Chapter 34
There is a particular sound the world makes when something irreversible begins. It’s not a crack or a break, but a deep, violent rupture so irreparable and absolute that it feels like the earth itself has split itself in two.
I was awake before the blare had finished rolling through the walls. My body jolted upright before my mind caught up, the sheets falling away as my heart slammed against my ribs. For one fractured, disoriented second, I didn’t know what I was hearing.
Then the second blast hit, closer, harder, rattling the windowpanes and sending a fine rain of plaster dust from the ceiling—and I knew. Every nerve ending I had lit up at once.
Trace was already on his feet by the time Dominic blurred to the window, wrenching the curtain aside as a hellish orange light from somewhere below cut shadows across his face.
“We have company,” he said, and the quietness of it was somehow worse than if he had screamed it.
Footfalls smacked against the floor, too many and too fast to count before the door came off its hinges less than a second later.
The Order’s men poured through the opening like an infestation of rats—dark-clad and merciless, magic already crackling between their hands in jagged blue-white arcs that scorched the air and left a copper tang on my tongue.
Something hit the wall beside my head and blew out a chunk of plaster the size of my fist.
There was no time to think. There was only instinct and months of training, and the power surging up through me like a tide coming in, silver-bright through my runes and into my hands before I’d even consciously decided to reach for it.
The first man who got close went back through the doorframe the same way he’d come in.
The second was already on top of me before I could reset, and I scrambled off the bed and away from him, putting the mattress between us for half a second, just long enough to find my footing, before sending him skidding back into the third with a burst of force that took them both down.
After that it was just chaos. Pure, relentless, deafening chaos.
Bodies thudding into walls. Magic snapping through the air.
Furniture cracking apart underneath it all.
Trace fought somewhere to my left like something built for war, while Dominic picked apart anyone who came within arm’s reach, a dark blur at the edges of every fight.
For a fleeting, na?ve moment, I thought we could hold them off. That we actually had a chance. But I was gravely mistaken.
It was the stillness that caught my eye first.
Not the kind that came from the chaos settling, but the deliberate, chosen stillness of someone who had walked into the middle of a war and simply decided it didn’t apply to him.
He stood just inside the ruined doorway with his hands loose at his sides, not casting magic, not fighting, not even flinching as the room tore itself apart around him.
He just watched, patient and unhurried and only faintly interested, the way a man might watch weather moving across a landscape from a very safe distance.
Salt-and-pepper hair, collar length. A face all sharp angles and economy. Pale blue eyes moving slowly across the room until they found me and stopped.
My blood iced over.
I knew that face.
Alford Benedict. Sacred Keeper.
My mind flashed back to Huntington Manor. The day he’d barged into Dominic’s house with my uncle and William. The day the Senior Magister had casually ruined my life when he’d told it was my destiny, my duty, to vanquish Lucifer’s vessel. A vessel that just so happened to be Trace.
I had barely finished placing him before he moved.
And when he moved, the room couldn’t keep up with him.
He crossed it in almost no time at all, threading through the bedlam like the laws that governed the rest of us simply didn’t apply to him, stopping only when he was standing within arm’s reach of Trace and Dominic.
For a moment he just stood there, watching them fight the way you’d watch something you’ve already decided the outcome of.
He raised both hands, his fingers spreading wide and then curling inward, as though he was closing them around something none of the rest of us could see.
Trace left the ground first. He rose like something had seized him by the throat, his hands flying up to claw at the invisible grip, his body twisting with the effort of fighting something he couldn’t reach or touch or reason with.
Dominic went up a half second later, the same way, his face contorted and his mouth working soundlessly as his feet left the floor and dangled.
“NO!” The word tore out of me as I lunged toward them as two more of the Order’s men jumped forward to cut me off, one seizing my arm and wrenching it back hard enough to rip a cry out of me, the other driving a shoulder into my ribs and slamming me sideways into the wall.
