Chapter 26 #2
A thunderclap compressed into a closed space. A flash of white light that bleaches the hallway and leaves spots in my vision. The air itself smells singed, sharp and clean, like the sky after lightning strikes close.
Mira.
She's standing at the junction. Two hostiles on the ground at her feet, limbs at angles that say they didn't land voluntarily.
A third pinned against the wall by something I can't see, something that shimmers in the air around her hands and ripples outward like heat coming off pavement.
Her hands are shaking. Her eyes are bright. Her breathing comes fast and hard.
The hostile pinned to the wall slides down and doesn't move.
The shimmer around her hands fades. She flexes her fingers. Looks at them like she's not entirely sure they belong to her. Then she looks at me. Her jaw is tight. Her breathing hasn't slowed.
"Are there more?" she asks.
"Down the hall. Marcellus has the junction."
She nods once, turns, and runs. Three bodies lie on the floor behind her. She steps over them without looking down, and she doesn't slow, and her hands have stopped shaking.
I watch her go.
The wards scream. I feel it in my bones, in my teeth, in the crescent mark on my chest. The building shudders around us. Whatever is hitting the wards is hitting them hard, and it isn't stopping.
The building groans around us. Something cracks in the ceiling above the stairwell.
Then it stops. The silence that follows is worse.
Maximus and I reach the medical wing door. I open it.
Carson is behind the reinforced entrance with Sullivan and Elena.
The prototype is running, processing the first batch of contaminated blood.
Carson's hands are steady on the machine.
Elena has positioned herself between him and the door.
Sullivan is standing at Carson's shoulder, silver hair disheveled.
"It's clear," I say. "Twelve came in. None of them are leaving."
Carson doesn't stop working. "Did they know what was in this room?"
"They were heading straight for you."
He absorbs that. His hands stay on the machine.
"Then we'd better make it worth protecting," he says.
Julian's voice through the earpiece. "All clear. Marcellus has the last two."
"Casualties?" I ask.
Julian pauses again. This one longer.
"Cole from the security rotation. Dead. Grant is down, Elena needs to see him. Two kitchen staff caught in the corridor. David didn't make it. Rita is in the safe room with a broken arm."
Cole. Night shift at the south entrance. Buzz cut. Never talked much. Nodded at me every time I walked past and I never learned his last name. He had a Braves cap he wore off shift. I saw it on the hook by the south entrance every night when I came through.
David. Made coffee for the human rotation. Left a mug on the counter every morning for whoever came in first. He used the blue one with the chipped handle. The one nobody else wanted.
You didn't learn his last name either.
"Elena," I say. "Grant needs you."
She looks at Carson. Looks at the prototype running its cycle.
"Go," Carson says without looking up. "I can run this."
She goes.
Maximus presses a hand to his earpiece. His expression shifts.
"Feral," he says. "Parking garage off North Decatur. Erik's wolves are responding."
One feral. Placed in a public space while every asset we had was inside these walls. Designed to be seen.
Ethan's voice through the earpiece, tight. "Footage is uploading. Someone in the garage got three seconds of video. I'm watching it spread."
Three seconds of footage. Shaky hands, bad light, and something that used to be human moving across a parking garage in a way that makes your brain refuse to process what your eyes are sending it.
"Wolves have the feral down," Ethan says. "But the video's already on three local stations."
"Kill it," I say.
"Working on it. Our media contact is running the hoax angle. Viral marketing. Film production. She says she can get two of the three stations to pull it by morning."
"And the third?"
"Anchor's already calling it an animal attack. Witnesses are shaky. Nobody wants to say what they actually saw." A pause. "It'll stick. Barely."
The kind of barely where the next time, it won't.
The Hidden Accords are still intact, and the fracture running through them is visible if you know where to look.
I stand in the medical wing doorway and watch Carson work. The prototype hums. The contaminated blood feeds through the filtration column, dark going in, lighter coming out. One unit at a time. One bag. While four territories' worth of poison sits in storage waiting for its turn.
Math, Celeste. Run the math. Twenty minutes per unit. Hundreds of units. Weeks.
Carson doesn't look up. He's still here. Still working. Still alive.
We're going to keep it that way.
