12. Velma Doomweaver #2
“Created how?” Miles leaned forward, his curiosity already kindled.
“Binding ritual and sacrifice. The crafting process was long, intensive, and required extraordinary resources. You won’t find the spell in any Guild-sanctioned spellbook, Master Beauchamp.” Velma’s eyes flickered to Genna before she drew another card and placed it across the first.
The image showed scales—golden, ornate—but one side hung heavy with chains while the other held nothing at all. “ The Inheritance. The binding passes with the title. Whoever holds Rookgate holds the house’s... loyalty is not the right word. Obligation. Compulsion.”
Gabriel’s stomach turned. Compulsion. He knew about compulsion. Madaze had used magical compulsion on him for years, forcing him to spy and steal and—
Heavy golden chains emerged from the second card and seemed to reappear in the first, wrapping around the vague object on the anvil.
The sconces along the walls dimmed, then flared.
Gabriel stared at the card, at the golden chains that looked sickeningly familiar.
Madaze hadn’t just done this to people. He hadn’t just broken Gabriel .
He had broken the very world around him because he couldn’t stand the existence of anything he didn’t own completely.
The house wasn’t evil. It was just... him.
Before Miles. Before he remembered how to say no.
“Madaze,” Gabriel forced his voice to be even. “He made it. And then enslaved it. He really is a one-trick pony.”
Miles took his hand under the table, and they both squeezed.
Velma flipped another card. This one made Gabriel flinch—a figure bound in silver thread, mouth open in a silent scream. The Labyrinth , she called it. Suffering without end, without escape.
“In the past position,” Velma continued, “this indicates prolonged torment. The entity experienced considerable pain during its formation and binding. It learned to fear. To obey. To survive by anticipating its master’s cruelty.”
The chandelier’s crystals trembled overhead.
Gabriel shifted uncomfortably. He wasn’t interested in dwelling on parallels between himself and the building. “Lovely. We’ve established its tragic backstory. Can we move on to something more helpful, like what to do with it?”
“The magical theory underlying this is fascinating,” Miles murmured, almost to himself. “Creating true sapience would require—”
“An anchor,” Genna finished, her expression troubled. “Something to house the consciousness. The building itself, perhaps, or an object within it.”
“The attic,” Nikka said. “That’s why it won’t let anyone up there. It’s protecting something.”
“Can we focus?” Gabriel snapped. “I don’t care how Madaze tortured a house into existence. I care about what we do now.”
“There is an order to these things,” Velma said, unruffled by his outburst. “First the past, then the present.” She flipped another card. The Meteor . On the parchment, a ball of fire streaked across a dark sky, heading for a collision.
Her hand stilled, hovering over the card.
For the first time since they’d met, something flickered across Velma’s impassive face. Her gray eyes narrowed at whatever image lay before her .
“That is irregular,” she said.
“Irregular bad or irregular interesting?” Genna asked.
“Irregular in terms of velocity,” Velma said. Then, in that same flat, businesslike tone, she said, “Duck.”
Gabriel blinked. “I beg your—”
“ Duck! ” Miles shouted, grabbing Gabriel’s shoulder and yanking him downward.
Gabriel hit the floor as glass exploded inward. Crossbow bolts whistled overhead and through the space where his head had been a moment before, thunking into the wallpaper behind him.
More glass shattered—the large windows along the eastern wall—and dark figures poured through the gaps, rolling into crouches before spreading through the room with blades drawn. Six of them. Seven. All in black, faces covered, moving with the coordination of professionals.
He should have been paralyzed with fear. Instead, something bright and vicious unfurled in Gabriel’s chest.
Finally.
After days of paperwork and bureaucrats and mysteries and plotting and compromising and playing nice with monsters who wore noble titles, here was something he understood. Something simple. Something he was good at.
Violence.
His daggers were in his hands before conscious thought caught up, the familiar weight settling into his palms like coming home. He rolled sideways as the nearest assassin lunged, came up inside the man’s guard, and opened his throat with a neat flick of his wrist.
“I take it Lord Vellast wasn’t convinced by my performance,” Gabriel called to Miles as he danced away from another attack, the blade missing his ribs by inches.
He pivoted, kicked the assassin’s knee sideways with a satisfying crack, and finished him with a thrust between the ribs.
“Such a shame. I thought I played the vapid noble rather well.”
