Chapter 24:
– Amara Black –
I have killed dozens of people without my hands shaking once…
But apparently, giving Rachel Roth a bracelet was the thing that turned me into a fucking mumbling disaster because I'd never gotten anyone a present before. "So." I cleared my throat. I tried again. "I got you something. While I was out a few days ago. It's... I found this shop in Gotham, run by a woman named Xanadu, and she had... it's not a big deal, honestly, I just saw it and thought of you, and..." I was rambling.
Raven sat across from me on the opposite sofa, tucked into the corner beside Dick, her charcoal turtleneck buttoned to the throat and her dark hair falling across one eye in that way she had, half curtain, half shield. Her violet eyes tracked the box in my hands with careful attention.
Dick sat beside her looking unfairly handsome in his fitted navy shirt, his gaze flickering between me and the box with an expression I recognized as his "supportive but trying not to influence" face, the one Batman probably trained into him alongside the acrobatics. On his other side, Kara had her hands folded in her lap, fingers laced so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She caught my eye and offered an encouraging smile that was genuinely sweet and also somehow made my nerves worse, because now I had an audience for my emotional vulnerability, and audiences made everything exponentially more terrifying.
I exhaled hard through my nose.
Just give her the box. You burned a man's blood inside his veins three days ago. You can hand a girl a present.
I stood up, crossed the space between the couches in four steps that felt like forty, and held the box out to Raven.
"Here."
Smooth, Amara. Really eloquent. Truly the protégée of history's greatest dark sorceress.
Raven's fingers brushed mine as she accepted the box, and the brief contact sent a warm spark up my wrist, my Lewd Touch activating without permission, my body remembering what those fingers had done on the cruise, my succubus instincts purring mine before I could throttle them into silence. I pulled my hand back and shoved it into the pocket of my dress, which was tight enough that the gesture looked more awkward than casual.
Raven studied the box first. Of course she did. She turned it in her hands, running her thumb along the edge where the near-black wood met the silver clasp. The Veil Chain caught the afternoon light filtering through Morgana's heavy curtains and held it, the shadow-wrought silver drinking in the warm bars of sun and returning something darker, cooler, like moonlight reflected off still water. The tiny crescent moon charm dangled from the central link, carved from solidified darkness, its surface a perfect absence where light should have been.
Raven went still.
"It's a Veil Chain," I said, and my voice came out quieter than I intended, almost gentle in a way that didn't feel like me. "Madame Xanadu said it was forged in the twilight realm, the space between the physical world and the dimension of shadows. The silver acts as an empathic filter. It doesn't block anything. It just..." I searched for the right words, remembering how Xanadu had explained it, her green eyes watching me with that mixture of wariness and grudging respect. "It turns down the volume. So you can choose what to feel instead of drowning in everyone else's noise."
Raven's fingers trembled as she clasped it around her left wrist.
The effect was immediate.
Raven's shoulders dropped, not dramatically, but a subtle lowering of tension. Her fingers uncurled from the fists she probably didn't realize she'd been making. The furrow between her brows smoothed. And her eyes, her beautiful violet eyes, went glassy for a single second before she blinked hard and fast, twice, three times.
"It's quiet," she whispered.
I knew that voice. The raw, stunned disbelief of someone who had lived with pain for so long they'd forgotten it was abnormal, who'd been carrying a weight so constant it had become indistinguishable from their own body, and then suddenly, impossibly, the weight was gone. I knew that voice because I'd heard it in my own throat the day the System removed Dumbledore's blocks from my mind, the day I realized that the fog and confusion and inability to focus that had plagued my entire childhood weren't character flaws but chains someone had locked around my brain before I could walk.
"Raven," I started, not entirely sure what I was going to follow it with, something about how she deserved to hear herself think, how nobody should have to exist as an unwilling antenna for every passing emotional broadcast, how I'd burn down another estate for her if that was what it took to keep her eyes looking like that.
She kissed me.
