The darkness that claimed Julian's vision was not the velvet black of a summer night. It was the suffocating and granular gray of a cave-in.
It started at the edges. It was a creeping frost that turned the Great Hall into a blurring vignette until the high-arched windows and the flickering tapers were swallowed by the stone. Julian sat motionless. His spine was a pillar of unyielding marble as his last tether to the visual world snapped. He did not panic. He had no breath to waste on fear. He simply waited as a blind god reigning over a kingdom of dust.
"The doors," Julian rasped. The sound was a tectonic groan. It vibrated through the obsidian throne. "Kaleen. Tell me the iron-wood held."
"The wood held, My Lord," Kaleen's voice came from the left. It was tight and clinical. The sharp sound of a blade being drawn followed. "The hinges did not. We have five Fenris scouts in the foyer. They have brought a Breacher."
Elara stood ten paces from the throne. Her pulse was a frantic and rhythmic drumbeat that Julian could feel through the floorboards. To a blind man, she was no longer a girl. She was a thermal event. The scent of Night-Blooming Cereus had intensified. It was thick and honeyed as it swirled through the alkaline ozone of the hall. Where she stood, the air seemed to hum. The heat radiating from her was so localized and so intense that it made the stone skin on Julian's face itch with a phantom warmth.
"Get back, Miss Vance," Kaleen commanded. His footsteps shifted into a duelist's stance.
"Get back where?" Elara retorted. Julian heard the rustle of heavy canvas. It was the sound of her reaching into her tactical jacket. "The east wing is a mile of open hallway and the front door is currently occupied by a wolf the size of a sedan. I am staying where I can see."
"There is nothing to see," Julian whispered.
A roar ripped through the hall. It was a sound of wet fur and grinding teeth. The Breacher was a hideously distorted werewolf with fur like matted iron wire. It lunged. The sound of its claws gouging the obsidian floor sounded like a chisel striking bone.
Julian felt the air displacement. He felt the cold draft from the shattered entrance. But he was a prisoner of his own mass. His legs were stone. His left arm was a mineral graft to the chair. He was a king of rubble.
"Left! Four o'clock, low!" Elara's voice cut through the snarls. It was as sharp as a glass shard.
Julian did not hesitate. He could not see the beast, but he could feel the thaw Elara's proximity sent through his frozen nerves. He swung his right hand. It was his only flesh-bound limb. He swung in a blind and sweeping arc.
The impact was sickening. His hand was bolstered by the unnatural density of the curse. It hit the wolf's skull with the force of a falling wrecking ball. There was a wet crunch. There was a whimper. The sound followed of three hundred pounds of predator slamming into a marble pillar.
"Impressive," Elara breathed. He heard her boots scuff the floor as she moved closer to the dais. "But there are four more. They are not looking at the throne, Julian. They are looking at me."
"Kaleen!" Julian barked.
"Occupied, My Lord!" The castellan was a blur of silver steel to the right. His blade whistled as he engaged two scouts. "The tracker Silas left on her... it is a high-frequency pulse. It is blinding my sensors. I cannot lock the internal wards!"
Julian felt a surge of cold fury. The girl was a noise. She was a violent and beautiful and floral noise that had brought the filth of the underworld into his sanctuary. He wanted to crush her for the intrusion. He wanted to wrap his stone fingers around her throat just to see if the heat would finally melt him or burn him to ash.
"Elara," Julian said. The name felt like a jagged rock in his mouth. "Describe them. If I am to be your shield, I must know where the blows fall."
"You are blind?" she asked. The realization hit her voice with a tremor.
"I am a statue," he snapped. "Do not state the obvious. Tell me!"
"Two coming up the center. Low. One on the chandeliers. It is going to drop."
Julian centered himself. He closed his sightless eyes and focused entirely on the scent of the cereus. He treated Elara as the axis of his world. Where her scent was strongest, the stone on his chest felt thinner. Where her voice came from, his pulse found its rhythm.
The wolf on the chandelier leapt.
"Above!" she screamed.
Julian did not move his hand this time. He let out a low and guttural hum. It was a vocalization that tapped into the tectonic power of the Stonework Curse. The floorboards beneath the throne buckled. A spike of jagged obsidian erupted from the floor exactly where the wolf was meant to land. It was driven by the sheer weight of his will and the curse's hunger.
