I took Nyssa from Nina, pressing my face against my daughter's soft hair. She smelled like a baby. Everything worth protecting. "We've always got time for cuddles," I said. "Even if we're planning a war."
Nana stood and stretched. "These assholes won’t know what hit ‘em."
I looked down at Melaina in Mom’s arms. Her tiny face was perfect. Thaniel's sparks danced across his skin. Nyssa's shadows pooled contentedly around her. I would do anything to protect them.
Eighty-three babies had died so that monsters could steal their power. So many families had been destroyed by people hiding behind legitimacy and medical authority. My children would not be numbers eighty-four, eighty-five, and eighty-six.
CHAPTER 9
The Thessmark had been hunting magical children for fifty years. Tomorrow night, we hunted them. That plan played out in my head as I lay in bed with my family. Unfortunately for me, sleep wouldn't come. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those names on Nina's screen. Eighty-three families had been destroyed. My children would not be added to that list.
At 11:47 PM, I gave up pretending. Aidon's breathing was deep and even beside me. His hand twitched against my hip. He wasn't sleeping either. I slipped from the bed without speaking, and he didn't stop me. Some things didn't need words.
The stairs creaked under my feet as I listened to the familiar sounds in the darkness. Through the windows, our lights cast warm golden pools on the backyard. Everything looked blissfully ordinary. The mundane world slept while we prepared for war. If only it would stay that way.
Jean-Marc's voice drifted up from the kitchen before I reached the bottom step. "—can't be a coincidence. We know members of the staff were scanning the kids."
I found Nina hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table, on a video call with Jean-Marc. His face filled half the screen,dark circles under his eyes matching hers. There were two empty energy drink cans on the table. Damn, they'd been at this for hours.
"Mom." Jean-Marc didn't look up from his end of the video call. "Good. You need to see this."
Nina waved from her seat at the table, stifling a yawn. "We've been cross-referencing the flash drive data with Stella's network information. Building a complete picture of Corvus."
I pulled out a chair, the scrape of wood against tile unnaturally loud in the quiet house. "What did you find?"
"The research division's server activity is a dead giveaway that they’re up to no good." Jean-Marc's fingers flew across his keyboard, and a graph appeared on Nina's screen. "Every Tuesday and Friday at 3 AM, there's a massive data transfer to an external location." The spikes on the graph were unmistakable and regular.
"It's automated," Jean-Marc continued, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. "They're backing up whatever they're collecting off-site. But here's what's interesting. The file sizes are enormous. We're not talking simple medical records here."
"What could it be? Would magical scans be big like that?" I asked, moving to the coffee maker. My hands needed something to do.
"Yeah, they could be extremely detailed magical signature recordings. Or video files." Nina pulled up another window on the laptop. "We traced the IP address. The external server is located in an industrial park, twenty minutes from Corvus’s main building."
I poured coffee into a mug, watching the dark liquid swirl. The task's normalcy grounded me even as my mind raced. "Who owns it?"
"That's where it gets interesting." Jean-Marc's expression was grim. "It's registered to a shell corporation that doesn'texist on paper anywhere. I can’t find anything except this server registration. There’s no business license or tax records."
I stared at the laptop screen, my coffee growing cold in my hands. The bitter taste matched my mood perfectly.
Jean-Marc was smiling triumphantly, reminding me of the young boy who finally figured out how to put the CD player back together after taking it apart. "I broke through their proxy servers. Mom, you're not going to like this."
My stomach dropped. "Tell me."
"I can’t find an individual tied to it. Corvus Medical Group owns the building where the clinic is located." His fingers flew across his keyboard, and files populated on Nina's screen beside me. "They've got subsidiaries in over twenty different locations, and they all offload data to the same server."
Tarja jumped onto the counter. Her green eyes reflected the laptop's glow. "I went to Stuleros and checked in with Zeph."
Zephyr. The familiar bonded to Luci, the European Pleiades. Tarja didn't often talk about him. I wasn’t sure if he was her mate or what their relationship was exactly. He was Binx’s father. I didn't ask for more details because their relationship seemed... complicated.
"He said the Essence Scythe wasn't always a weapon," she continued. "Originally, it was created as a tool of preservation. A way for dying practitioners to transfer their power to chosen successors. It was considered sacred. Someone corrupted it within the last fifty years. Changed its fundamental purpose to forcibly extract essence from unwilling victims."
“We had guessed as much.” My throat tightened. "What does that mean for us?"
"Nothing good." Tarja sat next to Nina and nudged her so she would scratch behind her ears. "The Scythe was designed for dying adults with fully formed magical cores. Stable essence that was ready to transfer. When they use it on children—especially infants with raw, unformed power—the extraction doesn't go cleanly."
A chill ran down my spine. "What do you mean?"
"Zeph showed me the aftermath of one incident. A clinic in Prague, three years ago. They tried to harvest from twins born to a moderately powerful bloodline. The magical backlash leveled the building and killed everyone inside. It was covered up as a gas explosion."
