Page 48 of Blood & Ash

“...before my grandfather’s...”

Autumn’s hand closed on Gabriel’s forearm. Her fingers pressed through the fabric of his sleeve, warm and solid.

Gabriel didn’t raise his voice. Voices dropped around the table. It always did. The gravity of the man at the head of the table pulled sound into silence.

He finished the calculation. His jaw was tight. The scar along it caught the firelight and held.

“Arrow was already here before the truce. Before the war. Before Kiera.” Each word landed clean and measured, without decoration. “He was here before any of us knew there was something to watch for.”

Wolves looked at each other across the table, at the walls, at the high windows where the grey morning light pressed against glass. A woman with close-cropped hair pressed her knuckles to her mouth. The man whose hand had trembled reached for his tin cup and didn’t lift it.

Gabriel stood at the head of the table with Autumn’s hand on his arm and the hellforged scars catching what little light reached them, his face set hard against where the numbers were taking him. The arithmetic was simple. Two hundred years of presence meant two hundred years of observation. Two hundred years of planning. Two hundred years of moves made in darkness while the pack slept in its beds, raised its children, buried its dead and never once looked up to check the roof.

The front door opened.

Aislinn walked in. Eric followed three steps behind her. They didn’t knock, and nobody expected them to.

Aislinn’s brown eyes found Gabriel’s across the hall. Her jaw was set. Her shoulders were straight. She had washed the ash from her hands, but the cut on her palm was still visible, a thin red line against skin that had seen worse.

“My sight didn’t fail.” Her voice carried to every corner of the great hall without effort. “Arrow took it. Through Eric’s name. Years ago. Before the war.”

Gabriel looked at her. Then at Eric. Then back at Aislinn. His blue eyes didn’t change. Behind them, something recalibrated and settled into a configuration that had no name in any language the pack spoke.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

Chapter 14

Del unlocked the back door of Nightshade & Nettle after midnight. The shop was dark. The oil lamp in the rear parlor burned steadily, its flame throwing a yellow square across the worn floorboards.

She stepped inside and shut the door. The lock caught with a soft click. Her boots sounded on the floor. She had walked the distance from the carriage house with the ledger under one arm and the cold air pressing against her face until her cheeks went numb. Now the shop’s warmth settled around her, carrying the smell of dried herbs and the faint tang of the beeswax she used to seal her orders.

Rosalind sat in the armchair beside the hearth. Her grey hair caught the lamplight and turned almost white at the temples. Her hands were folded in her lap. She wore a wool cardigan buttoned to her throat, and she sat the same as she had at coven meetings for thirty years: straight-backed, composed, patient. The hearth had burned down to embers. The room was cooling.

She looked at Del across the parlor and didn’t seem surprised.

Del stopped in the doorway. Her grip tightened on the ledger’s spine. The leather was worn soft at the edges from years of fingers. She had dog-eared three pages and marked them with ink smudges from her own hands. The pages fell open to those marks when she carried it. She could feel them under her thumb now.

She stepped into the parlor. The floorboard creaked under her boot. She crossed to the small table between the armchairs and set the ledger down open. The pages settled where she had marked them. January. February. March. The entries ran in Rosalind’s tight, slanted handwriting down the columns of component names, quantities, and dates.

“I’ve been through the books.” Del’s voice came out clipped and precise. “Every ledger. Every withdrawal. For two years.”

Rosalind looked at the open page. Her expression didn’t change.

“Oak gall. One hundred and twenty grams. Every month.” Del’s finger pressed against the entry. The paper dented under her nail. “Iron filings. Eighty grams. Birch bark. Two hundred. Valerian root. Two hundred and ten.” She turned the page. “April. May. June. The same numbers. Every month. For two years.”

The embers popped in the hearth. A small shower of sparks rose and died against the stone.

“Warding stones don’t use those proportions,” Del said. “A standard warding stone uses thirty grams of oak gall, maximum. You withdrew one-twenty. Every month. For two years.”

Rosalind’s hands stayed folded in her lap. Her brown eyes held Del’s across the table. The lamplight made the lines around her mouth deeper.

“Arrow came to me first.” Rosalind’s voice was reasonable and composed, the voice she had used to settle coven disputes for three decades. “He made the offer. Protection for the coven. All nine of us. In exchange for components delivered on schedule.”

“I voted against it,” Del said.

“The vote was eight to one.”

“I know that.”