What the fuck?
The woman moved closer.
Or perhaps the thing wrapped around her allowed her to move.
The air shimmered around her body like heat passing over glass. For less than a heartbeat, the outline of her face shifted before settling again, as though another version existed beneath the surface and was struggling to emerge.
A cloak.
Not fabric.
Magic.
Old magic.
The compound lights caught her fully.
She was strikingly beautiful, with a white dress soaked against her body and dark hair plastered across her face and throat. Rain traced the sharp line of her jaw and fell from the ends of her hair.
At first glance, she appeared delicate.
Her eyes destroyed that impression.
Fear lived inside them, accompanied by exhaustion and confusion. Beneath all three waited something older, watching the brothers even while the woman herself appeared not to understand what she was seeing.
Rhen’s body locked when her scent reached him.
It was neither perfume, blood, nor ordinary human warmth.
Magic moved into his lungs, clean and wild and deeply wrong, like poison threaded through a memory he could not reach.
The shadows surrounding her wrists flickered. For a moment, silver glyphwork became visible beneath her skin, spiraling along her veins before the glamour concealed it again.
“She is cloaked,” Rhen said.
His hand moved toward the blade strapped across his back.
“Witch.”
Malakai adjusted Cole’s weight again and signed one-handed.
What is a witch doing at our gates?
The woman stumbled closer. Her bare feet made almost no sound upon the flooded gravel.
Her gaze moved between them as though she could feel the violence radiating from every male and did not know which one would strike first.
“Please.” Her voice shook. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know how I got here.”
Her terror was real.
Rhen could smell it.
So was the magic.
A witch appearing at their gates during a coordinated heretic attack was not an accident he was willing to entertain.
“I don’t care what she wants,” he said. “She is lying. Witches do not wander into vampire territory by mistake.”
