Page 5

She’d dusted them a thousand times and never once felt a single one of them so much as warm her palm. That had fit her tidy understanding of herself as the Morgan family's sacred duty and the family's empty hands to carry it out. One of those dead relics was glowing now. If the light seeping through the seam between the cabinet doors was anything to go by.

She crossed to the cabinet, keeping her eyes on the thread of light that was the color of a bruise. It was violet shading toward the gray-green of deep water. Unlocking and opening the panel, she saw it poured off a flat disk of cold iron. She'd cataloged it in her grandmother's filing system as the Tellstone. Nana's notes on it ran three lines long.

A Tellstone wakes when the Watch turns to war. Do not hold it ungloved. Whatever it costs, it costs in kind.

"You have got to be kidding me," Sarah breathed. She read the three lines again. As though a second pass might change what it said.

She knew better. That would be the part that haunted her later—if there was a later. The witch magic that she'd hidden since childhood had a presence she knew as well as her own heartbeat. It felt alive, green, and familiar. Unmistakably hers.

Whatever slept inside the iron disk felt nothing like that. It had no scent. No pulse. There was no trace of magic she recognized. It was older than witchcraft. And colder. It reminded her of a silent, bottomless void that her bones somehow knew, even though she had never encountered it before.

Amelia's warning settled heavily in her chest. Sarah hesitated for only a moment. She was exhausted. Tired of always being the Morgan whose magic had never awakened. Ignoring every instinct that told her to stop, she pressed her bare hand against the iron.

The cold seeped into her first. It poured up her arm the way the river pours into the ocean. The cold changed, and what came after it was overwhelming. Power tore up her arm in one long pulse. It slammed into the back of her skull and became hers. That was the impossible, terrible part of it.

The power waking under the Tellstone wasn't the green witch-fire she'd been smothering for two decades. It wasn't the angel's, either. It wasn't a borrowed flicker from the ley line. It rose out of her own bones like floodwater flowing over a levee.

Her whole body remembered something she had never encountered. Her jaw clamped down on a cry and split the lip that Abraxos’s kiss had left tender. Blood filled her mouth. Where her palm met the iron, a line of fire drew itself across her skin like a wire pulled tight until it snapped.

The Tellstone screamed, though that wasn’t quite right for what happened. It was just the closest her mind could make of it. It wasn't a sound a person could catch with their ears. It was a long, bright note that went up through the wards and out across the sleeping Quarter. She felt it leave her. It was a flare of her own newborn power broadcasting over the rooftops like a lighthouse lit for ships that should never make port.

She wrenched her hand off the disk and fell back against the Codex's pedestal. She cradled her wrist as the violet light guttered out and left her gasping in the dark with blood on her chin and a black brand burning across her palm. "No," she breathed, repeating it louder, because the first one wasn't loud enough to argue with what she already knew.

She began shaking her head from side to side. "Shit. Anyone with an ounce of magic will have felt it across three parishes."

Brimstone rolled down the stairs thick enough to coat her tongue. It was the stench of a struck match. A heartbeat behind it, glass broke above. It was the unmistakable shatter of her front window as it shattered. Over that was a sound she'd heard once before and had prayed to a tired God she'd never hear again.

It was a wet, ratcheting clatter, like a mouthful of broken China being chewed. It came from more than one throat at once. She was up the stairs before she'd decided to climb them. Nana had drilled that into her, too. She came up into her own shop with the Slugger already off the counter and a containment phrase on the tip of her tongue.

Four creatures were dragging themselves through the broken window. They were the size of yard dogs. They were low to the floor and hauling their weight over the glass on forelimbs longer than their hind legs. It made them move in a lurching gallop. Their hide was the black of cracked river mud. It also wept a tar-dark slick that hissed where it touched her oak floors. It ate little holes in the finish her grandmother had laid down by hand.

"Great. Demon tarhounds," she muttered, making up a name for the things. "Because regular monsters weren't enough."

A quick scan of their faces left her wondering where their eyes were. The whole front of each flat skull split into a mouth that ran the length of the snout and bristled with hooked teeth. They swung those blind heads side to side, scenting and tasting everything. Each of them turned the same instant toward the black brand pulsing on her open palm. They'd come for the beacon she'd lit. It was still burning inside her skin. There was no salting that sill.

"Of course you can smell it," she growled at the closest one. "I rang the dinner bell myself."

The lead tarhound lunged. Sarah did the only thing a masked bookseller raised by a paranoid Guardian knew how to. She swung. The bat caught the thing across its open mouth and shattered three hooked teeth. The blow slammed its blind head into a shelf.

The impact rang up her arms into the brand. A pulse of that gray-green light ran down the bat and into the creature's skull as a result. The brand's power made the creature shriek and rear back. It slapped its tar-slick across her forearm, opening three clean lines through her sleeve and the skin beneath it. The pain was almost a relief. She understood the discomfort.

The other three tarhounds came at once. She got the bat up and put her back to the heavy oak counter so nothing could flank her. She started chanting the containment phrase out loud. It was the old binding Nana swore could hold anything in place long enough to run. For the first time in her life, the words didn’t fall out of her mouth and fizzle. They caught.

The gray-green light spilled off her bleeding palm and crawled across the boards toward the demons. Before reaching them, it split into branching veins like frost spreading over a windshield. The lead beast's forelimb became glued to her grandmother's floor where the light touched it. It began screaming through that long, bristled mouth.

A second later, the front of the building came off. At least that was what she thought happened. It was hard to see everything. One instant, there was a wall and what was left of a window. And next, there was a red-and-black shape filling the space where they'd been.

Abraxos came through it like a storm cloud. His wings spread from the broken frame to the staircase. Scarlet feathers were edged in a cold light that threw red across the spines of a thousand books. The blade in his fist was a long curve of black steel veined with that same light.

"Get down," he ordered

She dropped without arguing. His scarlet wing swept over her as she dropped. He didn't fight the way she'd watched him fight an hour ago. Careful of her books and her shelving.

This time, he fought like a male whose mate was threatened. She didn’t know why she thought that. She wasn’t his mate, but she’d never seen anyone so ferocious before.

His blade took the stuck demon's head off in one stroke. It kept traveling and closed on the second beast mid-lunge. He drove the tarhound into the floor so hard the boards split. The creature burst into greasy smoke that stank of struck matches and rot.

When he spun, his wings did half the killing. One scarlet pinion swept the third demon off its feet before it cleared the counter. The tarhound was thrown into the oak shelving with a crunch she felt in her bones. The cold light off his feathers cut through the tar-dark hide wherever it brushed. The creature came apart screaming.