One moment she was sitting on the sofa with the bracelet glinting on her wrist and tears she'd never acknowledge gathering in her lashes, and the next she was right there, her hand catching the back of my neck, pulling me down, and her lips pressed to mine, over in two seconds but thorough enough that I felt the shape of her mouth imprinted on mine afterward like a brand.
She pulled back. Her grey cheeks had gone vivid violet, the full-body blush I'd learned meant she'd acted on impulse and was now experiencing the emotional equivalent of jumping out of a plane and realizing mid-freefall that she hadn't packed a parachute.
"Thank you," she said, her voice barely a whisper, almost fierce in its sincerity. "Amara, this is... I don't have... thank you."
The room's silence lasted exactly three and a half seconds. I counted, because the reactions unfolding around me were too good to miss by even a fraction.
Dick's jaw tightened, not with anger, but with the very specific expression of a man who was watching someone else kiss the woman he'd made out with in a London penthouse and was determined to be mature about it even if his circulatory system had other opinions. His right hand flexed once against his thigh before deliberately relaxing.
Full marks for composure, Grayson.
Kara made a sound like a teakettle reaching boil, a barely audible "nnhh" that escaped before she could catch it, her blue eyes enormous and her cheeks flushing from golden to pink so fast it was like watching a sunset in fast-forward. She suddenly became intensely interested in examining the arm of the sofa, running her fingers along the leather as if she'd never encountered upholstery before and found it absolutely riveting.
And Kori. Kori clapped. Three sharp, enthusiastic claps with her full Tamaranean strength, hard enough that the sound cracked through the room like miniature thunderclaps. Her face split into a grin of pure, radiant delight, the smile of someone who found all expressions of affection genuinely beautiful and couldn't fathom why anyone would respond to a kiss with anything less than celebration.
"That was wonderful!" she announced, beaming at Raven and me with the kind of uncomplicated joy that shouldn't have been possible from someone who'd been quietly rejected from a superhero team twenty minutes earlier. "On Tamaran, we would now exchange gifts of equal emotional significance to complete the bonding cir—"
"Kori," Dick said, his voice carefully level.
"—but I understand Earth customs differ!" Kori finished brightly, her enthusiasm barely dimmed.
I grinned.
I turned and walked back to the other sofa, lowering myself into the cushions with as much grace as my hammering heart would allow. The moment my weight settled, Kori slid closer. Not subtly; Kori didn't do subtly, possibly lacked the biological framework for it. She moved with the warm, unhesitating closeness of someone whose body was its own language and whose current vocabulary was please don't push me away too.
Her thigh pressed flush against mine, skin burning hot through the thin fabric of my dress. Her arm brushed my shoulder, and her breasts, frankly absurd in their dimensions, pressed against my upper arm as she leaned into me with a content sigh.
I let her. Not because my succubus instincts were purring at the contact, although they were. Not because her alien pheromones were doing complicated things to my hindbrain, although they absolutely fucking were. I let her because ten minutes ago, Kori had offered herself to a team and been gently, lovingly, devastatingly told no.
She'd watched Dick, the man she'd loved with the totality of an alien heart that didn't understand half-measures, explain that he needed distance from her, and she'd nodded once and swallowed whatever Tamaranean grief sounded like.
I knew what it felt like to be the person nobody picked. I'd spent eighteen years perfecting the art of not being chosen, not for families, not for friendships, not for the basic human right of being wanted. If the most powerful woman in this room needed to sit close to someone who wouldn't flinch, I could be that someone.
A silence settled over the room. Not uncomfortable, exactly, the kind of silence that happens when six people with complicated relationships and at least three overlapping romantic entanglements find themselves in the same room with no structured activity to hide behind.
Is this what it's like? I thought, and the question arrived with a strange ache, dull and deep, lodged somewhere behind my ribs. Having friends over at your house?And every single one of them wants to fuck you, my succubus instincts noted, because demonic heritage had no respect for tender emotional revelations. Which, fine. Yes. That was also true. The room practically hummed with it: desire layered over affection layered over tension layered over the particular brand of longing that happened when everyone wanted the same person and nobody knew the rules. Normal girls had brunches with their friends. I had a supernatural erotic pressure cooker in a Gothic mansion next door to Batman.
