Chapter 24 #2
Incubus perception amplified through his bond with Amrion. The ability had always been his. The range was what they'd been building—weeks of drills pushing it further, holding it cleaner. I watched his head tilt fractionally, tracking something miles away.
Anya watched with professional interest. I watched his face.
It changed.
A tightening around his eyes. His jaw. His hands went rigid on his knees. And I knew before he said a word, because I'd seen that exact expression on him once before, when he'd talked about his mother.
He was feeling them.
"Multiple signals," he said without opening his eyes.
His voice was strained in a way Draven's voice was never strained.
"Same direction Anya indicated. Northeast. Clustered.
Bonds in various stages. Some fraying, some nearly gone, some actively being.
.." He stopped. Swallowed. "Being corrupted. Right now."
He opened his eyes. The mask came back, smooth and fast, but I'd seen underneath it.
"How many?" I asked.
"At least a dozen. Maybe more. The signals blur at the edges."
Anya had gone pale. "A dozen people. Right now. Having their bonds...?"
"Drowned," I said. The word came out harder than I intended.
The dead pointing northeast. The living pointing northeast. Two completely different abilities confirming the same thing.
There was a facility out there. Active. Running.
Thalon hit the bond like a thunderhead breaking.
Not words yet. Just presence—massive, close, angry in a way that was older than I was. He'd been a warm hum all evening, patient the way he always was when I was working. He wasn't patient now.
"Rider."
His voice was quieter than the presence behind it. That was how I knew he was furious. When Thalon got loud, it was performance. When he got quiet, it was real.
"What they did to you—"
"I know."
The collar around my neck. The moment Thalon's voice in my mind had gone silent, the world going grey and flat and empty. The mate bond with Mason dissolving into static. Reaching for the connections that made me whole and finding nothing.
I'd lived it. I knew exactly what those dozen people were feeling right now, in that facility, in the dark. The drowning. The silence where someone they loved used to be.
"I am sorry you are learning the scale of it like this," he said, and the tenderness in the words nearly undid me more than the fury had. "You should not have to carry this memory twice."
"It's not being carried twice if I'm doing something about it this time."
A long beat. Then the fury rose back up underneath the tenderness, banked but absolutely present.
"We do not let this stand."
"No. We don't."
My eyes were stinging. I pressed my palms flat against the table and breathed through it.
Nobody spoke for a moment. The evidence sat between us—Anya's notes, the ring, the map with its northeast line drawn in pencil.
Draven was staring at the wall like he could see through it to wherever those signals were coming from.
Anya had her arms wrapped around herself, her violet eyes distant, still half in the space between the living and the dead.
I pulled my glasses off and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. The sting didn't stop, but the pressure helped me hold it together. When I put them back on, the room was the same. The evidence was the same. The weight of it hadn't shifted.
But my resolve had.
The shadows in the corner of the study shifted. The temperature dropped for the third time that evening—but different this time. Not death-cold. Not the Library. This was deliberate. Focused. The smell of thunderstorms and ozone.
Anya's head snapped up. Her violet eyes went wide and her hand moved instinctively, magic flickering at her fingertips.
"Easy," I said. "He's with us." I'd forgotten that Anya and Ciaran had never met.
Ciaran materialized from the shadows at the far end of the study, silver eyes catching the lamplight. He was already looking at me—reading my face, my posture, the tears I hadn't quite managed to blink away.
He crossed the room in three strides. Not to the table. Not to the evidence. To me.
"A rúnsearc." His voice was low, rough at the edges, and he said it like the word itself was a hand reaching for mine.
His fingers found my jaw first—tilting my face up, thumb brushing the damp skin beneath my eye where I hadn't been fast enough. The shadows followed him, curling around my wrists, my shoulders, sliding against my skin like cool silk.
He kissed me. Not softly. Not the way you kiss someone when other people are watching. His mouth was warm and deliberate, his hand sliding to the back of my neck, and for three full seconds the room—the evidence, the horror, the dozen people in the dark—went quiet.
His shadows wrapped around us both, muffling sound, dimming the lamplight, and I let them. I let him. Because Ciaran's darkness had never once felt like a cage. It felt like steadiness. Somewhere to breathe.
When he pulled back, his thumb traced my lower lip. His silver eyes searched mine—not asking if I was okay. Reading exactly how not-okay I was and filing it somewhere behind his ribs where he kept every hurt of mine he intended to answer for.
