“This professional distance plan isn’t working.”
Hazel slowly twirled spaghetti around her fork. “No. It’s not.”
Marcus set down his fork and looked at her. Hazel Wickwood. The witch who argued with pixies and made tea exactly the way he liked it and fought beside him like they’d been doing it for years instead of days. The woman who’d turned his ordered world completely upside down.
“Ten days,” he said.
“Ten days until trial.” She met his eyes across the table. “I’ve been counting too.”
“And then?”
“Then you go back to Boston.” She set down her fork, no longer pretending to eat. “Back to your cases and your perfect record and your life.”
“And you stay here. Your shop, your customers, your life.”
“Yes.”
Marcus wanted to argue with it. Wanted to point out that Boston wasn’t that far, that he had vacation days he never used, that the firm had been talking about opening a satellite office somewhere in New England.
“It’s for the best,” Hazel said, though she didn’t sound like she believed it. “You’d hate it here. Small town, everyone knowing your business. No decent sushi for fifty miles.”
“I don’t even like sushi.”
“See? You’d be miserable.”
“Probably.”
She picked up her fork again, pushed a noodle around her plate. “And I’d drive you crazy. You’ve said so yourself. Multiple times.”
“You do drive me crazy.”
“There you go, then.” She didn’t look up. “It would never work.”
“Never,” he agreed.
Azrael jumped onto the table and ate a meatball off Marcus’s plate. Neither of them stopped him.
13
The wards were screaming.
Hazel bolted upright from the kitchen table where she’d been stealing glances at Marcus doing paperwork. The protective barriers around their safe house pulsed from violent red to gold to a sickly green: colors that shouldn’t exist in a healthy ward system.
“We need to move. Now.” Marcus was already on his feet, case files scattering across the floor.
“What?” But even as she asked, Hazel could sense it: the probing tendrils of magic testing their defenses. Professional work. Coordinated. Multiple casters working in sync. “The Shadow Council?”
“Worse. Blackwood specialists.” He was moving with the speed of someone who’d done this before, shoving documents into his briefcase without looking at what he grabbed. “Professional breach pattern. They’re using a seven-point dissolution spell. We have maybe two minutes before they punch through.”
The wards flared bright orange, a warning pulse.
“One minute,” Marcus corrected.
The front window exploded inward.
“Thirty seconds,” he said grimly.
Glass shards scattered across the floor. Hazel dove for her bag, cramming in grimoires and herb pouches with shaking hands. A handful of grimoires sat on the shelf by the door: modern volumes she’d bought at conferences, reference texts on ward construction and potion theory. Not her grandmother’s irreplaceable collection — those were still at the shop, shelved in the back room where they’d always lived. She reached for them anyway.
