The dimensional breach collapsed inward, folding in on itself like a star dying in reverse. The murraue were dragged back through the shrinking gateway, shadows clawing at nothing,mouths opening on silence. The portal shrank to a point of silver-black light, flickered once, and vanished.
Viktor stumbled backward, suddenly disconnected from the power that had sustained him. He looked old. Diminished. A six-hundred-year-old man who’d just lost his trump card.
Marcus was on his feet. He shouldn’t have been. The wound was bad, the blood was real, and the obsidian poison was eating him alive. But he stood.
He crossed the room in three strides and drove his fist into Viktor Blackwood’s jaw. The patriarch went down like a marionette with cut strings.
Marcus stood over him, breathing hard, demon nature flickering at his edges. His fist was raised for a second blow.
“Marcus.” Hazel’s hand on his shoulder. “He needs to stand trial. We need him alive.”
His fist trembled. The demon screamed for blood, for vengeance, for the simple satisfaction of ending the man who’d burned her shop, poisoned her town, and tried to drown a region in nightmares.
He lowered his hand.
“You’re right.” He looked at Viktor’s crumpled form, then at Cassandra, who’d stopped struggling on the floor. “They stand trial. They face justice. That’s what we do.”
Marcus used Cassandra’s own blood-magic restraints to bind them both, a particularly elegant irony. The suppression wards he added were thorough, layered, and unbreakable. Five centuries of legal-magical expertise applied to the simple problem of making sure two very dangerous people stayed exactly where he put them.
The driveback to Willowbrook took forty-five minutes. Beth’s wolves ran escort, grey shapes in the headlights. Azrael rode shotgun with the stolen evidence satchel between his paws, reading files aloud in a tone of increasing disgust.
Marcus drove because Hazel couldn’t stop her hands from shaking, and Hazel navigated because Marcus’s vision was graying at the edges from blood loss and obsidian poisoning.
“You need to stop,” she said when he swerved for the third time.
“I need to get us home.”
“You need to not die in a car crash after surviving a compound raid and a portal fight.”
He conceded. She drove the rest of the way with one hand on the wheel and the other on his arm, monitoring the pulse of obsidian poison through his system. It was faster now. The exertion had accelerated it.
Mrs. Henderson’s kitchen. The only intact workspace they had. Hazel laid Marcus on the table (he protested; she ignored him) and went to work with everything she had left.
The obsidian poison had spread from his ribs to his sternum. Black veins pulsed beneath skin that had gone grey. His demon healing was fighting it, but losing. The enchanted blade had been designed specifically to overcome supernatural regeneration.
“I need moonbell extract,” Hazel murmured, hands glowing purple over his wound. “And valerian. And silver shavings.”
“Your shop burned.”
“I know my shop burned.” She closed her eyes, reaching for the knowledge that lived in her hands and not in any grimoire. Her grandmother’s voice:The recipe is in you, girl. The bookis just a reminder.“I can make it from memory. I need ingredients.”
Mrs. Henderson appeared in the doorway. She didn’t ask. She left and came back twenty minutes later with a box of supplies salvaged from the ruins of Wicked Brews: sealed jars that had survived the fire, soot-blackened but intact. Moonbell extract. Valerian root. A pouch of silver shavings that smelled of smoke and ash.
Hazel didn’t thank her. Couldn’t. Not yet.
She worked through the pre-dawn hours, mixing the anti-venom from memory, adjusting proportions by instinct and the sound of Marcus’s breathing. The first batch separated wrong; she scraped it into the sink and started again. Without the grimoire’s precise measurements, she had to guess at ratios, taste-testing and correcting, correcting and tasting. Her grandmother would have been horrified by the methodology. Her grandmother would have understood.
By sunrise, the black veins were retreating. Marcus’s colour was returning, not to healthy, but toalive. He opened his eyes and found her face.
“Don’t you dare die,” she said. Her voice was wrecked. “I haven’t finished yelling at you yet.”
His hand found hers. Purple and gold light flickered weakly between their palms, a candle flame where there’d been a bonfire, but steady. Still burning.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “What did I miss?”
“You drove into a ditch. I saved your life. Azrael read Viktor’s financial crimes aloud for forty-five minutes. The usual.”
His mouth twitched. It was the best thing she’d seen in days.
