“Functional,” he said through his teeth. “Keep moving.”
They’d reached the central stairwell when the ward witches discovered the breach.
The alarm wasn’t loud. The Blackwoods were too refined for sirens. A low tone, almost musical, rippled through the walls. The art shifted on its hangings. The carpet darkened.
“They know.” Marcus drew his magic around him like armour, golden light hardening into geometric shields. “We have minutes.”
“Azrael?”
“Working.” The familiar’s voice came from somewhere above them, already in the office. “Filing system is alphabetical. Viktor is nothing if not organised. Give me sixty seconds.”
Footsteps in the corridor behind them. Fast, professional. The vampire patrol, redirected from the main gate.
Marcus stepped between Hazel and the sound. “Go. Help Azrael. I’ll hold.”
“Like hell.”
“Hazel—”
“We fight together or we don’t fight at all.” She planted herself beside him, hands glowing purple. “That was the deal.”
The first vampire came around the corner moving fast enough that human eyes would have registered only a blur. Marcus caught him with a wall of golden force that stopped momentum like a brick wall. The vampire bounced backward, disoriented.
The second was smarter. She came along the ceiling, inverted, claws digging into the stone. Hazel’s purple fire caught her mid-leap and slammed her into the floor hard enough to crack the flagstones.
The third brought friends.
Four vampires and a troll in the narrow corridor. Too many for finesse. Marcus’s demon nature surged, shadows pooling at his feet, his form rippling with the effort of holding back the full transformation. He was too wounded for it. The obsidian poison would burn through him if he let the demon fully manifest.
“Shield me,” he said.
Hazel understood. She threw a dome of purple light over both of them, not a barrier, but a filter. Her folk magic absorbedthe vampires’ speed-draining spells while Marcus worked behind the shield, building something precise and devastating: a geometric trap woven from golden light and demon fire. When he released it, the trap snapped shut around all four vampires and the troll simultaneously, pinning them to the walls like insects in a display case.
“That won’t hold long,” Marcus panted. Blood was seeping through his shirt.
“It doesn’t need to.” Azrael appeared at the top of the stairwell, a leather satchel clamped in his jaws. Even in cat form, he radiated smugness. He dropped the satchel at Hazel’s feet. “Contracts. Financial records. Assassination orders going back thirty years. Payroll for the Shadow Council, including Margaret Thornfield’s monthly retainer. And a particularly interesting file titled ‘Murraue Deployment: Phase Two.’”
“Phase Two?”
“I’ll explain outside. Can we leave now? This building is becoming inhospitable.”
They ran. Through the east wing, past the disabled wards, out into the cold air. Beth’s wolves had withdrawn from the main gate and were falling back to the tree line, mission accomplished. No casualties, a few bites, some scratches, nothing that werewolf healing wouldn’t fix by morning.
They were forty metres from the compound when the ground trembled.
Hazel felt it through the soles of her boots before she understood it. Magic, massive, ancient, the kind of power that didn’t come from a person but from a dimension. The air split behind them, and the compound’s north tower lit up from within, silver and black light pouring from the windows like liquid.
“Portal,” Marcus said. His voice was hollow. “He’s opening a portal.”
They turned back. They both knew they shouldn’t. They both knew they had the evidence, had what they came for, and that running was the intelligent choice.
But a portal of that magnitude, silver and black, the colours of dimensional breaching, wasn’t an escape route. It was a weapon.
“That’s the murraue deployment,” Azrael said, reading from the stolen file as he ran alongside them. “Phase Two. If the trial proceeds, Viktor plans to open a full dimensional breach. Not a few murraue slipping through the cracks, but an army. Enough nightmare demons to blanket the entire region. He’s been testing the technique since the murraue attacked Hazel at the cabin. That was a proof of concept.”
“How do we stop it?”
“You don’t, typically. A portal of that magnitude requires a sustained power source. Kill the source, kill the portal.”
