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 arrivedin 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 dullgleam 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.