"We should do something," I announced, because the silence had crossed from contemplative to actively pregnant and somebody needed to intervene before it gave birth to something awkward. "I have a pool. An actual, gorgeous, Morgana-enchanted pool that changes color with the time of day and maintains perfect temperature. Or we could play a game? I think Bellatrix found a dusty chess set somewhere, although she tried to hex the pieces for not following her orders, so it might be cursed now."
Kori straightened beside me, her whole body perking up like someone had plugged her into a power source. "The pool! Oh, that is a wonderful suggestion! On Tamaran, communal bathing is considered the highest form of social bonding between close friends and potential lovers. We would remove our garments to symbolize trust and vulnerability, then enter the water together, and through the sharing of warmth and physical closeness, we would begin the Kel'vari Bonding, a ritual of deep reconnection that strengthens ties between warriors." She paused, her eyes bright with genuine enthusiasm, clearly building toward something.
I felt it coming the way you feel a train approaching the end of the rails…
We were so close to avoiding all the drama too…
"The first stage is the washing of each other's bodies," Kori continued, her hands moving in animated gestures, "which represents the cleansing of past grievances and the renewal of trust. The second stage is the sharing of breath, where we would press our mouths together and exchange air until our life forces synchronize..."
Raven's teacup froze halfway to her lips.
"...and the third stage is the Kel'vari Culmination, where we complete the ritual through shared physical ecstasy, typically lasting several hours, involving all participants equally, which reforges our bonds of sisterhood and ensures that no resentment lingers between..."
"Kori." Dick's voice was quiet. Controlled. The particular kind of controlled that meant the control itself was doing heavy lifting. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his jaw working in a way that suggested his back teeth were grinding. "Could you... not?"
Kori blinked, her enthusiasm stumbling. "I do not understand. Have I described the ritual incorrectly? On Tamaran..."
"We're not on Tamaran." Dick's composure cracked. He stood up. "We're on Earth. We've been on Earth. You've been here for years, Kori. At some point, you have to..."
He stopped. Drew a breath through his nose. His hands opened and closed at his sides.
The temperature in the room shifted. I could feel what was coming.
"I have to what, Richard?" Kori's voice had changed. The brightness was still there, but underneath it, miles underneath, buried deep but rising fast, was something older and harder. She didn't stand, but her spine straightened, and the alien muscles in her shoulders tensed with power. "Please, finish your sentence. Tell me what I have to do to earn the right to exist in your presence without apologizing for who I am."
Dick turned to face her fully. They were gorgeous together, I noticed, in the way two people who used to love each other were always gorgeous together; the echo of what had been made the current distance more painful, more visible, like looking at a photograph with a crack through the middle.
"You know that's not what I meant," Dick said, and to his credit, his voice softened. "I'm not asking you to apologize for your culture. I never asked you to apologize for your culture. But you knew, Kori, we talked about this. We sat down and we talked, multiple times, about what monogamy meant to me, about what exclusivity meant, about..."
"About your rules," Kori said, and the brightness was gone now, replaced by something raw and steady and horribly clear. "Yes. I remember your rules, Richard. I memorized them. I wrote them down in a journal so I would not forget, because I loved you so much I was willing to reshape the way I experienced joy to fit inside a framework that felt like..." She paused, searching for the word. "Like wearing a garment that was too tight in all the places that needed room to breathe."
"That's not fair."
"What was not fair," Kori said, and her voice cracked on the word, a fracture to match his, "was watching the man I loved look at me as though I had betrayed him, when I was doing the thing my heart had been built to do. I did not sneak. I did not hide. I invited you to share in something I thought was beautiful, and you looked at me like I had broken something."
The silence that followed was the kind that bruised.
