Chapter 17
Hazel traced the scars on Marcus’s bare chest with her fingertips. Five days until the trial. She was trying not to count.
“Stop counting.” His voice rumbled beneath her cheek, warm and sleep-rough.
She pressed a kiss to the scar on his ribs. “I can’t help it.”
He pulled her closer until no space existed between them. His heartbeat was steady and unhurried, a demon’s pulse, slower than a human’s. She’d learned to find it comforting instead of strange.
“Coffee?” she offered, though neither of them moved.
“In a minute.” He buried his face in her hair, inhaling deeply. “Or twenty.”
They made it to the kitchen eventually. Hazel filled the kettle while Marcus spread case files across the table, his reading glasses perched on his nose.
Cheap drugstore readers, the kind you grab off a spinning rack at CVS, which somehow made a five-hundred-year-old demon lawyer look unbearably human.
He hated that she knew about the glasses. She loved that she knew.
“I need to get Lily’s tonic to Mrs. Henderson,” Hazel said, staring at her grandmother’s mortar and pestle, the one thing she’d brought to the cabin. “It’s been four days. Lily’s stabilizer runs out tomorrow.”
“Five more days.” Marcus turned a page without looking up. “We can hold.”
“You don’t know what moon-sickness does to a fifteen-year-old girl without her tonic, Marcus. The nightmares alone—”
“I know.” He set his pen down. “But if you leave this cabin right now, Viktor Blackwood will know within the hour.”
She hated that he was right. She hated it more that being right didn’t help Lily Henderson sleep through the night.
The phone rang.
They both froze. Marcus’s work phone only rang for emergencies, and Hazel’s personal phone hadn’t rung in two weeks. Her clients had been told she was away for a family matter. This was her personal phone. The sound was jarring, almost foreign.
She answered on the third ring. “Hello?”
Mrs. Henderson’s voice came through in fractured sobs, the words tumbling over each other like stones down a hillside. Hazel caught fragments: fire, the shop, please, Lily.
“Slow down. Mrs. Henderson, I need you to slow down.”
“Wicked Brews is burning.” The old woman’s voice cracked on every syllable. “The fire department came but the runes… there are black runes carved into the doorframe, they can’t get close, the building is just…” A strangled sound. “It’s gone, Hazel. Everything.”
Marcus was already on his feet, reading her expression.
“Lily?” Hazel managed.
“Screaming. All night, every night for three days.” Mrs. Henderson’s breathing was ragged.
“Not just her. Jeremy Hollins’s wolf came out last night despite the stabilizer.
Half the neighbourhood heard it. And the Castellan twins, the household ward you made them failed. They’ve been sleeping in shifts.”
“That’s not possible. I wove that charm myself—”
“It’s those things. The nightmare creatures. They’re everywhere. Not just in dreams anymore. People are seeing shadows in the streets, smelling that awful copper-and-sugar smell. The whole town is terrified and nobody’s sleeping and your shop is gone.”
Hazel’s hand was white-knuckled on the phone. Marcus had moved beside her, close enough to hear.
“Who did this?” Hazel asked, though she already knew.
“Black runes. Obsidian. The Blackwood signature.” Mrs. Henderson’s voice dropped to a whisper. “There was a message. Burned into the sidewalk in front of the shop. It said: Withdraw, or everyone she’s ever helped pays for it.”
The line was quiet except for Mrs. Henderson’s breathing and Lily’s distant screaming.
“I’ll be there,” Hazel said.
“Hazel, no—”
She hung up. Set the phone down on the counter with a deliberate care that fooled neither of them.
Marcus stood three feet away, watching her. He didn’t say don’t go. He didn’t say it’s too dangerous. He waited.
“Those are my people.” Her voice was steady. Flat. The kind of calm that comes after a decision has already been made. “Lily is fifteen years old. Jeremy could kill someone if his wolf is loose. The Castellans don’t even have wards anymore.”
“I know.”
“I’m going back.”
“I know that too.”
She looked up, ready for the argument, the logical, precise, lawyerly argument about witness protection protocols and acceptable risk and five more days. Instead, she found Marcus Hawthorne already pulling on his jacket.
“Then we go together,” he said.
