Chapter 16 #3
Victoria would hold them; that was how her magic worked.
But holding required concentration, and concentration could be broken, and Malachi could see the strain beginning to show in the way Victoria’s coordination flickered whenever Belshegar advanced another step.
She was pouring more and more of herself into keeping her fighters in line, and every ounce she spent on discipline was an ounce she couldn’t spend on amplifying their attacks.
It was a textbook attrition pattern. The McAllisters weren’t trying to overwhelm the Van Horns.
No, they were grinding them down, applying pressure from multiple directions while Belshegar’s advance forced Victoria to divert resources from offense to morale.
Angela and Connor’s defensive wall was holding without breaking, absorbing the Van Horn fire and lightning and turning it aside.
Levi’s disruption continued to erode the eastern flank, forcing the fighters there to expend twice the energy for half the output.
And the Gibson alliance at the bluff edge had sealed the only avenue of retreat that didn’t run through the McAllister line.
The Van Horns were being boxed in by the same tactic they’d used to box the house.
The battle ground on. Fireballs continued to arc across the darkening yard, their orange light painting the study walls in shifting patterns that reminded Malachi of the attack the night before, when the entryway had burned, and he’d poured the last of his rebuilt magic into wards that had not been enough.
Angela’s left arm was hanging slightly lower than her right, suggesting a hit she was compensating for.
Connor was bleeding from a cut on his temple, bright red against his dark hair, and his deflections on the southern side had slowed by a fraction that most people wouldn’t have noticed but that Malachi, who’d spent a lifetime reading the language of power, saw clearly.
Levi’s disruption field flickered occasionally, which meant even his remarkable resources had limits.
And the Gibson contingent at the western edge was holding but not advancing, their alliance extending exactly as far as self-interest required and not an inch further.
But the Van Horns were being driven back.
The northern line had collapsed under Belshegar’s advance, the eastern side was in disarray from Levi’s disruption, and the southern approach was being held by Connor’s focused deflection work while Angela concentrated on the frontal assault.
Victoria’s coordination was holding her people together, but the territory they controlled was shrinking, and the fireball witches were burning through their magical reserves faster than she could replenish them.
The Van Horns fought with conviction. Malachi understood this because he understood them.
He understood the culture that had produced them, the belief system that said what the prima claimed was rightfully hers, that the possessions of a banished member reverted to the clan upon his expulsion.
Victoria genuinely believed the collection was hers.
Her fighters believed it, too. They weren’t mercenaries or hired thugs.
They were loyal clan members fighting for what they considered their inheritance, and that conviction made them dangerous even as they were losing because it meant they wouldn’t retreat easily.
He watched a fireball witch at the southern edge take a hit from one of Connor’s deflections — her own flame redirected back at her, catching her across the forearm — and she stumbled, cradling the burn, but she didn’t fall back.
Another fighter filled her position within seconds, and the assault continued.
That was Van Horn discipline, drilled into them from childhood, the knowledge that the clan came first and the individual came second, and the prima’s will was the framework that held everything together.
He knew that discipline intimately. After all, he’d lived inside it for twenty years, had been shaped by it and broken by it in equal measure, and watching it operate now — from the outside, from the ruins of the life he’d built to replace everything it had taken from him — evoked an emotion he couldn’t easily classify.
It wasn’t nostalgia, nor grief. It was something closer to the feeling of watching a house you once lived in being demolished, a home you’d left behind long ago but whose architecture was still imprinted on your understanding of what shelter looked like.
But they would retreat. The math was inescapable, even for Victoria, who wasn’t accustomed to loss.
She had brought a strike team built for mortal opposition, and she’d encountered an extradimensional being, a construct whose nature defied classification, and a bonded prima and primus whose combined power exceeded anything the Van Horn offensive line could generate.
She’d also encountered a healer who’d spent three weeks rebuilding a man whom Victoria had spent seventeen years trying to reclaim, and that healer had called in reinforcements Victoria couldn’t have anticipated.
She couldn’t understand the kind of loyalty that was earned through care rather than commanded through authority.
It was, Malachi reflected, the fundamental flaw in her entire philosophy of power — the belief that people were assets to be managed rather than connections to be maintained.
She’d managed him out of her clan at twenty, and she’d been managing the consequences ever since.
Those consequences had finally arrived in Astoria, Oregon, in the form of four people from Arizona who’d come because one of their own had rung a bronze bell and asked for help.
The irony was considerable.
Roslyn stood at the study window, watching the battle with her arms crossed over her chest and her jaw set in the expression he’d learned to read as, I hate this, but I’m doing it anyway.
She was waiting, conserving her reserves for the moment when the McAllisters would need healing — and they would need it, because the Van Horns were still fighting, still throwing fire and lightning with a desperate energy that signaled they were losing but hadn’t yet accepted that fact.
He could see the toll the waiting was taking on her.
Her hands were clenched against her arms, and every time a fireball struck near Angela’s position or a lightning bolt forked too close to Connor’s head, her whole body tensed with the effort of staying put.
She was a healer who’d been ordered to stand down, and every instinct in her was screaming that she should be out there, that her hands should be on the injuries she could see happening through the window and sense with her own magic.
The restraint was costing her almost as much as the fighting was costing the people outside.
She would be needed soon. The battle was tipping, but it hadn’t yet tipped, and the Van Horns had the conviction of their certainty and the discipline of their training and the amplifying power of a prima who refused to concede.
All of those things together meant that before this was over, someone on the McAllister side was going to take a hit that couldn’t be walked off.
When that happened, Roslyn would go. Angela’s orders or not, she would go, because she was constitutionally incapable of doing anything else.
Outside, the dusk deepened into night, and the yard burned with orange and green and white-blue light, and the battle continued.
Malachi watched, and waited, and for the first time in seventeen years, he trusted someone else to do the fighting.