The Vampire & Her Witch

The fortified doors of Lothian Manor stood before them like the gates of a tomb.

They were heavy oak, darkened with age and banded with iron straps as thick as a man’s thumb, fitted into a stone archway that had been built to withstand the battering rams of an invading army. Through the timber, Ashlynn could hear the sounds of men on the other side. Shouted orders, the scrape of heavy furniture being dragged across stone, the dull -THUD- of a barricade being set in place. The defenders inside had heard the fighting in the bailey and had sealed the entrance.

No doubt someone inside was fighting even now to find the courage to disturb Lord Owain’s wedding. Clearly, someone had come to crash the festivities in the most dramatic way possible. Perhaps a messenger was racing toward Owain even now, and the defenders were only hoping to buy enough time for reinforcements to arrive, hopefully with a knight who could both take command of the men behind the door and take the blame for anything that went wrong.

The heavy oak beam that barred the doors from within was their answer to everything that had just happened. It was one of the oldest defenses in the world, a thick piece of timber set in iron brackets, backed by whatever weight they could pile behind it in the time they’d had. Tables, benches, anything heavy enough to brace the doors against whatever tried to break through them.

Anything that would slow the invaders down and give them the time they so desperately needed.

Isabell stepped forward, her spectacles glinting as her eyes swept the doors, the archway, the iron bands, and the heavy hinges with the practiced assessment of an engineer who had spent decades designing structures meant to withstand exactly this kind of assault. Her gaze tracked down the stone frame, noting the way the iron hinges were bolted into the masonry, the thickness of the oak planking, the gaps where the wood met stone.

"The hinges are the weak point," she said, already turning to scan the bailey behind them. Her eyes moved across the cobblestones, past the storage buildings and the hitching posts, and landed on the heavy wooden water troughs that stood near the stables. "Give me a moment," she said.

"I can fashion a lever from one of those troughs," Isabell said confidently as she eyed the gap between the top edge of the heavy door and the stone archway. "We can wedge the doors up high enough that we should be able to slip at least one of the pins free. The rest won’t be so hard once we’ve got the first."

"No need," Ashlynn said as she strode forward.

She walked past Isabell, past Ollie, past Elgon and Devlin, and the knights who were already positioning themselves to help with the breach. Her voice was quiet, unhurried, carrying the same quality it had carried when she’d commanded the group to open the outer gates themselves.

From the calm tone of her voice, she might have been asking someone to move so she could reach a shelf, but her coven knew her better than that. What looked calm on the surface concealed seething currents underneath. It was only by drawing on a thread of power contained within Nyrielle’s gift that Ashlynn was able to manifest an imitation of her lover’s cold detachment while she stayed at the center of the formation.

But she couldn’t hold herself back any longer. Not when even a minute of delay could allow a message to reach Owain and place everything in danger. She had to reach the Great Hall before.... Before Owain had the chance to do something that could never be undone.

Ollie hesitated, then took a step back. Elgon followed suit, though his mustache bristled with the uncertainty of a man who had never taken an order to step away from a fight without a clear reason to do so. Isabell’s brow furrowed behind her spectacles, but she too moved aside, watching Ashlynn with an expression that shifted from professional skepticism to something closer to curiosity.

Behind them, Devlin sheathed his fighting knife and rested the tip of his sword on the ground. His weathered face betrayed nothing as he watched the young woman he’d last known as a quiet, bookish girl walk toward the barricaded doors of Lothian Manor as though she intended to knock.

He’d begun to suspect there was something more to her survival than the story she’d told the night before, and now he narrowed his eyes as he began to wonder if there was a kernel of truth to the wilder stories his great uncle once told about about the promise of the seas and the reason a Blackwell must always rule over the bay his family had called home since the days when the Black Tide still sailed the seas under the command of Lord Phylip.

Ashlynn placed her right hand flat against the oak.

The wood was cold beneath her palm, rough and old, the grain cracked and splintered in places by years of rain seeping into the wood and freezing hard in the cold winter months. She could feel the age of it, the years compressed into rings that she could read as easily as the pages of a book. She could feel the iron bands, cold and lifeless, against the once living wood, and beyond them, the heavy beam in its brackets, bracing the doors from the inside.

She could feel the beam the way she could feel any wood that she touched, as though it were an extension of her own body. The grain of the oak, the compression of the fibers, the knots and whorls where branches had once grown before the timber was cut and shaped; all of it was as clear to her as the lines on her own palm.

"I’m sorry," she whispered to the wood, so softly that no one behind her heard it.

Then she pushed.