The Raven at the Ash Door (The Oak & Holly Cycle #3)

Chapter One

New magic sputtered in her veins. Sputtered, sparked, and then ignited. Finally.

“We’re a go,” Kierse said into her earpiece.

“Let’s stick to the plan, shall we?” Graves said, his crisp British accent coursing through her.

A smile came to her face. “I always stick to the plan.”

A scoff was Graves’s only reaction. Kierse was known to improvise. She’d had enough marks go south to know that she hoped for the best and planned for the worst. This was no different.

The plan itself was simple: steal a Celtic artifact—the Stone of Fal—from a Scottish warlock.

After a tip from one of Graves’s many old apprentices, they discovered it was being held in an underground vault in Edinburgh. The warlock-in-question’s main ability was evocation, which meant he could call spirits and demons and monsters to do his bidding for him.

Not so simple.

“George?” Graves asked.

His driver cleared his throat. “All clear out here, boss.”

“Walter?” Graves prompted.

“As soon as the tour leaves, you’ll have five minutes,” their tech guy said, calm and emotionless.

Five minutes. Kierse hoped that was enough time.

She shifted in position, feeling the weight of the Spear of Lugh at her back. A dangerous, powerful weapon forged by the gods themselves. And a last resort in all scenarios since the thing liked to whisper murder into her mind.

“Starting now,” she whispered.

She pushed aside the buzzing in her ears as she ignited a blue light in her palm.

The pixie light was teardrop shape, and when she concentrated, it split into two and then two more.

A handful of little lights buzzed excitedly, ready to do their job.

Hard to believe these little ones were typically depicted as wisps in fiction, with their lights leading a person to their destiny or off into the darkness of a swamp to their death.

The strain of her new magic made her grit her teeth, and this was the easiest of her abilities.

But her old Fae magic was still tied up by Lorcan Flynn.

While the cauldron had seen a loophole and given her these new powers outside of her magical binding with Lorcan, her original powers that she’d had full control over—time manipulation, glamours, and the ability to predict a score—were all gone.

It left the most dangerous of her magic—absorption—passive after everything she’d done to train it this summer.

She even had to learn how to do her hair differently to mask her pointed Fae ears from the general population. It was a pain in the ass.

After three months, neither she nor Graves figured out a way around the binding, so she buckled down to begrudgingly train what the cauldron had given her.

Other than the pixie lights, magical intuition allowed her to see who had magic and what kind.

And the last two powers “in theory” were—persuasion and portaling.

Kierse leaned forward and blew against her palm.

The pixie lights flew away from her like dandelions on the breeze.

They approached the ghost tour that had just entered South Bridge vaults where Kierse had hidden after sneaking off from her own tour.

Blue lights flickered around the heads of the tour guide and the twenty tourists trekking through the dripping, low-ceilinged underground.

The tour and its guide’s faces suddenly went blank. Then with a dead-eyed look, they all followed the lights out of the room, leaving Kierse alone. Lure complete.

“They’re out,” Kierse said.

“Five minutes starts…now,” Walter said.

Kierse watched the magic spark to life at the door to the vault chamber.

Walter was an apprentice-level warlock with force-field magic.

After working with King Louis for a time, Graves recruited him for the cauldron heist. Now he trained the young warlock, who he had previously dismissed as unworthy.

Kierse liked having a tech genius that no one could touch—well, except her, thanks to her always-on absorption magic—on their side.

“Showtime,” Kierse muttered.

As she removed her picks from the inside pocket of her leather jacket, a new smile graced her features, this one a little wild at the edges. Her thieving smile. The one that said she liked this part a bit too much.

Kierse went to work on the lock, fitting her tools into the old iron door and keeping her hands clear. Her Fae half still didn’t much like iron, but at least it didn’t hurt her as bad as it could.

The plan was simpler than the problem. Kierse would break into the underground vault, use her absorption abilities to bypass the warlock’s wards, and steal the stone.

Walter would run surveillance and use his force fields to keep the tunnels clear for her.

Graves would be the distraction this time, a fun change for him.

George, as always, was the getaway driver.