I sank deeper into the sofa cushions. My [Simmering Fury] stirred, not rage at either of them, but something adjacent, a reaction to watching two people I cared about tear pieces off each other in my living room. My jaw clenched. Beneath my dress, I felt the base of my spine tingle where my tail wanted to manifest, and the skin across my lower back itched where wings pressed against the inside of my body, and the faintest pressure built along my hairline where horns would emerge if I let them.
Not now. Keep it together. Horns and a tail will not improve this situation.
Raven stood up from the sofa, placing herself between Dick and Kori. "Stop," Raven said, and her voice carried the quiet authority of someone who'd spent her entire life moderating the gap between what people felt and what they said. "Both of you, stop. I can feel what you're actually trying to say and neither of you is listening to what the other means. Dick, she's not dismissing your pain. Kori, he's not rejecting your nature. You're both..." She pressed her fingertips to her temple and grimaced. "You're both so loud." The Veil Chain on her wrist shimmered faintly, its empathic dampening working overtime, and Raven's expression flickered with something I recognized as gratitude before she refocused on the two ex-lovers staring at each other across the wreckage of a conversation that should have happened years ago but kept getting deferred in favor of world-saving.
Kara drifted toward me.
It was the most graceful anxiety response I'd ever witnessed: Kara Zor-El, last daughter of a dead planet, hovering across a living room to escape emotional conflict, touching down in front of me. Her feet met the rug. Her blue eyes found mine.
We stared at each other.
An entire conversation happened in the space of that look. This is awful, her expression said. I know, mine answered. I don't belong in this argument, her bitten lip communicated. Neither do I, I agreed with a slight widening of my eyes. Can we please leave? asked the desperate furrow between her golden brows. God, yes, replied every atom of my body.
Behind us, Dick's voice had gone rough and quiet, saying something to Kori about needing space and time and... I wasn't listening anymore. I was looking at Kara.
Kara, who had flown across an ocean at maximum speed to fight sea monsters because someone needed help. Kara, who had compartmentalized the genocide of her entire civilization and filed it under "tragic but manageable" because falling apart wasn't an option she permitted herself. Kara, who stood in front of me in a yellow sundress and a white cardigan looking like concentrated sunlight wrapped in Kansas decency, her eyes wide and pleading and so blue they made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with succubus instincts and everything to do with the simple, devastating fact that she was beautiful and kind and here.
I looked up at her. Then I stood.
The movement brought us close. I stepped into her space. My arms went around her waist.
Kara made a tiny sound, "ah," more breath than vocalization. I pressed myself against her, deliberately, thoroughly, letting my breasts flatten against hers through the thin barriers of my dress and her sundress, our bodies finding each other with the particular alignment that happened when two women of comparable height and incompatible bust sizes attempted a full-body embrace. My lips were level with her jaw. I tilted my chin up.
"Kara." My voice was low, private, pitched for superhearing rather than human ears. "Do you want a tour of the house?"
Her pulse spiked. Her hands hovered at her sides, not quite touching me, trembling with the effort of restraint.
"A... a tour?" she repeated, her voice climbing half an octave.
"A private tour~" I let the word hang between us, weighted with precisely as much suggestion as I intended, which was a lot. My thumb traced a slow circle against the small of her back, right where her sundress fabric met the warm expanse of Kryptonian skin above her waistline.
Her eyes darted sideways, toward Dick, toward Raven, toward the argument she was abandoning, before snapping back to mine with a resolve that looked like it had been excavated from somewhere deep and Kryptonian and final. "Yes," she said. "A tour. Private. That sounds... yes."
I smiled.
I took her hand and turned toward the door.
"We'll be back," I announced to the room at large, not particularly caring whether anyone heard me. "Eventually."
I caught Raven's expression as I moved past: not jealous, exactly, but watchful. Intense. Her violet eyes tracked our interlaced fingers, then rose to meet my gaze with something complicated and hot and patient.
A couple minutes later of walking around the manor together, with plenty of lewd handholding…
"...This hallway alone is bigger than my bedroom at home," Kara said, her voice carrying that particular mixture of awe and self-consciousness that I was beginning to recognize as distinctly her, the girl from space and Kansas discovering something extraordinary and immediately measuring it against everything she knew.
