We needed Julie. She was a sensate—she saw the colors of magic with more precision than any m-scanner. I stuck my head out into the hallway and called, “Could someone find my kid, please, and ask her to come down here?”

Five minutes later, Julie entered the medward. When I’d first found her, she’d been half-starved, skinny, and had had anxiety attacks if the protective layer of grime was removed from her skin. Now at fourteen, she had progressed from skinny to lean. Her legs and arms showed definition if she flexed. She was meticulously clean, but recently had decided that the invention of brushes was unnecessary and a waste of time, so her blond hair looked like a cross between a rough haystack and a bird’s nest.

I explained about the necklace. Julie approached the boy. “Hey. I’m going to look at the thing on your neck, okay?”

Roderick said nothing.

Julie peered at the metal. “Odd. It’s pale.”

“Pale yellow? Pale green?” Any tint was good.

“No. It looks colorless, like hot air rising from the pavement.”

Transparent magic. Now I had seen everything.

“There are very faint runes on it,” Julie said, “hard to make out. I’m not surprised you missed them,” she added.

“Can you read them?” Curran asked.

She shook her head. “It’s not any runic alphabet I was taught.”

Doolittle handed her a piece of paper and a pencil and she wrote five symbols on it. Runes, the ancient letters of Old Norse and Germanic alphabets, had undergone several changes over the years, but the oldest runes owed their straight up-and-down appearance to the fact that historically they had to be carved on a hard surface: all straight lines, no curves, no tiny strokes. These symbols definitely fit that pattern, but they didn’t look like any runes I’d seen. I could spend a day or two digging through books, but Roderick didn’t have that long. We needed information fast.

Curran must’ve come to the same conclusion. “Do we know any rune experts?”

I tapped the paper. “I can make some calls. There is a guy—Dagfinn Heyerdahl. He used to be with the Norse Heritage Foundation.”

The Norse Heritage Foundation wasn’t so much about heritage as it was about Viking, in the most cliché sense of the word. They drank huge quantities of beer, they brawled, and they wore horned helmets despite all historical evidence to the contrary.

“Used to be?” Curran asked.

“They kicked him out for being drunk and violent.”

Curran blinked. “The Norse Heritage?”

“Mhm.”

“Don’t you have to be drunk and violent just to get in?” he asked. “Just how disorderly did he get?”