I should have said something.
Wraith raises his hand. White witch-light crackles between his too-long fingers.
The coffee shop door opens.
The man who comes through it is in his mid-forties. Dark eyes, dark beard streaked with silver, a long black leather coat that has seen better decades and doesn’t seem to know it.
But it is the sheer raw power radiating from him that is remarkable. This is a witch who qualifies as a force of nature in his own right.
He takes in the whole scene with one sweeping glance, those dark eyes moving across Wraith, across Hex and Dark pinned to the wall, across the wreckage of the coffee shop, across me and Bunny on the floor.
There is no visible surprise on his face. Just assessment. Just the rapid, practiced assessment of someone who encounters situations like this and has learned to work with what’s in front of them.
“Ah,” he says, with the calm of someone who has walked into chaos before and found it manageable. “I see.”
Wraith spins. The attack is fast and vicious and full, everything he has, the kind of attack that ended this in seconds last time.
The man raises his right hand. A shield blooms outward from it, gold-white and dense and clearly the work of considerable skill, and the attack hits it and doesn’t go through. Wraith claws at it, wild and rageful, and the shield holds, but it’s flexing under the pressure and I can see from the set of the man’s jaw that it’s costing him.
He doesn’t look alarmed. He looks like someone completing a calculation with a deadline.
He tilts his head. Studies Wraith through the shield with the focused attention of someone reading something written in a language they know intimately.
“Ah,” he says again, and it’s a different sound entirely. Something that means he’s understood something, found the shape of it, knows what to do.
He holds out his left hand. Palm up. Open. Empty.
Nothing happens for a moment. Wraith claws frantically and furiously at the shield. The gold-white of it flickers.
Then a gold amulet drops out of the air into the witch’s palm. Not from a pocket or a bag. Not falling from a shelf. Out of the air itself, as if it were always there and simply needed to be asked for correctly, by someone who knew the right way to ask. It’s small and worn, and it hums withthe kind of power that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up from across the room.
The witch wraps his fingers around it.
Wraith goes rigid.
“Stop,” the man says. Quietly. One word, landing with the absolute unquestionable weight of someone who has never had cause to doubt they would be obeyed.
Wraith shudders. The shadows around him convulse once, twice, three times. His head lowers, hung like a dog in trouble. Then he goes completely still, apart from a faint twitching at the edges. A discarded puppet waiting for his next command.
The sudden stillness is startling.
The coffee shop is destroyed. Cups are everywhere. Chairs are overturned. The windows are gone, and cold air is coming through the gaps. Dark is still pinned to the wall, amber eyes fixed on Bunny with an expression that has nothing professional in it anymore. Hex is still pinned, red eyes blazing. Bunny’s hand is still in mine on the floor.
Adam, no doubt, is cycling as fast as he can towards us. Unless Hex has locked him in a cupboard.
And this man standing in the middle of it all, fist closed around the amulet, looking across the wreckage directly at me.
Face to face. Eye to eye. No side profile. And like this, the beard hides nothing.
I know this face. I haven’t seen it in fifteen years, but I know it the way you know things that got into you early enough to become part of your structure. Before you had any say in what got in.
The world has gone very quiet.
“Dad?” I gasp.
Chapter 26
Shelter
