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The official emergency notification reached the Cauldron and Cup building at nine fifty-one.

The coven had left at nine forty-five.

“Is anyone going to mention the timing?” Fiora said as they moved at speed through the side streets toward their assigned positions.

“No.” Garnet kept walking.

“Right answer,” Bexley confirmed.

Valene had the cheese plate in a sealed container in her bag. Althea didn’t know when it happened.

“There are creatures,” Althea said, nodding toward the dock district, where two of the larger variants had apparently decided that a warehouse access lane was a navigational feature.

“I see them.”

“You have cheese.”

“I also have a fire extinguisher,” Valene said, patting the bag. “And the coffee thermos. And bandages.” She zipped the bag, calm and clearly prepared for several types of emergency at once. “I had a feeling about tonight.”

“You had a feeling, and you packed a field kit.”

“And cheese. Don’t underestimate the cheese. People make better decisions when they’ve eaten.”

Althea started to say something, then stopped. This was not the strangest thing about the evening so far.

The northern anchor ward line was visible when she reached it — glowing at a frequency she’d learned to read over the past months, its blue-green light unsteady, pulsing in the irregular rhythm of a line in distress from multiple directions. The stones were warm. Not the warmth of normal ward activity. The warmth of a line held together by force rather than function.

Drayce was there — partial shift, gold-eyed, moving along the ward boundary, efficient and brutal. Twenty minutes into holding this perimeter, he’d clearly run out of patience for what it would cost to push it further. He drove one of the larger creatures into the cliff face hard enough that the impact shuddered through the stones under her feet, pivoted before it finished recovering, and was already between two pack members and a second creature. A claw mark ran along his left forearm. He was refusing to acknowledge it.

Beyond Drayce, she could place the others now. Maelin held the eastern flank, directing two pack members into the gap where the creatures pressed hardest. Pike stood higher up the cliff path, notebook out — either absurd or completely on-brand, and she’d stopped trying to tell the difference where Pike was concerned. He was tracking something: head up, head down, marking. Counting.

She caught the claw mark. Fresh, from the look of it. A tightness gripped her chest, and she wasn’t going to call it panic, because panic wasn’t useful right now, and she could have it later.

He saw her. Across fifteen feet of active combat zone, with two pack members and a ward line under siege, his eyes found hers and held. His wolf was gold and present, every bit of him aware of her.

Then his gaze went to the ward line behind her and back to her — not a command, but an absolute request.

Can you hold it?

She looked at the ward line. At the pressure along it. At the cold-centered fires burning wrong in the dock district below. At the creatures massing at the perimeter, their purposeful coordination saying someone had directed them here.

She looked back at him.

Then she turned to the ward line and put her hands on the anchor stone.

It wasn’t what she’d expected.

She’d spent months bracing for it to surge, to explode, to erupt in the uncontrolled eruption she’d been managing since she got here. But the ward stone under her palms was gently drawing her fire magic — not drawing, not demanding. Receiving. She was what the ward had been waiting for.

She opened up.

Not the way she’d been afraid of — not outward and uncontrolled. Outward and intentional. She let the fire go the way her training had taught her — not a surge, not a fight, more like pressing a hand flat against a wound that needed pressure. The heat moved through the stone and into the line, and the line drank it down like dry wood catching fire. The ward had been waiting for this. She’d been the one making it wait.

This, her fire told her without words, in the language of heat and pressure, is what you’re for.

The ward line steadied. Not fully — the dock district breach was still burning, and the eastern section was strained — but enough to give the pack more room to work. She could feel Drayce on the other side of the line, the way she could feel the cliff at her back: solid, enormous, not going anywhere.

She held on.