During the thirty seconds that followed, Roslyn thought for sure the situation was going to become a three-way fight, which would have been the absolute worst possible outcome. She could feel the Gibsons bristling, could sense Catherine’s magic gathering itself for a response, and she braced for the impact of a new front opening up at their unprotected rear.
But the Gibson prima-in-waiting was apparently more pragmatic than Roslyn had thought. Instead of attacking, a single figure broke from the Gibson formation and walked toward Angela’s position, hands raised in a gesture that was clearly meant to signal non-aggression. The emissary — Roslyn couldn’t tell from this distance whether it was Catherine herself or someone she’d sent — stopped about ten yards from where Angela and Connor were holding the front line and shouted something that Roslyn couldn’t hear through the study walls.
But Angela didn’t stop fighting, and kept one hand raised against the incoming fireballs even while the Gibson emissary spoke. Connor heard their words, turned to Angela, and said something brief. Angela nodded once, a sharp, decisive motion that sure looked like a deal being struck.
The Gibson figure retreated, and the Gibson magic at the western edge shifted from aggressive to defensive; they weren’t joining the McAllister line, but holding their own ground in a way that effectively closed the gap the Van Horns had left. They were covering the bluff side, preventing any flanking maneuvers, and in exchange, they were letting the McAllisters handle the Van Horn problem.
She didn’t know what the terms of this alliance might have been, but Roslyn could guess at the broad strokes. The Gibsons would cede the territory dispute over the Victorian house in exchange for the McAllisters dealing with the out-of-state aggressors who were currently scorching the neighborhood. It wasn’t friendship or anything close to it, just simple math.
Roslyn had never been a student of military history, but she suspected that was how most alliances formed — not in conference rooms over careful negotiations, but in the moment when two parties realized they had a common enemy…and it was better to work together than apart.
Malachi watched from the study, and he took mental notes, because that was what he did. Even diminished, even propped up in a leather chair with a blanket over his legs and his burned arm braced against his body, his mind was still the instrument it had always been, and that instrument refused to stop running.
Victoria had brought ten fighters, possibly twelve. Two lightning talents, three fireball witches, Karl with his sleep magic, and the remainder a mix of ward-breakers and general offensive capability. She’d positioned herself at the rear, which was tactically sound — the prima as coordinator, amplifying and directing rather than engaging directly. It was the Van Horn way. Victoria had always understood that her power lay not in personal combat but in her ability to make the people around her more effective than they could be alone.
He’d once admired this about her.
Once.
The McAllisters were outnumbered but not outmatched. Angela and Connor’s paired magic was holding the front, their combined energy proving resistant to fire and lightning in equal measure. The bonded power of prima and primus was something the Van Horns had no equivalent for — Victoria’s consort, Neil, if he was even present, had never been a fighter, and the Van Horn tradition of breeding for offensive magic had produced soldiers, not partners. Angela and Connor fought as a single organism, covering each other’s weaknesses and multiplying each other’s strengths, and the Van Horn fireball witches were clearly struggling to find an angle of attack that wasn’t immediately countered.
Levi was the variable that Victoria hadn’t prepared for. His disruption field was subtle enough that it took time to notice and was impossible to counter once you did, because it didn’t operate on any frequency the Van Horns were trained to resist. Their magic was designed to overcome other mortal magic — fire against wards, lightning against barriers, sleep against conscious resistance. It wasn’t designed to encounter a being whose very nature existed on frequencies that mortal magic couldn’t reach. Victoria would eventually adapt — she was too intelligent not to — but that adaptation would take time, and time was what the McAllisters needed.
Belshegar, however, was something else entirely.
Malachi watched the extradimensional being stand in the path of the northern assault and absorb it, and he understood at once that Belshegar wasn’t fighting. He was containing. The fire that struck him didn’t bounce off or deflect; it was drawn into whatever existed beneath his human surface and neutralized there, converted from an attack into inert energy the way a transformer converted voltage. It was effortless and also terrifying, because effort was the thing that made power comprehensible. A man who strained to lift a boulder was powerful, but a man who lifted it without noticing its weight was something else entirely.
The Van Horns at the northern perimeter had realized this and were redirecting their efforts toward the front, where Angela and Connor were engaged. Victoria was compensating, tightening her coordination to focus the available offensive magic on the McAllisters’ position rather than wasting resources against a target that couldn’t be harmed. It was the right tactical decision, but it meant the northern side was effectively conceded, and Belshegar was free to advance.
And he did. He went slowly, without hurry, walking across the overgrown yard toward the Van Horn formation with the calm, measured tread of someone out for an evening stroll. The fireball witches who had retreated from him were now caught between his advance and the property wall, and the panic in their magic — Malachi could feel it even from inside the study, the fraying of Van Horn discipline as trained fighters encountered something their training could never have covered — was beginning to spread.
