The Warlocks Proof

Soren placed the scroll on the table in front of all of us and I stared at it like it was going to bite me because honestly at this point everything in my life was capable of doing exactly that. The handwriting on the scroll was old and careful and I could feel my witch side reading it before my eyes even focused properly, the same way she always translated things without asking me first, like she had her own pace and I was just along for the ride. "This was written in 1347," Soren said, sitting down across from me while Brecken stood by the wall with his arms crossed and Lucian leaned against the bookshelf looking like someone who already knew the ending of a book everybody else was still reading. "Three hundred and thirty-nine years before your mother was born. Long before anyone in your bloodline could have arranged any of this deliberately." I looked at the scroll. At the description written in the old language that my witch side kept translating in real time. The three-layer

Training Begins

Soren stayed after Brecken and Lucian finally stopped arguing long enough to give me the rest of what they knew, which took two hours and left me sitting at that table feeling like someone had taken my whole life apart and laid all the pieces out in front of me to show me how little of it had actually been mine.I didn't cry. I was done crying over things I couldn't change.But something had shifted in me and everyone in that room could feel it.Brecken drove back to Ironveil at dawn. He didn't want to leave but I told him to go, and the look on his face when I said it was the kind of look that made my wolf ache and my chest go tight, because he went even though it cost him something and that mattered more than I wanted to admit right then.Lucian withdrew to some other part of the house.Soren stayed."Your witch side is the most untrained of the three," he said, sitting across from me at the same table where the scroll still la

Three Men, One Problem

Brecken came back the next morning without calling first.I heard his voice downstairs before I was even properly awake, low and tight and very controlled in the way it got when he was working hard not to let his wolf take over the conversation. Lucian's voice came back even and calm the way it always was, which I already knew made Brecken more frustrated not less because there was nothing to push against when the other person refused to get loud with you.I pulled on clothes and went downstairs because leaving those two alone felt like leaving a match next to something flammable.They were in the main room. Brecken on one side, standing, arms crossed, jaw set. Lucian on the other side, sitting, relaxed, looking like he had nowhere else to be and all the time in the world to get there. Which he did. Eight hundred years had a way of making urgency feel optional.They both looked at me the second I walked in."Don't." I pointed at both of t

First Shared Vision

Soren asked me to hold still while he worked through a grounding exercise with me, something about anchoring the witch energy to my own heartbeat so it stopped firing at random, and I was trying to do what he said when his hand covered mine on the table.It was just to correct my position. My fingers had been curling inward when they needed to be flat and open. He reached across and laid his palm over the back of my hand to show me the difference and the moment his skin made contact with mine the room disappeared.Not the way Lucian's visions took me. Not cold and dark and deliberate. This one hit both of us the same way and at the same time, because Soren's grip on my hand went tight the exact second I felt the floor drop out from under me.We landed somewhere old.Stone floor. High ceiling. The smell of something burning that wasn't wood or candle, something older, something natural, like the earth itself had caught fire somewhere far beneath us

The City Attack

The attack happened on the third day while we were outside.Soren had suggested we try training in open air because some of the witch energy worked better without walls around it, so we were in the back garden of Lucian's estate when my vampire side snapped awake so fast I stopped mid-sentence and grabbed Soren's arm."Someone's here," I said. "Over the wall."Soren didn't question it. He turned immediately, hands coming up, and I felt the magic shift in the air around him, something quiet and building, the way weather builds before a storm you can't see yet.They came over the wall in three places at once.Not wolves. Not vampires. Something in between, something with too many joints moving wrong and eyes that were flat and empty, and they moved fast, so fast I barely registered the first one before it was already across half the garden.Brecken came out of the back door at a sprint.I didn't know he'd been watching fro

Cade Returns

I saw him in the hallway. I had come downstairs at night for water because I couldn't sleep and the house was quiet and I was trying not to think about the attack or the vision or Soren's face when the woman with my face had looked at him. I turned the corner into the kitchen and there was a man sitting at the kitchen table that I had never seen inside this house before.He looked up the same second I saw him.And I knew.I didn't know how I knew. My vampire side had flagged him before I consciously recognized anything, that specific kind of alert she threw when something was nearby that wasn't wolf or vampire or witch but was still something, and my wolf had gone still in the way she went still around things that hadn't decided yet whether to be a threat.He was in his late twenties maybe. Dark hair. A face that looked like it had spent a lot of time outdoors and didn't apologize for it. Clothes that were built for moving in, not for anything els