"The whole house is obscene," I admitted. "Twelve acres. Forty-something rooms. Morgana handled the structural magic in one evening and nearly passed out, which I've literally never seen happen, so that tells you how much power the restoration took. The contractors handled the cosmetics. Bellatrix accelerated the timeline by traumatizing most of them into working double shifts."
"Traumatizing how?"
"She greeted the lead painter holding a severed chicken head and told him the last person who got paint on her floors was still screaming somewhere he'd never be found." I paused. "The chicken head was from dinner. The threat was entirely sincere."
Kara's laugh was bright and startled, echoing off the high ceiling. "And he didn't quit?"
"We tripled his rate. Amazing what people will tolerate for money."
I led her through the first doorway on the left, Morgana's study. The room hit you before you fully entered it, a weight in the air like walking into deep water, the ambient dark magic thick enough to taste. Ancient texts in languages that hadn't been spoken aloud in millennia were stacked in precarious towers across a desk carved from a single piece of blackened oak. A half-finished cup of tea sat beside an open grimoire, its contents long since gone cold. The shadows in the far corners didn't behave correctly. They pooled and shifted in patterns that had nothing to do with the light source, as though something alive was breathing just beneath the surface of the darkness.
The library was next, and Kara's breath actually caught.
It spanned two full floors, connected by a wrought-iron spiral staircase that Morgana had enchanted to rotate between levels at a murmured command. Books climbed every wall from floor to ceiling, thousands of them, tens of thousands, bound in leather and cloth and materials I couldn't identify, their spines bearing titles in English, Latin, Greek, Old English, Gaelic, Arabic, Sanskrit, and scripts so ancient they predated written human history. Some hummed faintly when you passed too close. Others were chained to their shelves with silver links because their contents were considered dangerous enough to warrant physical restraint. One, on the highest shelf, was sealed inside a glass case that fogged and cleared in a rhythmic cycle, as though the book were breathing.
"Morgana's been collecting for over a thousand years," I said, watching Kara's eyes track upward, her mouth slightly open. "Some of these were rescued from the Library of Alexandria before it burned. Some were stolen from Merlin's personal collection. A few were written by people who don't technically qualify as human."
Kara floated. She drifted upward along the shelves, one hand extended, fingers hovering centimeters from the spines without touching.
"On Krypton, we stored knowledge in crystal lattices," she murmured, her voice carrying that distant quality of someone talking more to themselves than to their audience. "An entire civilization's accumulated wisdom compressed into structures you could hold in your palm. When the planet died, most of it was lost. The Fortress has fragments, but..." She trailed off. Her fingers curled into a fist at her side. "I've never seen this many physical books in one place. It's so inefficient. And so beautiful."
Something in my chest did the warm, embarrassing thing it kept doing around her. I looked away, studying a shelf of particularly volatile-looking potion texts, and said nothing.
We moved through the house in a comfortable rhythm, Kara asking questions with the relentless curiosity of someone raised on two civilizations' worth of intellectual hunger, me answering with the particular pride of someone who'd never owned anything worth showing off before and was rapidly discovering how addictive it felt.
The conservatory, where Morgana had installed a collection of magical plants ranging from mildly poisonous to enthusiastically carnivorous. A Venomous Tentacula snapped lazily at Kara as she passed, its tendrils bouncing harmlessly off her invulnerable skin.
The training room, which I described as "a gym" and steered her through quickly because the floor was still scorched from yesterday's session with the Greengrass sisters.
The hallway where Bellatrix had hung portraits. Kara stopped in front of one and stared at it for a long time without speaking. It was the painting labeled MY DAUGHTERS, two stick figures with wildly disproportionate features, both rendered in black crayon with enormous green eyes that took up half their faces, standing beneath a crayon sky on crayon grass, holding crayon hands. The artistic quality was roughly equivalent to a gifted seven-year-old's.