“Your performance was excellent.” Miles’s voice carried that infuriatingly calm academic tone as he positioned himself between the attackers and a frozen Nikka. Golden light gathered at his fingertips as his other hand fished in his combat rig. “Some people can’t appreciate good theater. ”
A bolt of force slammed into an assassin’s chest, sending him crashing backward through a china cabinet. Porcelain exploded in a shower of painted roses and gilded edges.
Genna stepped forward as an assassin swung at her head; she ducked, came up inside his reach, and scored a dagger through the cloth above his gauntlet where the armor didn’t cover. It was just a scratch, but he dropped.
Genna’s poisons were marvelous.
“Behind you,” she called to Gabriel.
Gabriel spun, caught the incoming strike on his crossed daggers, and kicked the man’s legs out from under him. A quick stomp to the throat ended that particular threat.
At the table, Velma remained seated. She hadn’t moved. As Gabriel maneuvered past her, her pen rolled off the edge of the tabletop. She leaned down to retrieve it, and a thrown dagger sailed through the exact space her head had occupied, embedding itself in the wall behind her.
She straightened, examined her pen for damage, and straightened a card that had been knocked askew as Genna rolled over it to escape an assassin’s wild thrusts.
“Velma!” Gabriel shouted. “Perhaps you might consider relocating ?”
“That won’t be necessary.” She straightened her skirts. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”
“Miss Brightly.” Miles’s voice cut through the chaos with the patient tones of a lecturer addressing a particularly slow student. “Do you recall the kinetic displacement exercise from your third-year curriculum?”
Nikka stood paralyzed behind him, her face chalk-white, spectacles askew. “I—the— what ?”
“Vireon’s Hand.” Miles deflected another attacker with a casual gesture, sending the man spinning into the wall. “The principles are identical. Extend your will through the Kinetite focus. Visualize the force as an extension of your arm.”
“Miles, is now really the right time for a lesson?” Genna’s hand dug into a pocket of her apron and came out with a fist of something she flung into the face of her attacker as he tried to follow her over the table. He went down like a sack of bricks .
“On the contrary.” Miles smiled, and there was something almost gleeful in it. “Practical application in high-stress environments is invaluable. Nikka, consider this your supplementary field examination.”
An assassin charged them. Nikka squeaked, thrust out a fist wrapped around a stone, and a wobbly pulse of force caught the man in the shoulder. It wasn’t elegant—he staggered rather than flew—but it bought Miles the opening to finish him with a precisely placed bolt of golden light.
“Acceptable,” Miles said. “Your vector was slightly off. Aim for center mass next time and visualize lifting, not pushing. Again.”
Gabriel laughed, actually laughed , as he parried another attack and opened a line across his opponent’s belly. The man crumpled, clutching his spilling intestines. “Are you genuinely tutoring during an assassination attempt?”
“Opportunities for experiential learning are rare.” Miles caught Nikka’s arm and adjusted her stance. “Elbow tucked. Good. Now, the one on your left.”
Nikka’s second attempt was cleaner. The assassin lifted off his feet and crashed into the sideboard, which the house helpfully slammed shut on his fingers when he tried to pull himself back up.
“Much better! See how the follow-through improved your—behind you, Gabriel!”
Gabriel spun, but he knew even as he moved that he wasn’t going to make it. The assassin had flanked him somehow, blade already descending toward his exposed back. He tried to twist, to bring his daggers up, but the angle was wrong and the distance was wrong and—
The floor beneath the assassin’s feet vanished.
The man dropped with a startled scream, and then the parquet snapped shut again with a sickening crunch. Blood seeped through the seams of the wood as the assassin’s bisected body twitched and went still.
Gabriel froze, staring at the bloodied floorboards. The house had saved him. Not Miles, not his own reflexes— the house .
“Well,” he murmured, “that’s new.”
“I believe we just witnessed evidence of sapient defensive capabilities,” Miles observed clinically, as if commenting on an interesting academic phenomenon rather than a man being bisected by angry architecture.
“The structural manipulation required to separate and rejoin load-bearing elements with that precision suggests a degree of control—”
“ Miles. ”
“Right. Later.”
The remaining assassins had noticed too. Their coordination faltered, confidence crumbling as they realized the very building had turned against them. One bolted for the broken windows. The floor buckled under his feet, sending him sprawling. Genna was on him before he could rise.