Morning Star

"Seven seals." Harry raised an eyebrow. "What's inside them?"

Holt looked at him, fear appearing in his gray eyes for the first time.

"I don't know all of it," Holt said. "My clearance isn't high enough. I handled the technical details of each breach operation, but after a seal was opened—what was inside, where it went, what the ultimate objective was—only Minister Graves and Cohen knew those things. I only know one thing."

"What?"

"After every seal was opened, Cohen would personally enter the interior of the seal. Every time he came back out, his magical signature had changed in some way. After the first seal, his magic still retained the emotional fluctuations of a normal person. By the seventh seal, he was completely different. You said just now you'd seen his magical signature. What you saw should have been his most recent residue. Cold, without any emotion at all. That wasn't what he was originally like."

Holt shuddered involuntarily.

"It was the thing inside the seals that changed him."

"How many seals are there in total?" Harry pressed.

"Ninety-nine," Holt said. "Cohen mentioned that number in an internal technical meeting once. Ninety-nine seals, spread across the world. The seven discovered within the United States have all been breached. Nevada is the eighth. After the seal in Nevada is breached, Cohen and Minister Graves will enter the interior of the seal together. Then—"

"Then what?"

"Then they'll disappear," Holt said. "Before Minister Graves left Washington for Nevada, he signed a document. The contents of the document said that if he did not return to Washington within seventy-three hours after the Nevada operation, temporary command of the American Ministry of Magic would be transferred to a designated person. I was the one who drafted that document."

"Who was the designated person?"