump.*
A heavy thud sounded from the kitchen window downstairs.
Julian froze.
His mother was currently at the grocer’s in Ardee. His father was at the snug in the Fox & Goose. The cottage was supposed to be empty except for him, the stuffed badger, and the lingering stink of burnt toast.
Footsteps moved across the flagstones. They were light. They were ridiculously agile. They made almost no sound at all, save for the faint squeak of expensive Italian calfskin on wet slate.
Julian shoved the three loose rings and the book beneath his pillow. He pulled the knitted wool-and-steel gloves over his tiny hands. They automatically contracted, clinging to his baby wrists with an elastic snap that made his eyes water.
The nursery door squeaked inward.
A tall man in a dark green sports jacket and a brilliant yellow knit tie slipped into the room. He had long sideburns, a face that looked like an expressive rubber wedge, and hair cut in a ragged crop that defied every standard of British and Irish respectability.
He carried a leather satchel tucked high beneath one arm. His eyes darted to the window, to the closet, and finally down to the cot.
He stopped.
"Well, now," the intruder murmured in Japanese, his tone dipping into a smooth, theatrical purr. "Look at you. What an inconveniently placed witness."
Julian stared back, his round, bluish eyes unblinking.
It was Arsène Lupin III.
Julian did not scream. He did not cry. Crying resulted in mothers offering mashed soda bread, which was a fate far worse than burglary. Instead, he gripped the top rail of the cot and evaluated the man’s jacket. The tailoring was impeccable, but the right cuff had a grease stain from an oil cooler. A classic Fiat 500, undoubtedly. The suspension on those was wretched on County Louth’s potholed back roads.
Lupin walked over to the cot on the tips of his toes, grinning broadly. "Hey there, little monk. Nice room you’ve got. Peaceful. No sirens. No angry inspectors screaming through megaphones about the dignity of the French Republic."
He reached into his breast pocket, drew out a small, velvet-lined jeweler’s box, and pried it open. Inside sat a tear-shaped emerald the size of a pigeon’s egg, deep sea-green and utterly flawless.
"Need to stow this for about twenty minutes," Lupin whispered conspiratorially, winking down at Julian. "Just while my tall friend from Tokyo works out that I didn't actually jump the ferry at Greenore. You don't mind holding onto it, do you? You look like a professional. You’ve got that stony look. Very Sicilian."
Julian did not answer. He was preoccupied with the faint, invisible thread that had just snagged in his peripheral vision.
It was not Lupin’s emerald.
Far away—hundreds of miles away, or perhaps across an ocean entirely—a golden filament jerked tight in the void of Julian’s inner awareness. It felt like a tether wound around two separate compass needles. One tugged toward a laboratory sterile with formaldehyde and high-grade plastic, smelling faintly of cold tea and tobacco smoke. The other pulled toward a grand stone terrace overlooking an alpine valley, bright with snow and smelling of ironed velvet.
A contract. A soul-resonance.
It flared behind Julian's eyelids, buzzing like a hornets' nest. Two distinct signals. One cautious and brilliant, guarded by layers of institutional ice. The other sheltered, royal, and suffocating under the weight of hereditary protocol.
The sheer psychic feedback made Julian lose his footing.
His knee buckled. He tumbled sideways against the cot's slats.
Lupin caught him instinctively, his gloved hand reaching between the wooden bars to support Julian’s shoulder before he could crack his forehead.
"Whoa there, champion," Lupin muttered, his clownish grin fading for a fraction of a second into something sharp and extraordinarily observant. His fingers touched the knitted material of Julian's miniature mitt.
Lupin pulled back slightly. His eyebrows rose.
"That's funny," the thief murmured, his voice dropping into French for half a beat. "Kevlar-silk composite weave? With a damper plate on the thumb? Who the devil is your tailor, kid?"
Julian slapped Lupin’s hand away.
It was an intentional, spiteful swat. The Simon ring on his finger pulsed. The tiny jolt of gravity didn't knock Lupin over, but it did multiply the effective weight of the thief’s left shoe by approximately forty pounds.
Lupin’s foot smashed through the dry floorboard beneath him with a splintering *CRACK*.
"Yeowch!" Lupin hissed, dancing on one leg as the wood gave way. "What kind of termites do you people breed out here?"
He dropped the velvet box. It tumbled into the cot, landing softly on Julian’s pillow beside the hidden grimoire.
Before Lupin could yank his leg free from the floorboards, a tremendous bellow echoed from the bottom of the lane, loud enough to rattle the cottage’s single-pane glass.
"LUUUUUUPIIIIIIIN!"
Inspector Koichi Zenigata’s voice possessed the carrying power of a naval foghorn.
Lupin wiggled his stuck shoe frantically, wrenching it free of the joist with a muffled curse. "Ah, the Inspector. Always so punctual. Never gives a man time for tea."
He scrambled toward the window, throwing one long leg over the sill. Then he looked back at the cot.
The velvet box was sitting directly under Julian's left hand.
Julian had already pulled the corner of his woollen blanket over it. His blue-grey gaze remained completely empty, the portrait of infant dullness.
Lupin narrowed his eyes. The grin returned, smaller this time, stripped of its buffoonery. He touched the brim of an imaginary hat. "Keep it warm for me, junior. I know where you live."
He slipped out into the drizzle, dropping eight feet into the hydrangea bushes below. A second later, the frantic clatter of a two-cylinder engine roared to life somewhere behind the hedgerows, followed immediately by the squeal of tires and Zenigata’s incoherent, furious roaring in broken English.
The noise receded down the Ardee road.
The cottage fell quiet again.
Julian sat in his cot, breathing slowly through his nose. His breath still carried that faint, wintry chill from touching the grimoire.
He reached beneath the blanket.
He did not touch the emerald. He did not care about the emerald.
He touched the Simon ring on his finger, then touched the strange, cold iron latch of the grimoire.
Between the pages, where he had bled, a single line of text had rewritten itself, shifting away from Latin into jagged, modern print:
*The ledger requires three signatures before the equinox. Two are already bound; the ink is wet.*
Julian pulled the glove off with his teeth, dropped it onto the mattress, and looked at the skin of his own forearm.
Faint, silvery script was blooming under the epidermis, tracing along his veins like frost on a windowpane. It wasn't fading. It was spreading upward toward his shoulder, hungry and incomplete, waiting for names that hadn't even been registered in a parish office yet.
A draught stirred the curtains. Julian grabbed his wooden teething ring and bit down until the ash timber groaned under his jaw.
He had eighteen years before anything was supposed to happen in Beika City. But the clock on the nursery mantle wasn't ticking in seconds anymore; it was ticking in miles.