Page 14 of Embers of Midnight
“Tempt me,” I say, and kick his boot under the table. He pretends he didn’t feel it. Liar.
Ping.
It hits the wall ward over the pantry—one clean chime, not the alarm cascade. My stomach drops half a centimeter and chooses focus. Ronan’s head tilts. Caelum’s fingers pause. Darian’s eyes flick over to the etched sigil above the spice rack. The light embedded in it pulses once in a clear, cool tone.
Anomaly.
I set my spoon down. The table holds the silence like it’s normal. Because it is.
Ronan doesn’t move for a heartbeat. Then he stirs the pot once, kills the flame, slides the lid on, and says, “We finish.” Not a suggestion.
“Obviously,” I say. “I refuse to save the world hungry.”
“A hungry demon is a war crime,” Caelum says, pouring more tea like the house is a patient and he’s dosing it.
Darian takes the notepad from the end of the table and writes the ping string down by habit. Time, coordinates, severity. His handwriting is clean enough to cut yourself on it. “Cold zone,” he says. “Remote. We’ll need winter gear.”
Ronan nods once. “Pack after dishes. Brief in War Room. Portal in twenty.”
“Thirty,” Caelum says. “The tea needs to rest.”
Ronan gives him a look that would wilt a lesser Fae. Caelum only smiles wider. I stand to clear plates before Ronan can tell me to. Family first. Mission second. House rule number one.
We finish. We eat every last piece of bread in a way that would make the gods nod. We clean as fast as four trained hands can clean. Stew boxed. Pot rinsed. Counter wiped. It takes fiveminutes because we’ve done this a thousand times. Ritual makes our edges set.
The War Room glows up from the floor when we step in. The table throws a map in cold blue across its top and spreads the pins with neat logic. Alaska. River corridor. A circle around a clearing and a temperature spike that looks wrong—one big hit and then a sharp drop.
“The explosion looks like heat, not chemical,” Darian says. “Glass signatures along the rim.”
Caelum leans, elbows on the table, eyes bright. “The Forestry cam caught that?” He gestures; the projection obliges with a still: trees in the wrong posture, something like black glass where snow should be, the air above it waving.
“That’s cooked, not burned,” Ronan says. “Flow lines. Resin run. Sheer.”
“Something that edits heat,” I say. “Not just throws it.”
He cuts me a look. “Agreed.”
I can feel the house listening. The wards lean in; the floors steady. Caelum sets a finger to the map and drags two inches downstream. “Camps here and here. Hunters?” He doesn’t say the word like a question. He says it like a warning label.
Darian’s mouth goes flat. “If the ping leaked through their channels—maybe. The spike was loud.”
The War Room hum shifts. The opposite wall slides in a soft tone and a silhouette resolves in the doorway where there wasn’t a door. Draven’s projection. Head and shoulders only, crisp as a video call without the soul suck. He looks like someone ironed a suit onto a good man and didn’t ruin either.
“Evening,” he says. Voice steady, easy. “I’m not interrupting dinner, am I?”
“You missed it,” I say. “Ronan cooked. A tragedy for you.”
“Save me stew next time,” he says, with that not-quite-smile he uses when he wants us to feel like this is normal life. “We have a field event. Cold region. One offshore cam caught a flash pattern that doesn’t match electrical and doesn’t match standard thermite. Ground team is two hours away, weather permitting. You’re closer by portal. This is an extraction if someone’s alive, a mitigation if not. Keep the veil intact. Don’t get filmed.”
“Copy,” Ronan says.
Draven’s gaze skims us like he’s counting limbs. “Watch over each other,” he says, and it’s not policy, it’s him. “Ash, don’t take souvenirs before the site’s cleared.”
“I am insulted,” I say, hand over my heart. “I always wait until after.”
“Caelum,” Draven says, ignoring me like any healthy adult, “mask the satellites if you can without tripping flags. Darian, I’llsend you the two alarm bells in the county that still work—keep them muted if you set wards. Ronan—”
“Warm hands, cool heads,” Ronan says. It’s our line. It lands.
