Hecate had come to Merlin a few days ago with something heavy clearly on her mind, and that didn't happen all that often, so he was instantly interested, even though he played it cool. She did too, looping around to what was bothering her, possibly in an attempt to string Merlin along and keep him guessing (and dammit, it worked). Kaden, the dog who would be boy, was back in New York, and what was more, whatever trauma he'd been through with Hecate's magic had affected him somehow.
Now this interested Merlin on a couple of levels. One, this series of events was highly irregular and extremely intriguing. And two, his own magic had been integral to the boy becoming, well, a boy, and thus may have impacted this small development. Which, needless to say, definitely held his attention.
So he'd promised Hecate at least an assessment. Any further than that would have to be evaluated as they went. Which is how he found himself on a bench on the roof of the Enodia, smoking a pipe under a crisp, cloudless night sky. Blue curls of smoke drifted lazily upward, and he hummed an old song under his breath, something from the old tales not heard by the ears of man in decades, if not centuries.
It was easy enough to create the door he needed. The Enodia was primed for that sort of thing already. A puff of wind, a little encouragement to the nighttime plants to smell just as inviting as they could, and was that an owl, calling nearby? Perhaps he needed to repack his pipe just then, knocking out the old ashes and relighting it afresh, a glow of a match illuminating his face for a moment before it disappeared behind a cloud of fresh smoke. All things engineered to be just interesting enough to a sleepless teen boy up past his bedtime.