From the windowsill, Azrael lifted his head. “Finally. I was beginning to think you’d both forgotten what spines were for.”
They arrived in Willowbrook at dusk, and Hazel smelled it before she saw it.
Smoke. Charred wood. Underneath it, the copper-and-burnt-sugar stench of murraue residue. The nightmare demons that had invaded her dreams two weeks ago at the cabin, the ones Marcus had driven back with silver and obsidian. They’d come back. Not for her this time, but for everyone.
Wicked Brews was a skeleton.
The front wall still stood, purple letters of the sign barely visible through the soot.
Behind it: nothing. The shelves where six generations of Wickwood women had arranged their ingredients, gone.
The antique mortars lined up on the kitchen counter, melted to slag.
Her grandmother’s grimoires, handwritten across thirty years of careful work, recipes and remedies and the accumulated wisdom of a hedge-witch lineage, all of it ash.
The brass scales her grandmother had used for measuring ingredients lay in the rubble, warped beyond recognition.
Hazel stood in the street and felt the loss settle into her bones like lead.
Marcus didn’t touch her. He knew better. He stood close enough that she could feel his warmth and waited for her to decide how to break.
She didn’t break. She walked into the ruins.
The obsidian runes were carved deep into the stone doorframe, the one piece of the building that had survived intact.
She recognized the pattern from Marcus’s case files.
Blackwood binding sigils. Not just arson markers; these were territorial claims. Viktor was saying: this ground is mine now.
Everything you built here belongs to me.
“Professional work.” Marcus examined the runes. “This isn’t a warning. It’s a siege. He’s attacking your supply chain: the shop, the ingredients, the charms protecting your clients. Without you here to maintain them, every ward and tonic you’ve placed in the last twenty years degrades.”
“The murraue?”
“Accelerants. They feed on fear and nightmares. A sleep-deprived, terrified population won’t rally behind a witness. Viktor intends to break this town’s will so thoroughly that no one will support your testimony.” He paused. “It’s what I would do, if I were prosecuting from the other side.”
The streets were quiet. Not the peaceful quiet of a small Maine town at evening, but the hunted quiet of people behind locked doors, curtains drawn, lights out. She saw a face in Mrs. Henderson’s upstairs window. It vanished when she looked.
“They’re afraid of me,” Hazel said.
“They’re afraid of what helping you costs.”
She walked deeper into the rubble. Glass crunched under her boots.
Here was where the register had stood. Here was where Lily Henderson sat every Wednesday afternoon, drinking chamomile tea while her tonic brewed.
Here was where Mr. Vance complained about the price of valerian root and then tipped her twenty dollars anyway.
Twenty years. Three generations of Wickwood women. Gone in a night because she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time and refused to pretend she hadn’t seen Viktor Blackwood drive an obsidian blade through a fae’s chest.
“Hazel.” Marcus’s voice, sharp.
She turned. Three figures had materialized at the edge of the ruined shopfront.
Black tactical gear, faces obscured, the dull gleam of obsidian blades at their hips.
Blackwood enforcers. Not the amateur thugs from the forest weeks ago.
These moved like professionals, positioning themselves in a triangle formation that cut off the exits.
“Miss Wickwood.” The lead enforcer’s voice was female, bored. “Mr. Blackwood sends his regards. He wants you to know that this”—she gestured at the ruins—“was the polite version.”
Marcus stepped forward, putting himself between Hazel and the enforcers. His demon nature flickered at the edges: shadows pooling at his feet, a faint amber glow behind his eyes.
“Leave. Now.”
“Or what? You’ll file a motion?” The enforcer drew her blade. Obsidian, enchanted, the same magic-eating stone that cut through witch defences like they weren’t there. “We’re not here for the lawyer. We’re here for the witch.”
They attacked as a unit.
The first enforcer came straight at Marcus, a feint. The real attack came from the flanks, two blades arcing toward Hazel from opposite sides. They’d studied Marcus’s fighting style, knew he’d protect her, planned to use his protectiveness against him.
Marcus moved faster than physics should allow. He caught the feint-strike on his forearm (obsidian slicing through his jacket, drawing a line of black blood) and pivoted to intercept the blade headed for Hazel’s throat. His hand closed around the enforcer’s wrist. Bone cracked.
