“Night assault,” Beth said. “My wolves handle the guards. What about the vampires?”
“Vampires are strongest at night,” Marcus said.
“So are werewolves.” Beth’s smile showed her canines. “And we don’t need to kill them. Just keep them busy while your witch does her thing.”
The plan was simple because it had to be. Hazel and Marcus breach the wards and retrieve the evidence. Beth’s wolves create a diversion at the main gate, drawing guards away from the east wing. Azrael infiltrates Viktor’s office in cat form (invisible, overlooked, the perfect spy) and locates the specific files while Hazel and Marcus handle the magical defences.
“What about Viktor?” Jeremy asked. He’d joined the planning session uninvited, hollow-eyed but alert. “Is he in the compound?”
“Azrael’s reconnaissance suggests he’s been moving between the compound and a secondary location,” Marcus said. “We may encounter him. We may not.”
“And if we do?”
“Then we deal with it.”
The Blackwood compoundoccupied a headland south of Willowbrook where the forest met the sea. Gothic revival architecture (turrets, gargoyles, imported stone) designed to look like old money by people who’d had old money so long they’d forgotten what it meant. The ocean crashed against the cliffs below with the steady rhythm of something patient and hungry.
They moved through the forest at midnight. Beth’s wolves ran ahead in wolf form, four grey shapes flowing through the trees like water. Marcus and Hazel followed at a more human pace, his hand in hers, both of them silent.
Azrael rode on Hazel’s shoulder, claws pricking through her jacket.
“Ninety seconds starts when the east ward drops,” he whispered. “I’ll signal.”
The compound’s lights were sparse. Two at the main gate, one in the guard house, a scatter of windows on the upper floors. The ward perimeter was invisible to normal sight, but Hazel felt it, a wall of structured magic that hummed at a frequency just below hearing. The pressure pulled at her fillings.
They waited.
Beth’s wolves hit the main gate at 12:04. Not subtle. Not meant to be. Four wolves slamming into the gate simultaneously, snarling, scattering the troll guards like bowling pins. The noise was enormous, designed to pull every pair of eyes toward the front of the compound.
“Now,” Azrael hissed.
The eastern ward flickered. Not dropped, but cycling. Ninety seconds of reduced sensitivity while the ward witches recalibrated the alignment.
Hazel pressed her hands against the outer barrier. Folk magic: the old way, the grandmother’s way. She didn’t fight the ward. Sheagreedwith it. Persuaded it that she was part of the landscape, that her magic was soil and stone and the natural movement of the earth beneath the compound’s foundations. The recognition barrier hesitated, confused by a signature that wasn’t demon or fae but something older, something it had been built on top of.
The first ward parted like curtains.
Marcus moved through the gap and went to work on the second layer. Golden light traced geometric patterns in the air, ward lattices made visible by his analysis. His fingers found the structural nodes, the load-bearing points where the magic was densest, and he applied precise counter-pressure. Not breaking. Unlocking. The same technique, Hazel realized, that he used on legal arguments: finding the point where the structure rested on an assumption, then removing the assumption.
Forty-five seconds.
The second ward dissolved.
The third was different. Newer. Keyed to blood. Blackwood blood, specifically. It wouldn’t respond to analysis or persuasion.
“Together,” Marcus said.
They’d done this before: the roadblock, the cabin training, the night they’d first discovered that their magic could sing in harmony. Purple light joined gold. Folk magic wrapped around structured magic, intuitive power filling the gaps in geometric precision. Their combined force hit the blood ward like a wave hitting a seawall, not over it, not through it, butaroundit, finding the seams where the enchantment met the stone and pulling them apart.
The ward shattered. Silent, invisible, and total.
They were inside.
Azrael dropped from Hazel’s shoulder and disappeared into the shadows, a black cat in a dark corridor, essentially invisible. His mission: Viktor’s office, second floor. Find the files. Get out.
Marcus and Hazel moved through the east wing, staying close to the walls. The corridor was stone and carpet, expensive art on the walls, the kind of old masters that had been old when Marcus was young. Their footsteps were silent. Their breathing was not.
“Your wound,” Hazel whispered. Marcus’s shirt was dark with sweat, his jaw clenched. The obsidian poison flared during magical exertion, and he’d just poured everything into breaking those wards.