The beast was impaled before it could even whimper.
The remaining two wolves hesitated. They had not expected the Dead Prince to have teeth. But the beacon in Elara's jacket chirped. It was a tiny and electronic sound that signaled her rising value on the dark-web markets. The wolves snarled. Their primal greed was overriding their fear of the stone.
"They are circling," Elara whispered. He could hear her footsteps. They were quick and light as she climbed the steps of the dais. "Julian, they are faster than you."
"Then stand closer, girl," Julian rasped. He did not look for her. He simply felt the air grow warmer as she approached. "Give me the resonance to move."
"What?"
"The closer you are, the more the stone breaks," he admitted. His voice was a low and dangerous growl. "Stand by the armrest. If you want to live through the next minute, you will stay within reach."
Elara reached the top of the dais. Julian felt her heat before she even touched the glass. It was like standing before an open furnace. When her hand accidentally brushed the obsidian armrest, a shockwave of sensation slammed into him. It was just inches from his frozen left hand.
The gray film over his eyes flickered. For a fraction of a second, the world snapped back into a brutal and high-contrast clarity.
He saw her.
She was not the fragile thing he had labeled her. She stood with her chin up. A small and serrated knife was held in a reverse grip. Her eyes were wide and honey-gold with adrenaline. The light from her skin was visible now. It was a faint and amber shimmer that seemed to be pushing back the shadows of the hall.
Julian lunged forward. His torso moved for the first time in a decade as the stone on his waist fractured and fell away in white chunks. He caught the throat of the lead scout mid-air. His grip was so powerful that the beast's neck snapped like dry kindling. He threw the carcass aside and turned toward the last wolf. His mercury eyes glowed with a terrifying and unseeing silver light as the vision faded back into gray.
The last wolf turned and fled into the night.
Silence returned to the hall. It was broken only by the heavy and ragged breathing of the girl and the rhythmic drip of blood on obsidian.
Kaleen stepped forward. He wiped his blade on a silk handkerchief. "The immediate threat is neutralized. But My Lord... the tracker is still live. And my sensors are finally decoding the auction data Silas broadcasted."
Julian did not move. He turned his head toward Elara. He was guided by the heat she threw off. The marble on his chest had receded just enough to allow him to breathe deeply.
"What is she, Kaleen?" Julian asked. His voice was a low and dangerous rumble. "Why does a human girl have the resonance of a thousand suns?"
"I do not know yet," Kaleen admitted. He looked at Elara with a new and clinical curiosity. "But Silas did not call her a daughter in the auction listing. He called her Model 01: The Conduit. He has sold her location to every buyer from the Shadow-Vail to the Fenris Pack."
Elara pulled her hand away from the throne. Julian felt the cold immediately begin to claw its way back up his arm. He let out a hiss of pain as the stone reclaimed its territory. The gray veil dropped over his eyes once more.
"I am not a conduit," Elara snapped. Her voice was shaking. "I am a Vance. And my father is going to die for this."
"Your father is a minor irritant," Julian said. His voice was cold and dismissive. He reached out blindly. His hand hovered in the air where her heat was strongest. He did not touch her. He did not want the hunger to return. "The problem, Elara, is that you are currently the most valuable object in the supernatural world. And I am a man who does not like his assets being hunted."
"I am not an asset," she hissed.
"In this house, you are a tool of survival," Julian countered. "That makes you mine. Kaleen, lock the estate. Take her to the library. I want every text on the Old Bloodlines. I want to know exactly what Silas Vance did to her."
"Of course," Kaleen said.
"Julian," Elara said. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she noticed the tracker in her jacket pocket pulsing a steady and rhythmic red. "The wolves did not leave because they were scared. They left because they were the distraction."
From the darkness of the high rafters, a new sound emerged. It was not a howl. It was a rhythmic and metallic clicking.
Julian's sightless eyes narrowed. "Kaleen?"
"Gargoyles," Kaleen whispered. His voice failed for the first time. "The Vane Court... they are not waiting for the wolves to finish the job. They have activated the estate's own guardians against us."
The statues Elara had seen earlier began to uncoil from their pedestals. They were the frozen and screaming figures.