The impact rattled my teeth, but I didn’t stop to feel it. I pushed off the wall and fought back, fighting them with everything I had, driving my elbow back into the first one’s face and feeling something crack beneath it, clawing at the second with my free hand.
My eyes locked on Alford as he flicked both wrists inward at the same time.
Before I could understand what he’d done, two cracks split the air in rapid succession as Trace and Dominic dropped from the air, hitting the floor like dead weight, their bodies crumpled and unmoving.
I knew they would survive it. They were immortal Revenants.
But knowing it and watching it were two entirely different things, and for the span of a single heartbeat all I could do was stare in horror.
Fury detonated through my blood.
I wrenched free of the men holding me and shoved both hands out toward Alford, pushing everything I had at him in one panicked burst. It wasn’t controlled. It wasn’t clean. It was panic with power behind it and we both knew the difference.
It hit him anyway.
He stumbled back a step but recovered quickly before raising a single hand toward me.
What came back at me was nothing like what I’d sent.
It caught me square in the chest and threw me off my feet.
I hit the far wall hard enough to see white before bouncing off it and landing in a graceless heap on the floor.
Everything greyed at the edges as the room tilted around me.
Refusing to give up, I pressed my palms flat against the floorboards and shoved upright before the dizziness had even finished clearing, and then I came at him again.
This time it felt as though I were moving through deep water, the air thickening and solidifying with every step, actively pushing back.
I bore down harder, pushing with everything I had against the invisible wall of his magic.
The floorboards beneath my feet groaned in protest, bending and then buckling, splinters curling up around my feet as the force of what was moving through me dragged against everything in its path.
I felt the wall of his power straining against mine, felt the hairline fracture beginning to form in it, and I pushed harder.
For a single beat, Alford’s composure slipped. His pale eyes narrowed by a fraction, as though I’d caught him off guard. As though I’d almost…impressed him. Then it was gone, smoothed over beneath a look of cool irritation.
“I’d advise you to stop that,” he said as he reached into his black coat and withdrew a small leather satchel.
He held it up between two fingers with the unhurried deliberateness of someone making a point they intended to make only once.
I didn’t need to ask him what it was. I already knew by the way the air around it felt, by the way my runes reacted, by the way every instinct I had went cold and desperate in the same breath.
Cinderdust.
Enough of it to make sure that neither Trace nor Dominic ever saw the light of day again. Not in this world, anyway.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Don't,” I warned, my pulse pounding so hard in my ears it nearly drowned me out. “They have nothing to do with this. Whatever you want from me, this is between me and the Order. Let them go.”
“Perhaps,” said Alford, regarding me as a man might regard an argument he found quaint. “But you've demonstrated a rather unfortunate tendency to behave unpredictably when you have nothing left to lose. I prefer you motivated.”
“Let them go and I promise to stay motivated not to rip you limb from limb,” I offered sweetly in return.
“My orders are to bring you in, Miss Blackburn,” said Alford, unmoved by the threat. “However difficult you choose to make that is entirely up to you.”
“Orders from who? William?”
“The Senior Magister has requested a private audience with you. He wishes to put an offer to you directly, away from the theater of public scrutiny and other sundry complications.”
I blinked at him. “You burst into my house in the middle of the night and attacked us because William wants to have a chat?” I found that very hard to believe.
“Given your history of cooperation with this Order, we thought it prudent to arrive prepared. My men's enthusiasm, though hasty, was not entirely unwarranted. As I'm sure you will agree.”
I most certainly did not agree. I didn’t trust a single word coming out of his mouth, but Trace and Dominic were still on the floor within reach of three of his men and the satchel was still in his hand, so this was really not the time to say as much.
“Why now?” I asked instead, trying to drag the conversation longer, to buy myself a sliver of room to think.
“Why not tomorrow, in the daytime like normal people? He can just as easily say whatever he has to say to me then,” I said, and then another question landed on top of the first. “How did you even get in here when the house is warded?”