Page 51 of Orc’s Hex

Behind him, Ziva has her hands dark again—the blood thread work, disrupting the sigil’s control from outside. He can see in his peripheral that she’s working two constructs at once, both tethered to channels in the floor that she’s already mapped. Good. She finds the mechanisms faster than he does. He’s the blunt instrument. She’s the precision.

He drives his knee into the second construct’s midsection and crushes what passes for its ribcage with both hands. It goes down. He moves to the third.

Something moves at his blind side.

He catches it in his periphery a half-second before it would have reached his spine—a construct he hadn’t tracked, low to the ground, using the wreckage of the second one as cover to close the distance without triggering his attention. He pivots on instinct rather than calculation, forearm up, and takes the strike across the ribs instead of the kidneys. The cracked ribs go from cracked to worse. He registers the sound of it more than the pain, a wet give under the strapping that Brynna is not going to be pleased about, and there isn’t time to be anything but grateful it wasn’t the spine.

That one was hunting, not attacking. It waited.

The realization costs him a half-second he can’t spare. He drives his elbow back into the thing’s center mass, feels it crumple under the blow with the particular resistance of compressed shadow trying to hold a shape it hasn’t earned, and finishes it with both hands closing around what passes for its throat.

It goes down. Doesn’t get back up immediately. Small mercy.

He doesn’t have time to assess the damage. He moves to the third.

The third is the largest—three centuries of the sigil’s work compressed into one form. He takes its reaching limb in both hands and uses the momentum to drive it into the nearest pillar hard enough to crack stone, then drives his forearm into its sternum three times until it disperses.

Not monsters. Not enemies.

Monuments to loss.

He cannot afford grief in real time. He crushes and shatters and moves to the next.

Varek is at the hall entrance, holding the doors—keeping the constructs from reaching the main passage. Two of them have been testing the perimeter and he’s been redirecting them with Blood Law impact and Ziva’s chalk marks on the threshold. She prepared for this. She set the ground before the fight.

Of course she did.

“Clear!” Ziva, from across the hall. “The chalk marks will hold the perimeter—they can’t pass the threshold lines. Focus on the ones already inside.”

Five inside the hall. Two held at the perimeter. He adjusts his routing.

He sees it two seconds before it happens.

The fourth construct has been moving differently—not toward him, not testing the perimeter. Circling. Patient. The most important target, to the Heir-Killer mechanism, has never been him.

It drives at Ziva from the left.

He moves.

He crosses the distance at a run and puts himself between the fourth construct and Ziva and takes the impact full across the chest and drives the construct down with everything he has, both knees on what passes for its chest, his hands at its throat-equivalent crushing inward.

The curse detonates in his chest.

He holds it. The construct disperses.

Ziva is three feet away, blood threads dark between her hands and the fifth construct, which has gone rigid. She glances at him. A look crosses her face she doesn’t name and doesn’t need to—not relief, not gratitude. Older than either.

“Three down. Four to manage.”

“The ones you thread—how long does the disruption hold?”

“Four minutes if I hit the channel correctly. Six if I reach the primary oath thread.”

“Show me which ones have the primary thread.”

She points. “That one. And the large one by the east wall.”

“I’ll drive them to you.”