The problem was Archie Blair. He was the premier warlock of Edinburgh and had lived on Blair Street off the Royal Mile since the late 1700s. Warlocks were territorial, and while lesser warlocks could be in their cities, they almost exclusively had one master.

Graves ran New York. Imani ran Chicago. Kingston had London. Estelle had Paris. They were all formidable and generally terrifying in their own right. Kierse hoped that she wouldn’t run into Archie this time. Meeting other warlocks didn’t tend to go well for her.

The lock clicked.

“I’m inside,” she said.

There were no wards on the iron door as she pushed into the blocked-off tunnel system.

Her fingers smarted against the iron, but the pain was quickly replaced by the smell, which was nearly enough to knock her off her feet.

She was used to the New York City subway, but this was ancient and ugly.

No wonder this wasn’t on the tour. She pushed aside that increasingly annoying buzzing sensation as she plugged her nose and continued forward.

She’d memorized the blueprints of the vaults from when they had first been created and knew the way to Archie’s house off Blair Street.

His vaults were kept private from the other one hundred and twenty, which had originally been used for storage, but they had been improperly sealed and after only a few years were abandoned. Humans rediscovered them years later.

Though the true story was that they had been taken over by monsters, and only the most desperate humans lived amongst them until they came into the light.

A stark difference to Kierse’s home of New York City, which resulted in mass murder when the monsters took over and a decade-long war for control of the city. Only through the Monster Treaty had it all calmed down.

And now in a month’s time, the treaty was going to be renegotiated. A problem for another day.

“Going to the door,” Graves said.

She heard the knock on the front door through her earpiece as she navigated the disgusting tunnels. She hadn’t been sure that she even believed in ghosts until she’d come to Edinburgh. A few days inside the vaults and their old cemetery had made her a believer.

“No one is answering,” Graves ground out. He knocked again.

They knew that Archie was home. In their stakeout, they had figured out his schedule.

Every morning, he ate the same breakfast at a tiny shop on the mile, took a walk up Arthur’s Seat, had lunch with a variety of monsters, an afternoon nap, and then a pint alone at a tavern walking distance from his house.

Everything he did was walking distance. They’d seen him walk into his home earlier that evening, and once he made it home, he never left.

It wasn’t late enough that he’d be asleep. Where was he?

“I’m almost there,” Kierse told him. “Will still need to break through the second vault door.”

“Don’t go inside without me,” Graves commanded.

“Understood.”

The buzzing was getting louder and she ground her teeth together as she focused on the task at hand. The entrance to Archie’s vaults were through another door, down one more tunnel, and behind another locked door. She opened it, hissing at the touch of iron, and pushed forward into the last tunnel.

It was night and day.

Where the previous tunnels were dark, dank, and disturbing, the hiss of the paranormal pressing against her had been oppressive. This area was clean, the air almost fresh. She’d made it to Archie’s section of the South Bridge vaults.

And before her was another giant iron door.

She blinked furiously when she looked at it, seeing a crisscross of magic and recognizing it all immediately as warlock wardings.

Before she’d received her magical intuition, she wouldn’t have known that the door was warded until she touched it.

She might have gotten a scent of some magic use or seen the thistle carvings—Archie’s symbol—glimmering in iridescence in a language she almost understood.

Now, she could read that language. She knew exactly what warding was put over this door, that it came from a warlock, and how powerful he was.

The gold gleam of his powers and the scent of peat mixed with the coconut-scent of gorse was nearly overwhelming.

With her experience now, it was almost a joke that she struggled so hard last year to discern that Graves’s magic wasn’t just books.

Now she could say distinctly that his magic was the leather of lambskin, the old parchment they used to hand cure in his youth in Ireland, and a new scent—an old resin ink.

She could have taken apart each individual Irish wildflower that comprised her magic.

She retrieved her picks again, pushing that magical buzzing down deep in her gut as she worked on the lock, which was arguably more advanced than the last one. He clearly had invested more in his own private vault than the South Bridge vaults at large.

“Fuck,” Graves muttered.

She paused. “What?”

His voice grated as he said, “The wards are down.” He cursed under his breath. “I connected with the house and they’re down.” She heard a door creak open.

“The vault door is still secure.”