Fair.
He goes outside, and the hammering begins almost immediately.
Too fast.
Strike after strike lands in a rhythm no ordinary arm could maintain. Iron bites into stone. The sound rings through the house with unnatural force and precision. I move to the window and watch him work, each anchor driven flush in a handful of blows, each movement smooth, strong, tireless.
My throat tightens.
“He isn’t just healed,” I say.
Rhazek’s voice comes from behind me. “No.”
I keep watching my brother. “He’s not fully mortal anymore.”
“No.”
The answer is soft enough to be merciful and clear enough to be cruel.
Corin looks up from the yard as if he feels us watching. He raises the hammer in a little salute, trying to make a joke of it, trying to make me smile.
I do smile.
It hurts.
Behind the house, the shadows along the alley wall stretch against the direction of the light.
Rhazek steps closer before I tell him to, and the tether steadies.
I look down at the parchment map, then back at the yard, then toward the street where every dark corner suddenly feels like a mouth.
The predator is circling.
10
RHAZEK
Maltherion arrives without crossing the wards.
That alone tells me he intends to be clever.
The night over the house has thickened into a deep, wet black, heavy with salt from the distant docks and the sour smoke of banked hearths from neighboring roofs. The reinforced sigils around the property burn low and red beneath stone, iron, and threshold, steady enough to hold back lesser creatures but not enough to blind the sky. Mist clings to the street in torn strips, and every shadow near the alley wall has begun leaning toward the house as if drawn by hunger.
I stand at the front threshold with Sable behind me and Corin to her left, both of them too close to danger and too stubborn to be moved from it.
The air above the roofline folds inward.
Sable feels the shift through the tether before she sees it. Her pulse climbs, sharp and immediate, and the bond tightens around my core with a protective intensity that is becoming dangerously familiar. Corin’s restored aura flares in answer, not disciplined enough to conceal itself, bright enough to draw notice.
A shape gathers above the roof.
It is not a full manifestation. Maltherion would not risk full embodiment against prepared wards without first testing their bite. Instead, he casts himself as a projection of smoke-black light, tall and elegant in the way certain predators appear elegant before one notices the blood on their mouths. His face is narrow, beautiful by infernal standards, and cruel by any standard worth keeping. His eyes burn pale violet through the dark.
“Rhazek,” he says, and his voice slides over the roof tiles like oil over a blade. “I had heard the rumors, but even gossip did not make the humiliation sufficiently vivid.”
Sable steps closer to my side. “That’s him.”
“Yes,” I say.