The love radiating from it was unmistakable.
"Your… mother painted this?" Kara asked softly. "Or at least the scary crazy witch that thinks she's your mother?"
"She's... it's complicated." I looked at the stick figures. One had slightly longer hair than the other, that was supposed to be Morgana, I realized. The shorter-haired one was me. Bellatrix had drawn a tiny crown on Morgana's head and tiny flames shooting from my hands. "But yes. She did, and yes, I'm starting to think of her as my actual mother."
Kara's expression did something complicated. "It's nice," she said, with the sincerity of someone who meant it entirely. "Having people who draw pictures of you."
Nobody ever drew pictures of me, I didn't say. For eighteen years, nobody recorded my existence in any medium. No photographs, no portraits, no Christmas cards with my name. I was a gap in the world where a person should have been…
We reached a wide window at the end of the east wing corridor, and through the glass, the Gotham countryside rolled away in manicured green slopes until it climbed a gentle hill on the opposite side of a shallow valley. At the crest, partially screened by ancient oaks, sat another manor, darker stone, more angular, bristling with gargoyles and the kind of architectural severity that said money and solitude and do not approach without an appointment.
"Kara."
She looked at me. The afternoon sun through the window caught the fine golden hairs along her jaw and turned them incandescent.
I raised my hand. Slowly. Deliberately.
Kara's blue eyes tracked me in something approaching slow motion. I could watch her pupils dilate in real time. Her expression was something I didn't have a word for. The look of someone who had imagined this exact moment a hundred times.
My palm met her cheek.
Oh. The softness defied everything I knew about Kryptonian physiology. Her skin was impossibly, absurdly, unfairly soft, smoother than silk, smoother than anything my enhanced succubus senses had ever catalogued. Kryptonian cells under a yellow sun existed in a state of perpetual renewal, I remembered, never aging, never roughening, never accumulating the microscopic damage that gave human skin its lived-in texture. Touching Kara's cheek was like touching something freshly made, something that had never known friction or time or imperfection.
And underneath that silk was density. My fingers could feel it, a firmness beneath the give of flesh that didn't match human anatomy. She was stronger than steel. She could catch missiles and shrug off explosions and fly through the heart of a star. And right now, under my thumb, goosebumps were forming.
Tiny raised points spreading across her cheekbone, trailing down toward her jaw. My thumb traced lower. Found her lips. Pink. Slightly fuller on the bottom than the top. When the pad of my thumb dragged across her lower lip, her breath stuttered across my knuckles.
I was a succubus. I took what I wanted.
Kara Zor-El. Supergirl. One of the most desired women on the planet, maybe the most desired, if internet forums were anything to go by, and they were. I'd seen the fan pages. The thirst compilations.
The entire world wanted Supergirl.
And it was my soft pink lips that were about to be on hers.
I leaned in and kissed her.
I closed the final inch between us and claimed her mouth because that was what I was, a creature of desire, and this was desire given permission by proximity and the unmistakable desperation in a pair of alien-blue eyes.
I moved my lips against hers. Slowly at first, testing, mapping: the specific geography of her mouth, the way the bow of her upper lip fit against mine, the tiny hitch in her breathing when I changed the angle by tilting my head just enough to deepen the contact. Her lips parted, barely, just enough that our breath mixed in the space between, and I caught her lower lip between both of mine and tugged.
"Mmn—!"
The sound she made punched through my composure. Not a moan, something higher, more startled, a mewl of pure surprise that vibrated against my mouth, the vocalization of someone experiencing a completely unknown sensation and not possessing the catalogue to contextualize it. She didn't know how to be quiet during a kiss.
I did it again. Same tug. Same angle. Her lips were plush and yielding despite the Kryptonian density beneath, and the slight suction I applied made another sound spill from her, deeper this time, a proper moan, her chest vibrating with it, and fuck, the contrast between the innocent mewl and this richer, needier sound sent a bolt of heat straight between my thighs.
We broke apart.
