The colossal organ pulsed above the floorboards in a sickening blue flare, casting grease-stained shadows over Leta’s borrowed apron. Barnaby whimpered behind her skirts. Ovidia kept her gaze locked onto the luminous sinew. “An abyssal core,” she said, testing the air for ozone and brine. “An ingredient rare enough to bankrupt an empire. And Graves vaults keep it bolted down.” Sterling, who had been scrambling to his feet, paused, his face still pale from the psychic projection. “Hoards it?” Sterling repeated, his knuckles gray against his dish rag. “You speak as if it’s a kitchen crock, not a relic.” “To commoners it’s a relic. To your bloodline, it’s an unseasoned trophy.” She leveled a wooden spoon at his nose. “House Graves keeps it locked while the dead ruler beneath my floorboards starves on phantom ash. If that ancient hunger breaks containment, neither your gold nor my marrow will survive the night.” Barnaby crawled out from beneath the butcher block on shaking knees. “The… the Graves vaults? In High Quarter? We’ll be flayed!” Sterling stared, wringing his damp rag into a copper basin. “The Marrow heir,” he muttered under his breath. “You speak of her as if you cooked by her elbow.” Ovidia’s brow arched. “More intimately than you could possibly imagine, Graves. Why the sudden interest in the late Ovidia Marrow?” He dragged a soapy cuff across his snot. “Because my own broth tasted like boiled parchment, Leta. Every gold leaf, every gilded kraken fin—all tasteless vanity. I thought that was the standard Ovidia Marrow required to turn her head. I bought the dearest stock so she might taste my pan.” A choked hiccup shook his ribs. “I wished to feed *her*.” He buried his chin into the coarse linen, weeping into grease spots. Ovidia crossed her arms, disgusted yet faintly mollified. The pampered brat who had spent years mocking her slow-simmer stocks had simply been begging for a crumb of approval like an underfed terrier. A pathetic admission, yet remarkably useful. “Dry your nose,” she snapped. “You wanted her praise, yet you let your kin hoard the only organ capable of sating the slumbering monarch below our pantry. We extract that organ from your ancestral cellar before the blood moon rises, or every apparition in this city will pick our ribs clean.” Barnaby squeaked. “A burglary? The Graves compound is ringed with rune-forged iron and hound wards!” “Which is why you are leaving first,” Ovidia said, catching the scullion by his collar. “You scurried through every alley in the lower district without being eaten. Send your pigeon, Percy, over their courtyard eaves. Note the watch-lanterns and ward-posts. Dawn is your limit.” She dropped an ivory whistle into his palm. Barnaby stared down at the whistle. “Me? Spy on High Quarter nobles? Their boundary wards make my molars vibrate!” “Take this tallow lamp,” she said, shoving a smoked-glass lantern into his grip. “The wick burns corpse-fat. It blinds perimeter talismans for twenty paces. Run.” Clutching the lamp, Barnaby scrambled through the scullery threshold into the fog, his boots slipping on wet cobbles. Ovidia turned back to the wash tub. “Sterling. The floor plans to your father’s subterranean vaults. Describe them.” Sterling scrubbed a sleeve over his reddened eyelids. “The vault floor is granite encased in brine-glass, Leta. My father keeps three padlock wards on the organ brine-tank. You cannot simply carry an abyssal cut by hand—its frost rots living skin.” “Then we seal an iron stockpot with salt-paste and grave-rind,” she said, unhooking her heaviest cast-iron cauldron. She crushed dried rue and star-anise in a stone mortar, tossing the pungent powder into vinegar. The bitter perfume drove back the damp cellar stench. If the prize radiated frost, she would brine it in spiced preservation oil until her burners were lit. Gray light seeped through the cracked pantry transom hours later. A dull thump sounded against the sill. Percy rested there, feathers missing from one wing, a curled scrap of butcher paper bound to his leg with frayed twine. Rusty smears coated the parchment. Ovidia ripped the binding free. “*Captured at the North Gatehouse. Send help.*”

The Midnight Menu Changes