The roof of the Hotel Eterna was a quiet place. Its space had been given over to a church, the altar at the far end and the rows of pews all suitable for speeches or sermons or weddings. But beneath the stillness of the night sky, the delicate scent of lavender perfuming the breeze, it became a place for contemplation.

In that silence, Dr. Camilla Alucard could hear the ticking.

But then again, she thought, the quiet had little to do with it.

In a few weeks, the night would no longer be silent and still. Gaslights would blaze from posts and windows. The clatter of carriage wheels and the hubbub of voices would fill the streets. An organ-grinder's tinny music, a chestnut-seller's sales pitch, a child's laugh and a lover's sigh would all be heard. People were coming back to the capital. Purged of the fiends that had haunted its streets, Eurulm was no longer part of the World Without Night.

Even then, Camilla would still hear it.

She pressed her hand to her chest. There was no scar, yet she was all too aware of what lay beneath the skin, the clockwork artifact that kept her blood flowing. After all, she'd been the one to put it there.

Scientifically speaking—and Camilla was always scientific—there was no way that she should have been able to hear anything. The phrase "auditory hallucination" best fit the facts. A left-over scrap of the natural human disquiet she should have felt when she'd set the machines, knowing that being out of tolerance by even a millimeter would mean her death, when she'd calculated the dose of ether, and buckled herself to the laboratory table so that her still-beating heart could be extracted and the artificial one set in its place.

So that she could then, with her own hands, set her heart in place of the one Aluche Amatoria had lost, because Camilla had known that a biological heart would synchronize better with the Blue Blood, allowing her to bring the dead knight back to life as a half-demon.

She'd heard the ticking ever since.

She'd heard it when Aluche's eyelids raised, revealing eyes now mismatched, one iris flooded with azure. She'd heard it while they pursued every clue to the Moon Queen's plan and whereabouts. She'd heard it through every battle fought, every tear shed, every delighted laugh. She'd heard it as Aluche and Liliana pushed Malvasia within the void of time, the forever-frozen piece of Eternal Night that caught them all. She'd heard it when she fought the battles that made them call Camilla the Hero of Eurulm.

And she heard it still, as she considered the future, the work yet to do, the changes that had to be made if the Curia was truly to stand for humanity rather than merely as one of its would-be rulers.

A sound that was not real, but that she heard nonetheless.

Then she looked up at the sky, and thought of the azure moon that she could not see, but whose presence she felt with every breath she took, and she smiled.

It ticked on, that soft, steady reminder of who Camilla was, what she'd accomplished and the things that were yet to be done, and she found that she didn't mind at all.