Two in the morning. The compound has gone quiet. The scraped-out kind, where a place has lost people and the gaps are still showing. The corridor where they died smells like cleaning solution and underneath it, blood. Someone mopped. The stain is gone. The smell isn't.
Seraphina sits in the garden. The oaks lean toward her, branches angling the same as they have since she came back from Thessivane. Her hands are in her lap. Her face is drawn, the lines around her eyes deeper than they were this morning.
Maximus and I take the stone bench. Seraphina sits across from us on the low wall beside the garden bed. The air is cold and smells like damp soil.
"Adrienne pulled her strikes," Seraphina says. She's looking at the oaks, not at us. "The ward assault was three witches. Two of them pushed hard. The third held back. Adrienne had openings she didn't take. I felt her pull away twice."
"Why?" I ask.
Seraphina looks at me. "She is fighting against something. Or she is fighting for something she cannot reach."
"The daughter," I say. "Free her, and Adrienne stops fighting. Maybe fights for us."
"Maybe." Seraphina's hands tighten in her lap. "A witch freed from a blood oath carries a particular kind of fury. It would be better directed at the man who compelled the oath than at us."
"Can we find her?" I ask.
"Not without help. The daughter is hidden.
Guarded. Konstantin chose the location, and he chose it well enough that Adrienne hasn't been able to reach her on her own.
" Seraphina pauses. "But if I had something that belonged to the daughter, something she'd worn or carried, I could trace the connection back to her location. "
"Which means getting a message to Adrienne," I say. "Without Konstantin knowing."
"He watches his witches," Maximus says. "Adrienne won't be alone. Any contact outside the oath, he'd know within hours."
Seraphina is quiet. She looks at the oaks, and I can see her working through it.
"Not if the contact isn't outside the oath," she says. "When Adrienne comes against us, she touches my wards. She has to, to fight them. The next time she does, I could leave something inside the lattice. A message she'd feel and Konstantin wouldn't. She knows my signature. She'd recognize it."
"You're counting on them attacking us again," Maximus says.
"They will," I say. "They came for Carson tonight. They'll come again." I look at Seraphina. "Can you build it before then?"
"I can build it tonight."
"And if Konstantin detects it?" Maximus asks.
"He won't," Seraphina says. "He is a vampire. He reads wards the way a human reads weather. He feels the pressure. He doesn't feel the language."
"We survived tonight," Maximus says. "Carson is alive.
The prototype is running. But Konstantin just hit four territories and our compound in a single coordinated strike.
Three witches on our wards. Twelve operatives inside our building.
A feral placed for maximum exposure." He pauses.
"We lost two people tonight. He can keep sending more. We can't keep absorbing this."
The garden is quiet. The branches above us are still.
"Seraphina," Maximus says. "Tell Lanthar it's time. We need his forces now."
She nods.
"I'll reach him tonight," she says. "I make no promises about how quickly his people can cross."
She stands and walks deeper into the garden.
Maximus watches her go. Then he turns to me.
"You're pale."
"I'm always pale. I'm a vampire."
"Paler than that."
I lean back against the garden wall. The stone is cold through my shirt, rough against my shoulder blades.
Adrenaline kept me upright through the fight, through the casualties, through the calls.
It's gone now, and whatever has replaced it is worse, because at least running on fumes keeps you moving.
"Long night," I say.
He sits beside me on the bench. Close enough that his shoulder presses against mine.
Solid. Warm. He doesn't ask me to explain.
He doesn't tell me to rest. He just sits there, and what reaches me from him isn't strategy or the tension I felt from him earlier.
Just presence. Just the quiet of a man who knows when not to talk.
That's enough. That's actually enough.
I lean into him. His arm comes around my shoulders, pulling me against his side. The fabric of his shirt is cool against my cheek. He smells like the fight still, copper and plaster dust, and underneath it, him. The nausea rolls through once more, low and heavy. I'm too tired to assign it a reason.
His hand finds mine where it rests on the bench between us. His palm is warm and his fingers curl around my knuckles.
Above us, the oaks creak in a wind I can't feel. The garden smells like rain that hasn't come yet.
The cold from the stone is seeping through my jeans. His shoulder against mine is solid.
I close my eyes.
The crescent marks pulse between us. Two hearts. In sync.