CHAPTER 12
The Crystal Vine—Lainie
The crystal vineyard was singing.
Lainie knelt on the porch boards with her palms pressed flat against the stasis material encasing Sawyer's lower body. The sound came through the morning air—a chime, faint, wrong. The breeze moving through twenty rows of frozen vines and pulling sound from them.
She hated it.
Her knees ached against the wood. Blood from Charlie's forearms had dried in thin lines between the planks, rust-colored, already browning.
The sun was up now. Full February morning, the sky scrubbed blue, like the Collector's storm had never happened.
Like the predawn attack was a dream she'd had between the nightmare about trolls and the alarm she'd never set.
The crystal under her hands was warm. That was the wrong part. Ice she could have understood. Glass she could have broken. But this was body temperature, smooth as a river stone, and it held Sawyer the way a cast holds a broken bone—not to hurt. To keep.
"Well." Sawyer's voice came from above her, thin in a way she'd never heard from him. "This is undignified."
She looked up. His human half gripped the porch railing, chest moving in short pulls.
His mouth was set in the half-smile he used when everything was fine—the same half-smile she used to put on before parent-teacher conferences with John.
But his eyes were too wide. The pupils were blown.
She knew that look. She'd worn it herself in gas station bathrooms at two in the morning, eighteen years of wearing it.
"I'm going to get you out."
"Take your time. I've got nowhere to be." His jaw worked. "Obviously."
She dug her fingernails into the seam where the crystal met the fur of his left hind leg.
The material didn't give. She didn’t find anything that could be pried.
It was bonded. It didn’t sit on top of him but in him.
The stasis material and Sawyer's body occupied the same space, the way water occupied a sponge.
She pulled. Nothing. Shifted her grip. Pulled again. Her nails bent against the surface.
The timepiece flared.
Sharp heat against her sternum, through the white fabric of her top. This was a directive. A nudge. The relic responded to the crystal the way it responded to the well, to the ward line, to anything that carried magic it recognized.
She breathed deeply in through her nose and out through her lips. It was up to the timepiece to help him. She slipped it from around her neck, then pressed the watch flat against the stasis material.
The response wasn’t as rapid as she had hoped. The crystal softened.
It wasn’t melting, just becoming supple. The surface went from rigid to something with the give of candle wax left in the sun. Sawyer sucked air through his teeth. Whatever was under the crystal—his body, still his—was waking up.
"What did you do?"
"I don't know yet."
She needed a tool. The softening was already firming at the edges, the crystal reasserting itself like a wound closing. She looked around the porch—the broken railing, the blood, the crate of rosé that Charlie had set out for the grand opening. Her label. Her wine. Her business in a box.
She grabbed a bottle by the neck. The base was heavy enough.
She brought it down against the softened crystal in a controlled tap, gauging the right amount of force to apply.
The crystal cracked. Flaked. Fell away in pieces the size of thumbnail clippings, and underneath—fur.
Matted. Damp. But alive. Orange fur, because he'd been a cat when the threads caught him, and the shift hadn't changed everything below the knees. His left hind leg, freed.
Sawyer made a sound that wasn't a word.
She moved to the right leg. Pressed the watch. Counted in her head—one, two, the softening spreading under her palm. Grabbed the bottle. Tapped. Crack. Flake. Fur.
The process was taking something from her.
Each press of the timepiece softened a palm-sized area, no more.
Each area rehardened within half a minute.
She lost the rhythm twice—pressed, reached for the bottle, and, by the time she brought it down, the crystal had snapped back to rigid.
The watch ran hotter with each attempt. She switched hands.
A red oval, the exact size and shape of the watch face imprinted across her fingers.
The relic was spending its energy. Her skin was paying for it.
She freed the right hind leg. Both legs now twitching on the porch boards, muscle memory running ahead of control. But the tail—
She pressed the watch against the six inches of crystal encasing his tail.
The material that had been first to form, first to bond, the oldest stasis on his body.
The watch flared. The crystal gave, but barely.
A millimeter of softness. Not enough to chip.
Not enough to crack. The original point of contact, the deepest archive, and her relic couldn't break through.
