Page 31 of Blood & Ash

Del straightened. She looked at Marcus. Her eyes were red at the corners. Her mouth was set in a line that didn’t waver.

“It held,” she said.

Marcus made the note. Sodium thiosulfate, seven grams. Distilled water, two milliliters. Silver nitrate, one milliliter. Result: arrest of degradation, no relapse observed at sixty seconds.

He underlined sixty seconds twice.

The lamp guttered in a draft from the half-open door. Outside, the deep gray had lightened to the pale gray that meant dawn was close. The birds had gone quiet. The town of Ashton Grove held its breath between night and morning.

Marcus capped his pen. He set it beside the logbook and looked at the twenty-first entry. The only one without a cross-out. The only one with a number instead of a No.

“We need more,” he said.

Del was already measuring. Her hands moved across the brass scale with the precision of ten thousand repetitions. The weights clicked against the pan. The sodium thiosulfate poured white and fine. The distilled water measured clear in the glass cylinder. The silver nitrate came last, one milliliter at a time, drop by careful drop.

The white suspension formed in the mortar. It looked like snow in a stone bowl, waiting.

Outside, the first true light of dawn touched the trees beyond the parking area. Gold touched the highest branches and moved down.

Inside the carriage house, the lamp burned. The slides waited. The work continued.

Marcus smelled smoke before the first alarm reached the clinic.

It came through the cracked window above the reagent shelf, carrying scorched wood and the mineral bite of damaged wards. Del looked up from the microscope at the same moment he did. The woman who called herself Sable had been gone less than twenty minutes.

“The nest.” Marcus was already reaching for his coat. “Lock the door and stay here.”

Del straightened. “If she’s using magic to breach the wards, you’ll need someone who can see it.”

“I need you alive.”

“Then keep up.”

She grabbed her satchel before he could argue. Marcus took the instrument case containing the silver scalpels and ran into the night with Del close behind him. The smoke thickened as they climbed the road toward the ridge.

The front doors of the nest stood open. One hung crooked from the upper hinge, its carved ward line split down the center. A body lay facedown on the steps, motionless except for one hand twitching against the stone.

Marcus dropped beside the injured vampire. A deep wound crossed the man’s back from shoulder to hip, and the flesh around it refused to close. Del knelt on the opposite side and pressed her palm above the wound without touching it. “Iron and wolfsbane. Bound together.”

“Can you break it?”

“Not while it’s still attached to the weapon.”

A crash sounded inside the house. Marcus looked through the doorway. A dark shape struck the corridor wall hard enough to crack the plaster. Luca hit the floor, rolled, and came up with blood running from his temple.

Sable followed him into view.

Her right arm had changed from the elbow down. Dark fur covered the limb, and the hand ended in claws long enough to score the floorboards. Her eyes burned gold as she advanced, but her face remained composed.

“Luca!” Marcus called.

Luca glanced toward the door. The distraction cost him. Sable crossed the corridor in a blur and drove her altered hand into his chest, throwing him through the narrow table beside the wall.

Marcus entered with a scalpel in each hand. Sable turned before his boots crossed the threshold, her attention moving to him with the speed of an animal catching a new scent. The jacket he had cut at the clinic was gone, exposing the pale scar beneath her ribs.

“The whole set,” she said. “You listened.”

“I’m a quick study.”