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“I said move!” Ethan kept waiting for his panic to set in, but knowing there were victims trapped inside, barely twenty feet from where he was standing, was a huge motivator.

Rook didn’t budge. His shadows coiled around Ethan’s ankles, as if physically stopping him from going anywhere as well. “I can’t let you go in there.”

“You’re wasting time.” Ethan stepped sideways, but the shadows followed. “Every minute we stand here arguing is another minute those people are trapped.”

“If something happens to you…”

“Then you’ll handle it.” Ethan looked past Rook to the door. “That’s what you do. You told me this. Now either help me or get out of my way.”

Rook’s shadows tightened fractionally, then reluctantly withdrew. “Don’t touch anything except the ward. And if shooting starts, you hit the ground and let me take care of it.”

“Fine. Deal. Whatever.” All Ethan could think about was how close he was to saving Fiona, and no one, not even Rook, who had been nothing but good to him, was going to stop him.

They approached the door together, Thorn and Cillian converging from their positions. The ward shimmer intensified as Ethan got closer, a heat-mirage distortion that made his eyes water. Ethan couldn’t say if it was magic or not - it’s not like he had any experience in that sort of thing. But he felt a pressure against his eardrums, as if he was hearing a frequency just outside human perception.

The sigil itself was etched across the metal door in rust-brown strokes. Thin paint? Ethan thought hopefully, even though he knew it was probably blood. Crouching down, Ethan examined the pattern.

“Can you break it?” Thorn loomed behind him.

“Give me a second.” Ethan traced the design without touching. It was an interesting design, at least to an artistic eye, made up of circles within circles, with intersecting lines forming geometric shapes. It was similar to Renaissance occult diagrams he’d studied during his graduate work. Protective wards used sympathetic magic, at least to people who believed in such things, with the pattern creating the barrier. Guess it was real after all.

“What do you need?” Rook’s voice came from directly over his shoulder.

“I need to do something to disrupt the pattern.” Ethan patted his pockets, but it wasn’t as though he’d come prepared to clean anything. He didn’t even have a napkin or a handkerchief. Giving up on finding anything in his pockets, Ethan scanned the surrounding concrete, noticing a puddle near the loading dock. “That’ll work.”

Do not think about what might be in this water, he told himself as he bent down, cupping his hands and scooping out a bit of water. It was cold, and definitely wasn’t hygienic, but it would have to do. Returning to the door, Ethan checked the sigil once more, identifying the primary anchor points.

“You’re going to wash it off?” Silas sounded skeptical through the comm. “That seems remarkably simple for a highly powered ward.”

“The complexity is the barrier itself, not the medium.” Ethan splashed water across the central circle, and then used his damp palm to scrub at the dried blood. I’m definitely going to freak out about this afterward. “The pattern maintains the ward. It makes sense that if the pattern is broken, the ward will collapse.”

At least I hope so. The blood smeared under his hand, and Ethan swallowed down his nausea at the contact with his skin. I’ve cleaned worse than this before, he reminded himself, working methodically, focusing on the intersection points where multiple lines converged. The ward’s shimmer flickered.

“It’s weakening.” Cillian’s shadows crept closer to the door. “Keep going.”

Ethan returned to the puddle twice more, gathering water and scrubbing with his hands until the central circle dissolved into rust-colored streaks. As the last part of the circle washed away, the pressure against his eardrums popped, and the shimmer that was hurting his eyes disappeared.

“Done,” he said, letting out a long huff as he wiped his hands on the back of his pants, trying to get any blood flakes off them and hoping his staunch companions wouldn’t notice.

Thorn clearly didn’t care about his hands or pants. His shadows slammed into the door, ripping it from its hinges. The metal crashed inward, and Thorn flowed through the opening, Cillian right behind him.

Rook grabbed Ethan’s shoulder. “Behind me. Always stay behind me.”

Ethan barely had a chance to nod before he was inside the warehouse.

At first glance, the interior was the type of place that set all of Ethan’s alarm bells ringing. It was dark, and the industrial fixtures created pockets of deeper shadow that definitely added to the “you shouldn’t be in here” vibe. Shipping containers lined the floor - not stacked for storage, but arranged deliberately in a line like cells in a prison block. Ethan took in the layout automatically, noting three containers on the left and two on the right, all with reinforced doors and ventilation slats.

“Contact!” Thorn’s voice boomed as muzzle flashes lit the upper catwalk.

Rook’s shadows exploded outward, generating a wall of darkness between Ethan and the gunfire. Bullets sparked off metal, ricocheting from one side of the room to the other. Ethan dropped to a crouch behind a concrete pillar, not really wanting to watch, but unable to look away.

Thorn was like a smoke machine, his shadows rushing up the stairs to the catwalk and engulfing the first guard before he could reload. The man’s scream cut off abruptly. Not dead, Ethan realized, but very definitely unconscious. Thorn’s shadows deposited him on the ground, already moving toward the second guard.

Cillian scaled the opposite wall, his form flickering between human and something else entirely - he had morphed into a being with too many angles and the wrong proportions to be anything remotely human.

He hit the catwalk, and a guard swung a glowing baton at him - clearly enhanced, and while Cillian’s hiss as it made contact was loud enough for Ethan to hear, Cillian didn’t slow down. A hand - or was it shadows, because Ethan was guessing at this point - closed around the guard’s throat, lifting him off his feet as the baton clattered to the metal grating.

Rook stayed with Ethan, his shadows forming a protective perimeter. A third guard emerged from behind the containers, raising a shotgun. My gods, he’s aiming at me. But even as Ethan’s brain struggled to process his new reality, Rook’s shadows lashed out, wrapping around the barrel of the shotgun and yanking it aside as if it were nothing.