Light flickered, along with an awareness of dull pain. It took a woozy moment, but Bell finally forced her eyes to flutter open. Before her, her ring-covered hands lay limp on scarred floorboards, a large sports sock not far from them. Confusion muddied her already hazy thoughts ... until her gaze lifted. A rumpled navy duvet hung off the edge of a bed. Beyond it, other people lay on scarred floorboards or collapsed amongst scattered pieces of furniture and clutter. Some groaned, slowly regaining consciousness.

Reality crystalised as the disturbing sights and sounds clicked into place: Aden's bedroom, overrun and in disarray, party guests in tangled heaps on the floor. Some appeared to be bleeding. All looked like they'd been hit by a bus.

She felt like she had been.

But it'd been a vampire that'd hit her—a hard swipe across her chest that'd sent her flying.

Aden. Jumbled memories joined the pain in her skull: The looks of disbelief and horror he'd shot her way through wild spell-fire. Him pushing away the groping hands of laughing, enthralled friends. Him fighting to get back to her when he should've been running for his life.

He'd been clueless—totally unprepared for the demon that'd literally come to his door.

She struggled to sit up, panic a rush in the queasy whirl. What'd happened to him? Where was he?

Slapping a hand against the broken wardrobe mirror beside her, she planted her boots and got upright. After the world stopped spinning, her vision cleared enough to sweep the room's chaos.

Shirley Chan lay vamp bit on the bed, but still breathing. Other injured students and friends lay on the floor, their wounds the result of their efforts to break into the room—flesh torn by broken glass and splintered wood, and bruises from impacts with the door, other people, and the floor, where she'd dropped a good number of them.

Among the groaning survivors starting to sit up, she saw plenty of broad shoulders and lean torsos honed by hours in the pool or through other sports, but no sun-blond head. No clear lake-blue eyes blinked open to stare at her with confusion, maybe even fear.

Aden. He'd been taken. The vampire had come and gone, his sole mission to retrieve the one unique human his blood sire needed to survive.

"Oh, God—shit." Bell scrambled to where Jolie lay, the girl's red curls a mad tangle across her face. "Harper! Wake up!" She shook the girl until green eyes cracked open. "You sober? Enough to drive?" Sweetheart that she was, nine out of ten, Jolie was someone's designated driver. "Look after Shirley! Take her, Paul, and anyone else who's bleeding straight to the ED. Do you hear me?"

She only waited long enough for dazed green eyes to clear and widen. Then, she launched herself towards the broken door, sweeping up her wand from the floor on the way out.

As she raced through the chaos of the lounge—party lights still flashing, music still booming—she grabbed her phone from her back pocket. The absence of signal bars confirmed an ambulance wasn't an option, witch disruptions still in play. And it confirmed the fear killing her breath. Calling her family for help would require more than radio frequencies and silicon chips. She was as good as on her own.

Fear strangled her as she burst into her cousin's room. Its emptiness hit, a brutal slap. Aden wasn't the only one missing. All of Raj's weird shit was there—his spell tools, knitting projects, faux-fur jackets, and hand-painted guitar—but no six-foot fool ready to roll eyes at her crappy social skills and lack of style.

Her knees almost went out at the enormity of the situation she found herself in. Her inadequacy struck in a drowning wave.

"Hey, Blackwood." Josh Brickwill's slurred voice jolted her around. "You ... looking for Raj?" The big econ major slumped against the room's doorframe, his aggression gone. But his eyes remained unfocused, some part of his idiot brain still affected by the vampire's thrall or a concussion. "He, ah... Some tattooed freak. They hit it off like freaking cats in heat. Disappeared somewhere. Wouldn't expect to see him 'til noon ... or later."

Bell snatched a breath, fighting panic. "What did the 'freak' look like?"

Losing the battle against his psychically or physically injured brain, Brick slid down the doorframe to the floor. "Tall, weedy ... black tracksuit, skull jewellery. I think he and Raj had one of ... you know, Raj's special teas... They 'floated' out of here, giggling like girls. Uh, why's my head spinning?"

"A tea? Shit." Bell scanned her cousin's bedside collection of herbs: tisanes for focus, sleep, meditation, and, yes, 'giggles'. But birthday or not, Raj wouldn't have taken anything brain-addling on a night full of witch magic. And he'd never have left Aden undefended—not willingly. If Raj had 'floated' off, high on some drug, the blame lay with the tattooed guy who'd seduced him—a Bhellbane, no doubt, or some normie witch fanboy follower. The vampires had needed a non-demon to infiltrate the house and compromise Raj and his wards.

And now, they had him and Aden.

Bell covered her mouth; stifled a sob. The desperate—pathetic—sound that managed to escape her fingers broke despair's grip. Blackwoods didn't cry; they got to work. Raj and Aden needed her to get her shit together, right now.

She swung to her cousin's carved driftwood shelf of crystals, candles, and charms. All useless dust-catchers and knickknacks to the untrained, normie eye, but to her—

She snatched up a long, thin crystal that burned midnight-blue on the metaphysical plane. Dark psychic energy fizzed over her fingers, sparking a reaction in her rings as they sought to sync with the spell imbued into the translucent stone.

A whisper crystal. A means for one mind to touch another.

Tuning out Brick's confused mutterings as he struggled to stay conscious a few feet away, Bell closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. If she linked with the stone's energies, she'd be able to send her thoughts across the psychic ether. Her mother might hear her or, more likely, her Aunt Willie; the wizard elder had a psychic ear as sharp as a shadow bat. There was still time to save Raj and Aden. The witches hadn't killed Raj yet because doing so would be noticed and draw attention to their real game. And Aden...