But the third blade found him.
The obsidian drove into his side, just below the ribs. Not deep, but deep enough. Black veins spidered out from the wound like ink in water.
Marcus staggered. Didn’t fall. Threw the broken-wristed enforcer into her companion with enough force to crack the wall behind them.
The third enforcer pulled her blade free, Marcus’s blood smoking on the obsidian. She raised it for a killing stroke.
Hazel’s magic detonated.
She didn’t choose it. Didn’t shape it or direct it the way Marcus had taught her.
The purple light erupted from her core, raw, wild, furious, and the enforcer simply ceased to exist. Not disintegrated.
Not burned. Ceased. One moment a person stood there; the next, the space was empty and the air smelled of ozone and lilacs.
The two remaining enforcers scrambled backward. One was cradling her shattered wrist. The other looked at the empty space where her partner had stood and made a sound that might have been a prayer.
That’s when Azrael transformed.
The small black cat expanded. Shadows poured from him like liquid night, pooling and rising and taking shape.
In seconds, he stood eight feet tall: a creature of living darkness with eyes like dying stars and a mouth full of geometries that shouldn’t exist in three dimensions.
His tail alone was longer than Marcus was tall, barbed at the tip with something that caught the light and refused to give it back.
This was what he truly was. Not a familiar. Not a pet. Something ancient and terrible that had chosen to wear a cat’s form for reasons only it understood.
The enforcers ran. They didn’t look back.
Azrael shrank back to cat size, padded over to Marcus, and butted his head against Marcus’s hip. “You’re bleeding.”
“Noticed.” Marcus pressed his hand to his side. The black veins had spread across his ribs, visible through his torn shirt. The obsidian poison was different from last time, refined, nastier. Designed for demons. “How bad?”
“Bad enough.” Hazel was already kneeling beside him, hands glowing purple.
She pressed them to the wound and felt the poison fight her.
It was like trying to push water uphill; the obsidian enchantment ate at her healing magic, corroding it from the inside.
“The blade was cursed. This isn’t just obsidian, it’s been treated with something. Anticoagulant enchantment.”
“Viktor’s been refining his weapons.” Marcus’s voice was tight. “Specifically for demons. He expected me to come.”
She pushed harder. The poison retreated, slowly, grudgingly, like a predator forced from its kill. She couldn’t purge it completely. Not here, not with salvaged supplies and exhaustion pulling at her edges. But she could slow it. Buy time.
“Can you walk?”
“Can you stop asking me that every time I get stabbed?” He tried to smile. It came out more like a grimace.
She got him upright. He leaned on her, heavier than he wanted to be, and they surveyed the damage. The ruins of Wicked Brews. Marcus’s blood on the broken glass. An empty space where a person used to be.
Hazel found the first-aid supplies she’d brought from the cabin and set up a makeshift treatment station in the alley behind the shop.
The wall was still warm from the fire. She worked by the purple glow of her own magic.
Cut away Marcus’s shirt. Got blood on her sleeve, swore, kept working.
Cleaned the wound. Packed it with the anti-venom paste she’d made after the last obsidian attack.
Her hands were shaking, and she had to redo the bandage when it went on crooked.
“The poison’s moving slower than it should,” she said, watching the black veins pulse. “Your demon healing is fighting it.”
“Demon stubbornness.” He caught her hand. “We need a plan.”
“I have a plan. Keep you alive. Keep Lily’s tonic coming. Find every murraue in Willowbrook and send them back to whatever dimension Viktor summoned them from.”
“That’s three plans.”
“I’m an overachiever.” She pressed a fresh bandage against his wound, harder than necessary. “Five days until trial. We hold.”
From the shadows of the alley, Azrael watched the street. His eyes, ordinary amber again, nothing ancient or terrible about them, tracked movements that human and demon eyes couldn’t see.
“They’ll be back.” The familiar’s ears were flat. “With more people and better weapons.”
“I know.” Hazel tied off the bandage and sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking. “So we’d better be ready.”
Somewhere on the other side of town, something screamed. Could have been Lily Henderson. Could have been a fox. In Willowbrook these days, it was hard to tell.