I can only make sure that when they get here, the evidence they find doesn’t match the evidence that triggered their deployment.
Discrepancies between the original referral and the current data will slow them down. Create doubt. Force a secondary assessment before they proceed to the kind of action that ends with consecrated silver and a closed file.
I need to warn her. Now.
The shadow communication network we built — the one that lets me send messages through the fire-shadow bridge by pushing emotional impressions into the darkness — was compromised two days ago when the new detection equipment picked up unusual shadow activity in the corridor outside my office.
We abandoned it. Switched to physical dead drops and coded notes left in agreed-upon locations.
Too slow.
Notes take hours. Ashley needs to know about this before breakfast, before she walks into a dining hall where everyHunter on campus has access to the same file that’s sitting on my desk.
I close my eyes.
Reach for the fire at my center — the steady amber warmth that has been part of me since I was nineteen and the Hunter training ignited it.
I push the fire outward. Not through my hands, not into the visible world where detection equipment could catch it.
Down. Through the floor. Into the stone of the building where Ashley’s shadows live in the cracks and spaces, the remnants of the network we built before the compromise.
My fire finds them.
Her shadows — dormant, compressed, the thin threads she leaves in the building’s structure the way Bael taught her, dark veins running through stone that carry feeling the way copper wire carries current.
I push emotion into the fire and the fire pushes it into the shadows:
Danger. Urgent. File. Hunters coming. Meet me.
It’s crude.
The shadow network carries feeling rather than words, and the feeling I’m sending is a mess — fear and urgency and love tangled together in a signal that Ashley will have to untangle from the raw emotion into something actionable.
But she’ll feel it.
I feel her wake up.
Through the fire-shadow bridge — a sudden sharpening of her presence in my awareness, the shift from the soft blur of sleep to the alert tension of a woman whose danger instincts have been honed by months of hiding.
Her shadows reach back along the network, touching my fire with a questioning pulse that carries the taste of adrenaline and the shape ofwhat’s wrong?
I push harder.
File on my desk. Your name. Shadow analysis. ADU recommended. I’ve altered the evidence but the original referral is already with the Council. They’re coming. Tell Bael.
The shadows carry it.
I feel the message travel through the stone — down through the administrative wing, across the courtyard’s underground foundations, up through the east dormitory walls into the room where Ashley sleeps.
The bond translates. Not perfectly — the emotional noise blurs some of the specifics. But enough.
Enough for her to understand that the morning she woke up in is not the same morning she went to sleep in.
I push a second message through a different channel, aimed deeper — into the ancient darkness that runs beneath the building, the layer where Bael’s shadows live.
The vampire reads fire differently than Ashley does — he translates heat into intention with the precision of a being who has been interpreting signals for millennia.
Council file. ADU deployment. Evidence altered but referral already sent. Sanctuary compromised. Need new plan.