"Fuck." Bell clenched her hand around the crystal. Aden would be long gone before she calmed her mind enough to establish a clear psychic link. Her brain was a mess; she had no focus. She was worse than useless. She'd effed up—lost Aden. All her life, she'd hated how his needs had restricted her and her family's lives, but she'd never hated him; had never, not once, ever wanted him gone.

But now, he was. He'd been taken.

Fear and guilt slapped her with torturous memories: Aden, age eight, skinny, missing teeth, and laughing, both his fists full of her grandmother's baking; Aden and Raj, age fifteen, tag-teaming her, dragging her into the local surf fully clothed and cursing; Aden pulling her close, telling her to ignore the idiots, less than quarter of an hour ago.

Bell pressed both fists to her jolting heart. Aden... She couldn't lose him. This couldn't be happening.

A groan from the door—Brick. "Why do I feel hungry and horny when I want to throw up?"

Hungry? Horny? "Shit." Bell dropped the crystal. The vampiric thrall was still messing with people in the house. That meant—"Thirty metres." A strong vampire could hold their influence on an alcohol-affected, enthralled mind up to around thirty metres.

Charmed stones scattered as she swiped up a far more prosaic item from a bowl of coloured rocks: a metal key decorated with strings of rainbow beads and a Ford badge.

Pulse booming in her skull, she dove for the kitchen—its wide-open door—and burst out into the night's witch-fouled air. The rental property's garage hunkered in the dark to her left, its ridged, steel door broken and permanently up. What it exposed gleamed, sleek and darkly metallic. High-gloss sapphire paint glittered, reflecting kitchen and porch lights. Pristine chrome cut the night with glints of silver.

Raj's one true love. His nineteen-seventy-six Ford Cortina MK3—meticulously resurrected from a rust pile for a total 'glow up', and obsessively enchanted with every ward known to wizard kind. Short of a god-tier apocalypse, nothing could damage it: not seaside oxidation; not rampaging hellhounds.

Battling her shaking hands, Bell wrestled the driver's side door open and dumped her butt down onto spell-charmed red leather. Magic hissed and snapped in warning as she slammed the door shut and jammed the keys into the ignition, her disrespect barely tolerated. Raj had spared nothing to protect his baby. And right now, that suited her fine.

With a twist of her wrist, she set the V6 roaring. Ignoring the car's spitting defensive spells, she slammed the gear stick into reverse and jammed her foot on the gas. She sent the car careering arse first down the drive. Spotting a few drunk, enthralled partygoers, she feathered the accelerator to give the idiots the most minimal of seconds to get clear of the car's rear fender.

As she exited the driveway with a squeal of tires, she whipped the car's nose about to face the direction she'd first found Aden. A sparse trail of dazed students stumbled and weaved up the sidewalk and street, attempting to follow the one who'd beguiled them, confirming her hunch about where the vamp had headed.

She slammed the car into first and planted boot. Vampires were demon-animated corpses, their speed an illusion, a trick of the mind, and their physical strength only temporarily boosted after a meal. Their real power lay on the psychic plane.

As she worked up the gears, to second, to third, she swerved to avoid the enthralled, the drunkest—most susceptible—following their vampire 'bestie', leading her to him like human breadcrumbs.

A tall figure emerged ahead, near the stormwater drain; pale hair a wild fall under the flickering glow of a dying streetlight. A body slumped in the vampire's arms—no small burden, that of a six-foot-two male with the muscle to make the two-hundred-metre butterfly his bitch at regional swim meets. But the demon carrying that long, lean body held his burden with the care of a parent bringing their precious, sleeping child home.

The sight stole Bell's breath. Then, it turned her vision red. Oh, eff people treating Aden like a baby—like he was weak and helpless. He was adept born, the son of a Grand Councillor. To deny that, to make him something else—a child, a pet, a victim—was just plain obscene. Under all the enchantments placed on him, and beyond his enforced naivety, Aden was a goddamn wizard. A strong one.

Foot to the floor, Bell desperately kept that thought top of mind as she jumped the curb and rammed the Cortina straight into the back of the vampire's leather-clad legs.

The demon bounced onto, then up and over, the bonnet and away into the night. Aden flew—hit the windscreen mid centre and, no doubt, would've shattered it if Raj hadn't been both wizard and obsessed car owner.

Jerking the car to a halt half on the footpath, half on the road, Bell stared through the windshield at the long-limbed carnage sprawled on the bonnet. Aden's bloodied face lay squished up against the glass, his lips 'smushed' and his nose at a weird angle. Her heart slammed her ribs at the sight. God. Had she killed him? Was Aden—

Movement—clumsy and uncoordinated. A groan sounded beyond blood-smeared glass. Long-lashed eyelids peeled back to reveal dazed—likely concussed—blue eyes.

Bell's head went light in relief.

A gasped curse, muffled by the windshield. Aden's gaze met hers, full of shock, but burning with disbelief, outrage—and a hint of arcane fire. "You ran me over?"

That flicker of power had her heart ready to explode. She bared her teeth and punched the windscreen, jolting blue eyes wider. "You're a fucking wizard, Harry!" she yelled the bastardised Harry Potter quote. "Suck it the hell up, and get your arse off the bonnet! Move! Move! Move!"