Victoria would hold them; that was how her magic worked. But holding required concentration, and concentration could be broken, and Malachi could see the strain beginning to show in the way Victoria’s coordination flickered whenever Belshegar advanced another step. She was pouring more and more of herself into keeping her fighters in line, and every ounce she spent on discipline was an ounce she couldn’t spend on amplifying their attacks.
It was a textbook attrition pattern. The McAllisters weren’t trying to overwhelm the Van Horns. No, they were grinding them down, applying pressure from multiple directions while Belshegar’s advance forced Victoria to divert resources from offense to morale. Angela and Connor’s defensive wall was holding without breaking, absorbing the Van Horn fire and lightning and turning it aside. Levi’s disruption continued to erode the eastern flank, forcing the fighters there to expend twice the energy for half the output. And the Gibson alliance at the bluff edge had sealed the only avenue of retreat that didn’t run through the McAllister line.
The Van Horns were being boxed in by the same tactic they’d used to box the house.
The battle ground on. Fireballs continued to arc across the darkening yard, their orange light painting the study walls in shifting patterns that reminded Malachi of the attack the night before, when the entryway had burned, and he’d poured the last of his rebuilt magic into wards that had not been enough. Angela’s left arm was hanging slightly lower than her right, suggesting a hit she was compensating for. Connor was bleeding from a cut on his temple, bright red against his dark hair, and his deflections on the southern side had slowed by a fraction that most people wouldn’t have noticed but that Malachi, who’d spent a lifetime reading the language of power, saw clearly. Levi’s disruption field flickered occasionally, which meant even his remarkable resources had limits. And the Gibson contingent at the western edge was holding but not advancing, their alliance extending exactly as far as self-interest required and not an inch further.
But the Van Horns were being driven back. The northern line had collapsed under Belshegar’s advance, the eastern side was in disarray from Levi’s disruption, and the southern approach was being held by Connor’s focused deflection work while Angela concentrated on the frontal assault. Victoria’s coordination was holding her people together, but the territory they controlled was shrinking, and the fireball witches were burning through their magical reserves faster than she could replenish them.
The Van Horns fought with conviction. Malachi understood this because he understood them. He understood the culture that had produced them, the belief system that said what the prima claimed was rightfully hers, that the possessions of a banished member reverted to the clan upon his expulsion. Victoria genuinely believed the collection was hers. Her fighters believed it, too. They weren’t mercenaries or hired thugs. They were loyal clan members fighting for what they considered their inheritance, and that conviction made them dangerous even as they were losing because it meant they wouldn’t retreat easily.
He watched a fireball witch at the southern edge take a hit from one of Connor’s deflections — her own flame redirected back at her, catching her across the forearm — and she stumbled, cradling the burn, but she didn’t fall back. Another fighter filled her position within seconds, and the assault continued. That was Van Horn discipline, drilled into them from childhood, the knowledge that the clan came first and the individual came second, and the prima’s will was the framework that held everything together.
He knew that discipline intimately. After all, he’d lived inside it for twenty years, had been shaped by it and broken by it in equal measure, and watching it operate now — from the outside, from the ruins of the life he’d built to replace everything it had taken from him — evoked an emotion he couldn’t easily classify. It wasn’t nostalgia, nor grief. It was something closer to the feeling of watching a house you once lived in being demolished, a home you’d left behind long ago but whose architecture was still imprinted on your understanding of what shelter looked like.
But they would retreat. The math was inescapable, even for Victoria, who wasn’t accustomed to loss. She had brought a strike team built for mortal opposition, and she’d encountered an extradimensional being, a construct whose nature defied classification, and a bonded prima and primus whose combined power exceeded anything the Van Horn offensive line could generate.
She’d also encountered a healer who’d spent three weeks rebuilding a man whom Victoria had spent seventeen years trying to reclaim, and that healer had called in reinforcements Victoria couldn’t have anticipated. She couldn’t understand the kind of loyalty that was earned through care rather than commanded through authority.
It was, Malachi reflected, the fundamental flaw in her entire philosophy of power — the belief that people were assets to be managed rather than connections to be maintained. She’d managed him out of her clan at twenty, and she’d been managing the consequences ever since. Those consequences had finally arrived in Astoria, Oregon, in the form of four people from Arizona who’d come because one of their own had rung a bronze bell and asked for help.
The irony was considerable.
Roslyn stood at the study window, watching the battle with her arms crossed over her chest and her jaw set in the expression he’d learned to read as, I hate this, but I’m doing it anyway. She was waiting, conserving her reserves for the moment when the McAllisters would need healing — and they would need it, because the Van Horns were still fighting, still throwing fire and lightning with a desperate energy that signaled they were losing but hadn’t yet accepted that fact.
He could see the toll the waiting was taking on her. Her hands were clenched against her arms, and every time a fireball struck near Angela’s position or a lightning bolt forked too close to Connor’s head, her whole body tensed with the effort of staying put. She was a healer who’d been ordered to stand down, and every instinct in her was screaming that she should be out there, that her hands should be on the injuries she could see happening through the window and sense with her own magic. The restraint was costing her almost as much as the fighting was costing the people outside.