"I'm fine," I said, which was a lie, and he knew it, and I knew he knew it, and his shadows tightened once around my shoulders before releasing me.
I became aware of the silence behind us. The very loud, very pointed silence.
Anya hadn't relaxed. "Who is—" She stopped. Tilted her head. "What are you? My magic is reacting to you."
"Ciaran," I said. "He's—"
"Old," Anya finished, her eyes narrowing. "Very old. And dark. My death magic is practically vibrating."
Ciaran regarded her with a flicker of respect. "Necromancer. A real one, not the parlor-trick variety."
He pulled a chair close to mine—close enough that his thigh pressed against my leg when he sat—and settled into it like he'd always been there. His shadows didn't retreat. They pooled beneath his chair, threaded along the armrest nearest me.
He leaned back, but his hand found the back of my neck, fingers resting against the knot of tension there—light, warm, not asking permission because he already knew the answer.
His gaze moved across the room. The evidence, Draven's rigid posture, my face. He'd read the situation in two seconds. "Tell me."
Draven briefed him. Short, precise. The evidence. The pattern. Anya's confirmation across multiple victims. The geographic cluster. The living signals. Ciaran listened without moving, silver eyes fixed on nothing.
When Draven finished, Ciaran said, "My network has been tracking disturbances in the same region. Warding activity that doesn't match any registered Guild operations. Replicated signature concentrations. People entering the area in patterns consistent with a guarded facility."
"Can you pinpoint the exact location?" I asked.
"No. The warding is designed to deflect the kind of surveillance I'm running. But I can confirm you're looking in the right place."
Then he looked at Draven, and his expression changed.
"How many living signals did you pick up?"
"At least a dozen. Clustered."
"Clustered." Ciaran said the word like it tasted wrong. "Running that many experiments in proximity, the replicated signatures would interact. Interference patterns bleeding across subjects. Each corrupted bond generating noise that affects the ones beside it."
"Is that a problem?" Anya asked.
"It's a powder keg." Ciaran's voice was flat.
Final. "Concentrated bond corruption is unstable.
The interference compounds. Push too many subjects at once and one catastrophic failure triggers a cascade.
Bonds collapsing in chain reaction. The magical energy released would be massive.
A detonation." He looked at me. "They can hide a facility. They cannot hide an explosion."
The room was very quiet.
"It's not a question of if," Ciaran said. "It's when. Whoever is running this operation knows it, which means they're either confident they can contain it or arrogant enough to believe it won't happen to them."
"There's a third option," Draven said. "They don't care."
Ciaran's expression didn't change, but his shadows darkened.
They don't care. That was the one that sat wrong in my chest, heavier than the rest. Not ignorance. Not miscalculation. They knew a building full of people could detonate and they'd looked at that number and kept going. Because the people inside had never been people to them.
"So what do we do?" Anya asked. Her voice was steady but her hands were still trembling from the readings.
"We work with what we can reach," I said. "We've narrowed the area. We keep pushing until we find the specific location. Draven's team runs the Aegis angle. I pull Library records. Ciaran's network watches." I looked at Anya. "And you're part of this now. If you want to be."
"I was part of this the moment Aurora Chase showed me what they did to her." Anya's jaw was set. "I'm in."
We talked logistics for another half hour before the group disbanded.
It was past midnight when I got back to my suite. Thalon was a slow, steady warmth at the back of my mind, tired with me.
I pulled out my phone.
The most recent message from Mason was from this morning. Long day ahead. Love you. I'd written back at a water break and hadn't heard from him since, which meant the Council had him running something he couldn't talk about on a personal line.
I started a reply and then stopped.
Not because I didn't know what to say. Because there was too much to say, and none of it fit in a text message. What I wanted was him in my kitchen, making coffee badly, listening to all of this the way only Mason listened. He didn't process things into strategy. He just held them.
I missed him with a sharpness that surprised me.
He was doing work that mattered, and what we had didn't require either of us to orbit the other.
But I wanted his hands on me. I wanted to tell him what we'd found tonight and watch his face do the quiet work Mason's face did when he was taking something in, and let him decide how to hold me through it.
I typed. Saturday. You and me. No exceptions. I'll bring the coffee.
The reply came faster than I expected.
Already on my calendar. I'll bring you.
I laughed out loud in my empty kitchen—tired and wet and real—and Thalon purred in the back of my mind, satisfied, and I went to bed thinking about Saturday.