"And the third?"
"Anchor's already calling it an animal attack. Witnesses are shaky. Nobody wants to say what they actually saw." A pause. "It'll stick. Barely."
The kind of barely where the next time, it won't.
The Hidden Accords are still intact, and the fracture running through them is visible if you know where to look.
I stand in the medical wing doorway and watch Carson work. The prototype hums. The contaminated blood feeds through the filtration column, dark going in, lighter coming out. One unit at a time. One bag. While four territories' worth of poison sits in storage waiting for its turn.
Math, Celeste. Run the math. Twenty minutes per unit. Hundreds of units. Weeks.
Carson doesn't look up. He's still here. Still working. Still alive.
We're going to keep it that way.
Two in the morning.The compound has gone quiet. The scraped-out kind, where a place has lost people and the gaps are still showing. The corridor where they died smells like cleaning solution and underneath it, blood. Someone mopped. The stain is gone. The smell isn't.
Seraphina sits in the garden. The oaks lean toward her, branches angling the same as they have since she came back from Thessivane. Her hands are in her lap. Her face is drawn, the lines around her eyes deeper than they were this morning.
Maximus and I take the stone bench. Seraphina sits across from us on the low wall beside the garden bed. The air is cold and smells like damp soil.
"Adrienne pulled her strikes," Seraphina says. She's looking at the oaks, not at us. "The ward assault was three witches. Two of them pushed hard. The third held back. Adrienne had openings she didn't take. I felt her pull away twice."
"Why?" I ask.
Seraphina looks at me. "She is fighting against something. Or she is fighting for something she cannot reach."
"The daughter," I say. "Free her, and Adrienne stops fighting. Maybe fights for us."
"Maybe." Seraphina's hands tighten in her lap. "A witch freed from a blood oath carries a particular kind of fury. It would be better directed at the man who compelled the oath than at us."
"Can we find her?" I ask.
"Not without help. The daughter is hidden. Guarded. Konstantin chose the location, and he chose it well enough that Adrienne hasn't been able to reach her on her own." Seraphina pauses. "But if I had something that belonged to the daughter, something she'd worn or carried, I could trace the connection back to her location."
"Which means getting a message to Adrienne," I say. "Without Konstantin knowing."
"He watches his witches," Maximus says. "Adrienne won't be alone. Any contact outside the oath, he'd know within hours."
Seraphina is quiet. She looks at the oaks, and I can see her working through it.
"Not if the contact isn't outside the oath," she says. "When Adrienne comes against us, she touches my wards. She has to, to fight them. The next time she does, I could leave something inside the lattice. A message she'd feel and Konstantin wouldn't. She knows my signature. She'd recognize it."
"You're counting on them attacking us again," Maximus says.
"They will," I say. "They came for Carson tonight. They'll come again." I look at Seraphina. "Can you build it before then?"
"I can build it tonight."
"And if Konstantin detects it?" Maximus asks.
"He won't," Seraphina says. "He is a vampire. He reads wards the way a human reads weather. He feels the pressure. He doesn't feel the language."
"We survived tonight," Maximus says. "Carson is alive. The prototype is running. But Konstantin just hit four territories and our compound in a single coordinated strike. Three witches on our wards. Twelve operatives inside our building. A feral placed for maximum exposure." He pauses. "We lost two people tonight. He can keep sending more. We can't keep absorbing this."
The garden is quiet. The branches above us are still.
"Seraphina," Maximus says. "Tell Lanthar it's time. We need his forces now."
