Chapter 16
Roslyn was in the kitchen early that evening when she sensed a shift in the wards that Levi and Belshegar had spent all afternoon reinforcing.
It seemed strangely familiar, and she realized she’d felt this same thing the night before, when Karl Van Horn’s sleep spell had rolled through the cracks in Malachi’s defenses and nearly taken her down.
Van Horn magic. More of it this time, stronger and coming from a lot more directions than just five people could account for.
She set down the glass of water she’d been drinking and moved to the kitchen window, then pulled the curtain aside just enough so she could see the yard.
The light was fading, the sky above the bluff had the dull pewter color it turned in the hour before full dark, and the overgrown grass between the house and the property wall looked empty.
But it wasn’t. She could feel them out there, their massed magic pressing against the ward perimeter from the north, the east, and the south, a coordinated formation that left only the western side, the one with the cliff drop to the ocean, unguarded.
They’d boxed the house in and left one way out, and that way led off a cliff.
Cute.
Angela was already in the entryway, Connor at her side.
Seeing them together, both of them dark-haired and green-eyed, matching each other’s stride without even thinking about it, was a sight Roslyn found oddly reassuring.
They fought as one, Malachi had told her that afternoon while she changed the dressings on his burns, and their combined power was greater than the sum of its parts.
Prima and primus, bonded magic, a weapon the Van Horns wouldn’t have encountered before.
“How many?” Angela asked Levi, who stood at the foot of the stairs with his head tilted in that way he had when he was processing information from a dimension no normal human could perceive.
“At least ten,” Levi replied. “Possibly twelve. I can sense the five from last night, plus reinforcements. One signature is considerably stronger than the others.”
“Victoria,” Roslyn said, and Angela’s jaw tightened.
Of course, Roslyn had never met Victoria Van Horn.
She knew of her only through Malachi’s careful, clinical descriptions — a prima who led through authority rather than finesse, whose magic was broad and forceful and who believed that the possessions of a clan member were the possessions of the clan.
What Malachi hadn’t said directly, but what Roslyn had guessed from the way his voice went flat whenever her name came up, was that Victoria was the kind of leader who took things because she could, a woman who’d thrown away a twenty-year-old boy for the crime of being interested in the wrong things.
Roslyn didn’t like her already, and she doubted her opinion was going to change anytime soon.
“Victoria doesn’t matter,” Angela said. There was a hardness in her voice Roslyn hadn’t heard before, something that went far beyond the controlled fury of the morning. “She’s their coordinator, not their strongest fighter. If we take out her offensive line, she’ll lose her advantage. Levi?”
“I’ll handle the sleep caster,” Levi said, his voice calm. “His magic works by exploiting the target’s own neural pathways. It won’t affect me.”
Because Levi’s neural pathways, Roslyn thought, weren’t exactly standard equipment.
“Belshegar and I will take the front,” Connor said, and Roslyn saw Angela flash him a look that was half exasperation and half fierce protectiveness.
“Belshegar and we will take the front,” Angela corrected him. “You and I fight together. That’s not negotiable.”
Connor held her gaze for a beat, then nodded. Almost thirty years of marriage, Roslyn reflected, and the man still tried to put himself between his wife and danger…and she still refused to let him. In a strange way, it was comforting to see that some dynamics were universal.
Belshegar appeared in the hallway behind Levi.
The air around him felt different than it had that morning, somehow denser, as if the human shape he wore had thinned enough to let some of what lay beneath bleed through.
His expression was composed, almost serene, and yet Roslyn could tell he was ready for whatever might come next.
“They’re beginning,” he said.
Just as he finished speaking, the first fireball hit the reinforced wards, and the impact sent a shudder through the house that Roslyn could feel in the floor beneath her feet.
Now they’d get to see if five McAllisters were a match for twice that many Van Horns.
Roslyn watched the battle from the study windows, mainly because Angela had been extremely clear on that point.
You stay inside. You’re our only healer, and if you go down, we all go down. Stay with your patient and wait until we need you.
It was sound enough reasoning, and Roslyn hated every bit of it. Watching people she cared about fight while she was shielded behind glass went against every instinct she possessed.
But Angela was right. Roslyn was their only healer, and her magic was already drained from the night she’d spent keeping Malachi alive. She needed to conserve what she had left for the moments when it would matter most, and those moments would come.
They always did.
The Van Horns had arrived in force. Roslyn counted at least ten figures spread across the yard and the street beyond, positioned behind the property wall and the neighboring fences and the scrubby hedges that lined the bluff edge.
The fireball witches worked in groups of three now, their spheres of flame larger and more concentrated than the ones from last night, arcing over the yard in coordinated salvos that hit the ward perimeter from multiple angles.
The lightning casters — there were two of them this time — sent white-blue bolts that cracked against the reinforced wards with a sound that made her wince every time they hit.
And somewhere in the formation, Karl Van Horn was working his sleep magic, the insidious fog she remembered from the night before, rolling toward the house in waves that Levi’s new ward layer caught and dispersed before they could reach the threshold.
But the McAllister fighters weren’t behind the wards. They were outside them.
Angela and Connor had taken up positions at the front of the property, standing in the gap between the yard wall and the house where the overgrown grass met the cracked flagstone path.
Their combined magic was visible now, a shimmer of white energy tinged with crackles of bright green that surrounded them both, shifting and flowing between them like a shared pulse.
When the fireballs came, Angela raised her left hand and Connor raised his right, and the green-shot energy expanded outward, meeting the flames and deflecting them in cascades of sparks that scattered across the yard like burning confetti.
They moved together, and Roslyn could see their coordination every time they shifted their weight and angled their stance.
They didn’t need to speak. Whatever signal passed between them was deeper than words, carried through the bonded magic that had fused their powers over decades.
When Angela stepped forward, Connor covered her flank.
When a lightning bolt struck the ground three feet from where Connor stood, Angela’s free hand was already moving, redirecting the residual charge into the earth before it could reach him.
Levi was harder to track. He moved along the property’s eastern boundary, and the Van Horns who encountered him there seemed to lose focus, their attacks sputtering and misfiring as though something was interfering with their ability to concentrate.
Roslyn realized, after she watched a fireball dissolve in midair for the third time, that Levi was disrupting their magic at the source, not by countering it with superior force, but by introducing a frequency that scrambled the Van Horn energy the way static scrambled a radio signal.
It was quiet, subtle work, and it was extremely effective.
Two of the fighters on the eastern side had already dropped back, shaking their heads as if trying to clear water from their ears, their fireballs flaring out before they could fully form.
Belshegar had positioned himself at the property’s northern edge, where the heaviest concentration of attackers had gathered.
When the first wave of fireballs came his way, he simply stood in their path and let them hit him.
The flames washed over his human form and dissipated, leaving behind nothing — no burns, no damage, no indication that the fire had registered at all.
The Van Horn fireball witches stared, recalculated, and threw harder, but Belshegar still didn’t move.
The fireballs struck him and vanished, absorbed into something beneath skin that wasn’t skin at all but a boundary between this dimension and whatever lay on the other side of it.
One of the lightning casters redirected a bolt at him, and it forked across his chest and grounded out through his feet, scorching the grass in a circle around him but leaving him untouched.
He looked down at the blackened ring on the ground, then back up at the lightning caster, and the patient expression on his face was somehow worse than any display of anger could have been.
He might as well have said, Is that all?
The Van Horns at the northern perimeter fell back, and Roslyn couldn’t really blame them.
Watching a man stand unharmed in a column of magical fire was the kind of thing that would make you think twice before mounting another attack, and clearly, they’d decided discretion was the better part of valor.
Then Victoria Van Horn stepped into view.