The door did not swing open the way a door opened for a hand on a hinge. It dissolved, briefly, into something that was not quite wood and not quite shadow, and reformed a heartbeat later once whatever had passed through it no longer needed the illusion of an ordinary threshold.

The man who stepped into the vault wore no mark of rank, no cloak, nothing that told the eye anything about which pack, which territory, which side of any war he belonged to. He was older than Marina expected, silver threaded through dark hair, his face lined in the particular way of someone who had spent a very long...