Page 69
By the time she’d come inside, all four of them had been looking elsewhere, intently, absolutely not watching from twelve feet away.
The silence had lasted twelve full minutes.
She loved them.
The ward fluctuation hit at nine forty-three.
Not gradual. A ripple through the ambient magic of the room — the espresso machine went completely silent, something that had never happened before, and the candles on the table flattened sideways as if pressed by a wind that wasn’t there. Then three more ripples in quick succession, each carrying the distinct signature of a ward section under pressure.
Bexley was already standing.
She had a folded piece of paper in her hand.
Althea looked at it. “Is that—”
“Ward vulnerability map.” Bexley unfolded it. She’d added a red tier since the last version. There was a lot of red. “I distributed copies this morning and labeled them ‘emergency reference’ so as not to cause alarm.”
“You distributed copies.” Fiora held up the paper.
“This morning, yes.”
“Without telling us what they were for.”
“I labeled them clearly.”
“Mine said emergency reference.”
“That’s what I said.” Bexley was studying the map. “The dock district section went first. The northern perimeter is next, and the eastern anchor is compromised, which means the breach pattern is—” She looked up at Garnet.
Garnet: “Coordinated.”
“Yes.”
They looked at Althea.
She picked up her coat.
Outside was wrong — the way Spelltide Cove went when the ward lines were in trouble: the ambient hum residents stopped noticing after a few months here had vanished, replaced by a high-frequency harmonic that vibrated at the back of the teeth. The sky toward the docks carried a wrongness that wasn’t weather. Fires, but not hers. She knew the difference now: her fire ran warm at the center. These ran cold straight through.
Rift fires.
The creatures coming with them weren’t the scout variants from early fall — bigger, more numerous, moving with coordination instead of ambient Rift pressure. The ward lines were holding, barely, already weakened by the Colleen modifications, weeks of creature pressure, and the degradation Bexley had been logging in her ward-incident files since August.
Her phone lit up. Drayce: Three-section breach. Dock perimeter, northern anchor, eastern secondary. Pack deploying. Where are you?
She typed back: In front of the Cauldron and Cup with the coven.
He replied: Position?
She looked at Bexley, who was assigning positions, economical in her movements, as if she’d been thinking about this for forty-eight hours and was now simply executing. “Tell him, northern anchor. We need someone with ward access at the main anchor point.”
She knows about the map? Drayce sent.
Althea typed: She made the map. Then: Northern anchor. I’ll be there.
She put her phone in her pocket and followed Bexley’s pointing finger toward the cliff path.
On the emergency channel — a frequency she’d been added to two weeks ago and hoped she’d never need — Maelin’s voice cut through, clean and steady: pack positions called, flank assignments relayed, a terse update that the dock district breach was active at three points, not panicking, not performing calm either. Just someone who’d done this before, doing it again.
