“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 thingshe’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 isgone.”
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 saydon’t go. He didn’t sayit’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.”
