Page 118 of The Threads Between

Four men. Armed. They saw us emerge from the shadows and their weapons came up.

Everything happened at once.

Beatrice's ward slammed into existence, golden light shimmering between us and them. Two gunshots cracked against it and dissolved into sparks that scattered across the stone floor.

I reached for the void.

The familiar cold rushed through me, that hungry absence that lived beneath the Weave. For a heartbeat the old burn started to kindle in my chest, my life force beginning to feed the magic.

And then the bond opened.

August's awareness wrapping around mine. The hourglass pendant pulsing warm in his pocket. Everything aligned—the focusing stone, now shared between us. My magic flowed through the bond, through him, through the pendant, and the burn became a river instead of a fire. Channeled. Controlled.

I pulled.

Not threads. Absence itself. The air between me and the nearest hunter collapsed inward, a pocket of nothing that dragged him off his feet and slammed him backward into the wall. Stone cracked. He crumpled and didn't get up.

The second hunter swung his blade at August.

August ducked and came up inside the man's guard. His elbow cracked into the hunter's throat, and as the man staggered gasping, August grabbed his sword arm and twisted. Bones ground. The hunter screamed. August's Threadbreaker magic unpicked the blade itself—metal falling apart in the man's grip, fragments scattering across the floor like broken teeth.

Garrick handled the third with brutal efficiency. He caught the man's gun hand, wrenched the weapon away, and used the butt of it to crack the hunter's skull. The man dropped. Garrick was already spinning toward the fourth.

The fourth hunter ran.

Beatrice's binding threads caught his ankles. He pitched forward, arms wheeling, and hit the ground face-first. The crack of his nose breaking echoed off the stone walls.

Four hunters down in only a few minutes.

I was breathing hard, my heart pounding against my ribs. But the burn in my chest was gone. The magic had flowed through me like water through a channel, powerful, vast, but no longer consuming.

That's how it should feel.

“Beatrice,” August said, already moving. “The portal. His quarters are two floors up, east wing.”

“I know the layout,” Beatrice said, her hands already rising, threads spinning between her fingers in a pattern more complex than any ward. The air before us shimmered, distorted, and then tore open—a window of gold-edged darkness that looked through to a room I had never seen.

Elias's private quarters.

Through the shimmer of the portal, I could make out paneled walls, a mahogany desk, a cold hearth. And a figure seated in the chair behind the desk, silhouetted against the narrow window. Still. Waiting.

August's grip on my hand tightened. Through the bond, a surge of cold fury. Him.

We stepped through.

The figure didn't move as we entered, didn't flinch at the portal's light flooding the dark study.

Then he turned his head, and the lamp on the desk caught his face.

Not Elias.

Morrison.

He sat in Elias's chair, behind Elias's desk, wearing an expression of patient amusement that could only have been rehearsed.

He watched us step through the portal the way a man watches a play he has already read, a faint smile on his face.

“You're late,” he said conversationally. “He expected you an hour ago.”