Connor held her gaze for a beat, then nodded. Almost thirty years of marriage, Roslyn reflected, and the man still tried to put himself between his wife and danger…and she still refused to let him. In a strange way, it was comforting to see that some dynamics were universal.
Belshegar appeared in the hallway behind Levi. The air around him felt different than it had that morning, somehow denser, as if the human shape he wore had thinned enough to let some of what lay beneath bleed through. His expression was composed, almost serene, and yet Roslyn could tell he was ready for whatever might come next.
“They’re beginning,” he said.
Just as he finished speaking, the first fireball hit the reinforced wards, and the impact sent a shudder through the house that Roslyn could feel in the floor beneath her feet.
Now they’d get to see if five McAllisters were a match for twice that many Van Horns.
Roslyn watched the battle from the study windows, mainly because Angela had been extremely clear on that point.
You stay inside. You’re our only healer, and if you go down, we all go down. Stay with your patient and wait until we need you.
It was sound enough reasoning, and Roslyn hated every bit of it. Watching people she cared about fight while she was shielded behind glass went against every instinct she possessed.
But Angela was right. Roslyn was their only healer, and her magic was already drained from the night she’d spent keeping Malachi alive. She needed to conserve what she had left for the moments when it would matter most, and those moments would come.
They always did.
The Van Horns had arrived in force. Roslyn counted at least ten figures spread across the yard and the street beyond, positioned behind the property wall and the neighboring fences and the scrubby hedges that lined the bluff edge. The fireball witches worked in groups of three now, their spheres of flame larger and more concentrated than the ones from last night, arcing over the yard in coordinated salvos that hit the ward perimeter from multiple angles. The lightning casters — there were two of them this time — sent white-blue bolts that cracked against the reinforced wards with a sound that made her wince every time they hit.
And somewhere in the formation, Karl Van Horn was working his sleep magic, the insidious fog she remembered from the night before, rolling toward the house in waves that Levi’s new ward layer caught and dispersed before they could reach the threshold.
But the McAllister fighters weren’t behind the wards. They were outside them.
Angela and Connor had taken up positions at the front of the property, standing in the gap between the yard wall and the house where the overgrown grass met the cracked flagstone path. Their combined magic was visible now, a shimmer of white energy tinged with crackles of bright green that surrounded them both, shifting and flowing between them like a shared pulse. When the fireballs came, Angela raised her left hand and Connor raised his right, and the green-shot energy expanded outward, meeting the flames and deflecting them in cascades of sparks that scattered across the yard like burning confetti.
They moved together, and Roslyn could see their coordination every time they shifted their weight and angled their stance. They didn’t need to speak. Whatever signal passed between them was deeper than words, carried through the bonded magic that had fused their powers over decades. When Angela stepped forward, Connor covered her flank. When a lightning bolt struck the ground three feet from where Connor stood, Angela’s free hand was already moving, redirecting the residual charge into the earth before it could reach him.
Levi was harder to track. He moved along the property’s eastern boundary, and the Van Horns who encountered him there seemed to lose focus, their attacks sputtering and misfiring as though something was interfering with their ability to concentrate. Roslyn realized, after she watched a fireball dissolve in midair for the third time, that Levi was disrupting their magic at the source, not by countering it with superior force, but by introducing a frequency that scrambled the Van Horn energy the way static scrambled a radio signal. It was quiet, subtle work, and it was extremely effective. Two of the fighters on the eastern side had already dropped back, shaking their heads as if trying to clear water from their ears, their fireballs flaring out before they could fully form.
Belshegar had positioned himself at the property’s northern edge, where the heaviest concentration of attackers had gathered. When the first wave of fireballs came his way, he simply stood in their path and let them hit him. The flames washed over his human form and dissipated, leaving behind nothing — no burns, no damage, no indication that the fire had registered at all. The Van Horn fireball witches stared, recalculated, and threw harder, but Belshegar still didn’t move. The fireballs struck him and vanished, absorbed into something beneath skin that wasn’t skin at all but a boundary between this dimension and whatever lay on the other side of it.
One of the lightning casters redirected a bolt at him, and it forked across his chest and grounded out through his feet, scorching the grass in a circle around him but leaving him untouched. He looked down at the blackened ring on the ground, then back up at the lightning caster, and the patient expression on his face was somehow worse than any display of anger could have been.
He might as well have said, Is that all?
The Van Horns at the northern perimeter fell back, and Roslyn couldn’t really blame them. Watching a man stand unharmed in a column of magical fire was the kind of thing that would make you think twice before mounting another attack, and clearly, they’d decided discretion was the better part of valor.
Then Victoria Van Horn stepped into view.
She came from the street, walking between two fireball witches who flanked her like an honor guard. Roslyn couldn’t see her clearly through the study window — the distance was too great, and the light was now almost gone — but she could feel her. Victoria’s magic was enormous, a dense, commanding presence that rolled across the yard and pressed against the wards and seemed to settle over her fighters the way a weighted blanket settled over a restless sleeper, calming and steadying and focusing them all at once. The retreat at the northern perimeter stopped. The fighters on the eastern side who had been stumbling under Levi’s disruption steadied, their attacks sharpening, the sputter in their magic smoothing out as Victoria’s amplification took hold.
It wasn’t that she was personally more powerful than any individual McAllister. It was that her power was connective, amplifying and directing the magic of the people around her, the way a conductor directed an orchestra. The moment she arrived, the Van Horn assault intensified — the fireballs burning hotter, the lightning more precise, Karl’s sleep fog pressing harder against Levi’s disruption field. The fighters who’d been losing their nerve found it again, bolstered by their prima’s presence and the iron certainty she projected.
Angela must have felt the shift, too, because Roslyn saw her straighten, her attention snapping to the figure in the street. Something passed between the two primas that wasn’t a word or a spell but simple recognition. Then Angela tightened her grip on Connor’s hand, and the green-shot white energy between them flared brighter, pushing back against the renewed assault with a force that sent the nearest fireball spinning backward into the Van Horn line.
It didn’t seem as if this was going to end any time soon.
Roslyn sensed the Gibsons before she saw them, a cluster of new signatures at the property’s western edge, the bluff side that the Van Horns had left unguarded. There were maybe half a dozen, led by a sort of energy she thought she recognized from her encounter with that trio of witches in town.
Catherine Gibson had come to see what was happening on her family’s ground.
It was clear that they’d come not to attack but to watch, their magic held close and cautious, assessing the situation the way their scouting teams had assessed the house in the early days. Roslyn could feel the way their collective attention swept over the battle — the Van Horn fireball witches, the McAllister defensive line, the inexplicable being at the northern perimeter who was absorbing magical fire without flinching — and she could practically hear the calculations being made. Like all witch clans, the Gibsons were fiercely territorial. This was their ground, and two outside forces were currently tearing it up without their permission.
But they’d miscalculated their position, or maybe the Van Horns did. One of the lightning casters, either panicked or poorly directed by Victoria’s coordination, sent a bolt wide that crackled past the property line and struck the bluff edge, close enough to the Gibson formation that Roslyn felt their collective flinch through the wards.
The response was immediate, a flare of magic that said, You just attacked us on our own ground.