She pressed harder.
"That's enough, Lainie."
It wasn’t his sardonic voice. Or the put-upon cat. But something under all of that, raw and plain.
"You're burning yourself."
She looked down. The red oval on her hand was visible. The skin around it was hot to the touch. She pulled the watch away, changing hands again. The crystal rehardened in a breath.
Sawyer's tail stayed frozen.
A car door slammed.
The sound came from the driveway—the other side of the house, the side where the grand opening guests had parked.
The attack had been predawn, but hours had passed on this porch.
The sun was high enough now that the winery personnel must have started pulling in while she knelt here with a wine bottle and a cat who couldn't move his tail. How long? She'd lost time on the porch.
More car doors. Voices. The work crew. She was the boss. Were they expecting special instructions as a follow-up to the grand opening?
Lainie's throat tightened. Her employees were out there engaged with the normal world while her magical one crashed and burned, and she was on the porch with blood on the boards and a cat who couldn't move his tail.
Charlie came around the corner of the house.
He was carrying Jenna.
Lainie did a double-take. Jenna wasn’t hurt.
Cue mega relief. Apparently, Jenna had been fighting to get outside, and Charlie had solved the problem the way Charlie solved most problems—by physically removing the obstacle.
Jenna's arms were crossed, her face doing the thing that would make her look exactly like Lainie in twenty years, her feet six inches off the ground.
"I can walk, Charlie."
"Yeah, and you can walk yourself right back inside." He deposited her through the front door with the care of a man handling something precious and the efficiency of a man who had stopped caring about being popular. "Stay."
Blood had soaked through the dish towels wrapped around his forearms. The gash above his left eye was new—a crystal shard, from the porch, during the fight Lainie had watched from the doorway. The cut ran from his eyebrow to the bridge of his nose, and blood tracked into the creases around his eye.
He came back to the porch. Looked at Sawyer—freed legs, trapped tail, the crystal sheath rigid against the railing. Looked at Lainie—scratched hands, burned chest, the red oval printing through her shirt. He didn't say anything about either.
He sat on the top step. The same way he'd sat the afternoon he told Lainie about Sue. Just there.
She pushed her hair off her face. "Hey, when you get a chance will you tell the winery staff they can go home? Maybe give them the week off. I don't want any of them around to get hurt."
"Good idea. Will do." He came to his feet and winced. "I'll get the first-aid kit."
"For you or for me?"
The corner of his mouth twitched. Fighting a smile. Close enough.
She heard heavy footfalls on grass. Kalen came around the south end of the vineyard with Ash a step behind him.
In human form, both of them. Kalen's black clothes were streaked with dirt and ash—the residue of channeled fire—and the knife was still in his right hand.
He hadn't put it away since the attack started.
His golden eyes tracked the tree line as he crossed the yard. In the full sun, the gold looked hot.
Ash was bare-chested. The phoenix shift had burned his shirt off, and the thin lines on his left arm and shoulder from the Archivist's threads were fading, but his skin still carried the pattern—red welts like someone had drawn on him with a hot wire.
His arms were crossed. His jaw clamped. He looked the way fast people look when they're forced to stand still.
Bruno was not with them. Lainie scanned the tree line and found him—a human shape at the eastern fence, watching for the Archivists the way they watched the house. Keeping his own count.
They stopped at the porch steps.
"They're at the tree line." Kalen's voice was the constable register—clipped, pitched low, reporting. "All three. Standing. Threads retracted. They haven't moved since the recall."
"What are they doing?"
"Waiting." He looked at Lainie. The knife turned once in his hand, an unconscious rotation that she'd watched him do with the breakfast knife, with the dagger he kept in his boot, with anything his hands could hold when his body needed an outlet his brain wouldn't permit.
"They weren't fighting, Lainie. They were measuring.
Frost ran the data from the barn. They mapped every defensive position.
Every magical output. The relic's response threshold. "
The words hit her the way diagnoses struck—each one correct, each one adding weight to a picture she didn't want to see completed. The unknown was a bitch.
"They cataloged us."
"Aye."