Chapter 16 #2
She came from the street, walking between two fireball witches who flanked her like an honor guard.
Roslyn couldn’t see her clearly through the study window — the distance was too great, and the light was now almost gone — but she could feel her.
Victoria’s magic was enormous, a dense, commanding presence that rolled across the yard and pressed against the wards and seemed to settle over her fighters the way a weighted blanket settled over a restless sleeper, calming and steadying and focusing them all at once.
The retreat at the northern perimeter stopped.
The fighters on the eastern side who had been stumbling under Levi’s disruption steadied, their attacks sharpening, the sputter in their magic smoothing out as Victoria’s amplification took hold.
It wasn’t that she was personally more powerful than any individual McAllister.
It was that her power was connective, amplifying and directing the magic of the people around her, the way a conductor directed an orchestra.
The moment she arrived, the Van Horn assault intensified — the fireballs burning hotter, the lightning more precise, Karl’s sleep fog pressing harder against Levi’s disruption field.
The fighters who’d been losing their nerve found it again, bolstered by their prima’s presence and the iron certainty she projected.
Angela must have felt the shift, too, because Roslyn saw her straighten, her attention snapping to the figure in the street.
Something passed between the two primas that wasn’t a word or a spell but simple recognition.
Then Angela tightened her grip on Connor’s hand, and the green-shot white energy between them flared brighter, pushing back against the renewed assault with a force that sent the nearest fireball spinning backward into the Van Horn line.
It didn’t seem as if this was going to end any time soon.
Roslyn sensed the Gibsons before she saw them, a cluster of new signatures at the property’s western edge, the bluff side that the Van Horns had left unguarded. There were maybe half a dozen, led by a sort of energy she thought she recognized from her encounter with that trio of witches in town.
Catherine Gibson had come to see what was happening on her family’s ground.
It was clear that they’d come not to attack but to watch, their magic held close and cautious, assessing the situation the way their scouting teams had assessed the house in the early days.
Roslyn could feel the way their collective attention swept over the battle — the Van Horn fireball witches, the McAllister defensive line, the inexplicable being at the northern perimeter who was absorbing magical fire without flinching — and she could practically hear the calculations being made.
Like all witch clans, the Gibsons were fiercely territorial.
This was their ground, and two outside forces were currently tearing it up without their permission.
But they’d miscalculated their position, or maybe the Van Horns did.
One of the lightning casters, either panicked or poorly directed by Victoria’s coordination, sent a bolt wide that crackled past the property line and struck the bluff edge, close enough to the Gibson formation that Roslyn felt their collective flinch through the wards.
The response was immediate, a flare of magic that said, You just attacked us on our own ground.
During the thirty seconds that followed, Roslyn thought for sure the situation was going to become a three-way fight, which would have been the absolute worst possible outcome.
She could feel the Gibsons bristling, could sense Catherine’s magic gathering itself for a response, and she braced for the impact of a new front opening up at their unprotected rear.
But the Gibson prima-in-waiting was apparently more pragmatic than Roslyn had thought.
Instead of attacking, a single figure broke from the Gibson formation and walked toward Angela’s position, hands raised in a gesture that was clearly meant to signal non-aggression.
The emissary — Roslyn couldn’t tell from this distance whether it was Catherine herself or someone she’d sent — stopped about ten yards from where Angela and Connor were holding the front line and shouted something that Roslyn couldn’t hear through the study walls.
But Angela didn’t stop fighting, and kept one hand raised against the incoming fireballs even while the Gibson emissary spoke. Connor heard their words, turned to Angela, and said something brief. Angela nodded once, a sharp, decisive motion that sure looked like a deal being struck.
The Gibson figure retreated, and the Gibson magic at the western edge shifted from aggressive to defensive; they weren’t joining the McAllister line, but holding their own ground in a way that effectively closed the gap the Van Horns had left.
They were covering the bluff side, preventing any flanking maneuvers, and in exchange, they were letting the McAllisters handle the Van Horn problem.
She didn’t know what the terms of this alliance might have been, but Roslyn could guess at the broad strokes.
The Gibsons would cede the territory dispute over the Victorian house in exchange for the McAllisters dealing with the out-of-state aggressors who were currently scorching the neighborhood.
It wasn’t friendship or anything close to it, just simple math.
Roslyn had never been a student of military history, but she suspected that was how most alliances formed — not in conference rooms over careful negotiations, but in the moment when two parties realized they had a common enemy…and it was better to work together than apart.
Malachi watched from the study, and he took mental notes, because that was what he did.
Even diminished, even propped up in a leather chair with a blanket over his legs and his burned arm braced against his body, his mind was still the instrument it had always been, and that instrument refused to stop running.
Victoria had brought ten fighters, possibly twelve.
Two lightning talents, three fireball witches, Karl with his sleep magic, and the remainder a mix of ward-breakers and general offensive capability.
She’d positioned herself at the rear, which was tactically sound — the prima as coordinator, amplifying and directing rather than engaging directly.
It was the Van Horn way. Victoria had always understood that her power lay not in personal combat but in her ability to make the people around her more effective than they could be alone.
He’d once admired this about her.
Once.
The McAllisters were outnumbered but not outmatched.
Angela and Connor’s paired magic was holding the front, their combined energy proving resistant to fire and lightning in equal measure.
The bonded power of prima and primus was something the Van Horns had no equivalent for — Victoria’s consort, Neil, if he was even present, had never been a fighter, and the Van Horn tradition of breeding for offensive magic had produced soldiers, not partners.
Angela and Connor fought as a single organism, covering each other’s weaknesses and multiplying each other’s strengths, and the Van Horn fireball witches were clearly struggling to find an angle of attack that wasn’t immediately countered.
Levi was the variable that Victoria hadn’t prepared for.
His disruption field was subtle enough that it took time to notice and was impossible to counter once you did, because it didn’t operate on any frequency the Van Horns were trained to resist. Their magic was designed to overcome other mortal magic — fire against wards, lightning against barriers, sleep against conscious resistance.
It wasn’t designed to encounter a being whose very nature existed on frequencies that mortal magic couldn’t reach.
Victoria would eventually adapt — she was too intelligent not to — but that adaptation would take time, and time was what the McAllisters needed.
Belshegar, however, was something else entirely.
Malachi watched the extradimensional being stand in the path of the northern assault and absorb it, and he understood at once that Belshegar wasn’t fighting.
He was containing. The fire that struck him didn’t bounce off or deflect; it was drawn into whatever existed beneath his human surface and neutralized there, converted from an attack into inert energy the way a transformer converted voltage.
It was effortless and also terrifying, because effort was the thing that made power comprehensible.
A man who strained to lift a boulder was powerful, but a man who lifted it without noticing its weight was something else entirely.
The Van Horns at the northern perimeter had realized this and were redirecting their efforts toward the front, where Angela and Connor were engaged.
Victoria was compensating, tightening her coordination to focus the available offensive magic on the McAllisters’ position rather than wasting resources against a target that couldn’t be harmed.
It was the right tactical decision, but it meant the northern side was effectively conceded, and Belshegar was free to advance.
And he did. He went slowly, without hurry, walking across the overgrown yard toward the Van Horn formation with the calm, measured tread of someone out for an evening stroll.
The fireball witches who had retreated from him were now caught between his advance and the property wall, and the panic in their magic — Malachi could feel it even from inside the study, the fraying of Van Horn discipline as trained fighters encountered something their training could never have covered — was beginning to spread.