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"Hazel." The warning came sudden and short. Ace's voice changed. Barely. A slight dip in the timbre, the way a key clicks when it finds the right groove.

Every hair on my arms stood up at once, and my pentagram burned like someone had touched a lit cigarette to the side of my finger.

Lesson number twenty-four. The moment you catch yourself thinking that a bad thing is over, that bad thing is standing directly behind you, checking its watch.

I moved.

Scratch that. I actually dived.

Not away from the display case but into it, dropping my weight and twisting so my shoulder took the glass instead of my face. The display shattered inward with a noise like a chandelier committing suicide, and the hex went through the space where my head had been a half-second later.

I felt it pass. That's the part I'll never get used to. Demon magic hits you like a strong wind, like something nature is doing to you personally. A hex is aimed. A hex has your name written in the back of it in a hand you recognize, and this one dragged across the air two inches above my ear with a sound like a nail on a chalkboard.

I knew that signature all too well.

I'd grown up on that sound. Four stories of dark stone on the good side of Cleveland, and me in a bed too big for me on the third floor, listening to my grandmother work late. That soft dragging hiss coming up through the floorboards, over and over, patient as knitting. Some nights I'd counted them until I fell asleep.

That was my childhood.

Other children got lullabies.

"Down!" Ace was already moving, but he did not go down, because shifters have their own relationship with the word. He just wanted me to cower like a good little girl, the jackass.

I had glass stuck in my palm. Glass in my knee. But the boot, my boot, the oxblood, the good one, was still up on its little velvet plinth six inches from my nose, and I want it on the record that I grabbed it before rolling away. Priorities are what separate us from the animals.

The second hex took out the plinth.

It came in low and fast at knee height, sheared through the wooden stand like it was made of cake, and kept going into the far wall, where it hit a mirror and opened a hole through it the size of a dinner plate. The edges were smooth. That glass hadn't broken, it had been persuaded it was never there in the first place.

Somewhere behind me a woman started screaming, and the screaming sounded very human. That was a problem. I hated when humans had to get hurt because of us.

"Ace, humans—" my voice sounded strange to my own ears.

"I know." Came his grunt from behind me.

"There were four of them at the register⁠—"

"I know, Hazel." He stomped past me toward the front, and the way his voice came out of his chest was less and less like a man's with every word. "Stay behind the case." His wolf was way too close to the surface.

"Yeah, that's not happening." Seriously, this guy never learned.

The magic came up in me like a dog hearing a bag of chips being opened.

I'd like to tell you I called it. I'd like to tell you that after eleven days of drills with Amber in the mornings and Alex in the afternoons and Sissily standing to one side making that face she makes, I had reached some kind of understanding with the thing living inside me. What actually happened was that it noticed there was violence available, it perked up and got up right in everyone's face.

Golden light bloomed under the skin of my forearms, the sigils writing themselves and unwriting themselves faster than I could look at them, and every scrap of broken glass on that showroom floor shivered and rose an inch into the air.

Which was fine by me. I'd take help wherever I could find it.

I came up out of my crouch with the boot in my left hand and my right arm already sweeping, and I got my first look at the front of that store. My stomach dropped straight through the floor and into the parking structure below.

There was nobody there.

Just the open door onto Euclid, afternoon sun laying a long yellow stripe across the carpet, and dust moths turning over in the light like microscopic ballerinas with something to prove. No witch. Nobody in the doorway. Nobody in the street beyond it that I could see, and I could see plenty because the street was emptying fast the way streets do now when magic starts flying out of a shop window.

I stood there like an idiot with my arm out and my skin lit up like a carnival ride, aiming a whole lot of ancient power at a rectangle of nice weather.

"Ace." My mouth had gone dry as a sandpaper. "Who was it?"