Kara made a sound, a whine, high and involuntary and immediately mortified, the disappointed protest of a body that had just discovered something extraordinary and couldn't process its sudden absence. Her hand flew to her mouth, eyes going wide, horror and embarrassment flashing across her features in rapid succession because Supergirl does not whine and yet that sound had come from her throat without any input from her higher reasoning.
I licked my lips. Deliberately. Tasting the trace she'd left.
My tail twitched beneath my dress, not emerging, not quite, but straining against the base of my spine with the particular agitation it displayed when my demonic instincts surged. Down girl. Down. Or... boy. Depending on the situation.
My mind betrayed me with a flash of sense-memory: the cruise ship, the spare bed, Raven's body arching beneath mine, and my tail buried deep inside her, feeling every ridge and contraction through its hypersensitive surface as the pressure built at the base and the tip swelled and... Stop. Focus. Kara. Right now. Kara.
I pivoted back so hard I nearly gave myself whiplash.
"Can I kiss you again?" I asked. The words came out before the strategy behind them fully formed, but the instinct was right.
Her nod was tiny. A single dip of her chin, her eyes still wide, still slightly glazed, her lips parted and swollen and faintly glistening. She looked up at me through golden lashes, and the shy hopefulness of that expression, a goddess looking at me like I was offering her something precious, nearly unraveled me on the spot.
I leaned in and we began to make out. Properly, this time. My tongue slid into her mouth.
Not gently. I plundered her with the thorough, deliberate hunger of a succubus who'd been handed an opening and intended to use every inch of it. My tongue found hers, hotter than mine, everything about her was hotter, and stroked along its length, tasting more of that golden solar warmth, that impossible Kryptonian frequency. She moaned into my mouth. I swallowed the sound. Her hands gripped my hips hard enough that I felt the pressure in my bones.
"Mmph... wait... I..." Kara broke the kiss, gasping, her lips swollen and wet and devastating. She put one hand on my collarbone, gently, always gently, creating just enough space for words. Her chest heaved with breaths she didn't need, her cheeks flushed so deeply the pink had turned to rose, and her eyes were glassy with a desire she clearly had no framework for managing. "I'm not..." She drew a shuddering breath. "I'm not an easy girl."
I pouted at her. "No?" And moved my leg between her toned thighs.
"No. I... I need... if this is going to be a real... a thing... I need..." Another breath. "...d-dates. Real dates. Dinner and conversation and I want to know your... nnh, don't move your leg like that while I'm talking."
"I didn't move my leg..."
"You absolutely moved your leg. It wasn't there before!" She glared at me with as much severity as someone with a face that pink and pupils that dilated could muster, which was approximately zero. "I need... I want to know your middle name. And your birthday. And whether you're a dog person or a cat person, because that's actually very important and I'm... I'm not flexible on..."
"I don't have a middle name. The orphanage didn't bother. July 31st. And I'm a bird person." Something fragile shifted behind her eyes. The list of demands, the brave attempt at establishing terms and conditions, wavered, and underneath it, I saw what she was actually asking for. Not rules. Not protocols. Not the Kryptonian Science Council's compatibility assessments or formalized courtship applications.
She wanted normal.
She wanted to sit across from someone in a plastic booth and share fries and talk about nothing important. She wanted the human dating ritual she'd been observing from the outside for years, the awkward first conversations, the accidental hand touches over popcorn buckets, the slow accumulation of mundane knowledge that turned a stranger into a person. She wanted it because she'd never had it, because Krypton had been bureaucratic and sterile and then it was gone, and Earth was warm and messy and she'd spent every year since arrival saving it without ever getting to properly live in it.
I recognized that. It wore different clothes than mine, but the shape was identical. The ache of watching everyone else have something you couldn't name and couldn't ask for.
"Maybe a movie?" she continued, softer now, the demands gentling into something more like hope. "Where we sit next to each other and our hands accidentally touch over the popcorn and it's..."
"Adorable?"
"...a normal human dating experience, yes, and I know I'm not human but I want that, I want to be... to have someone who chooses to be there and doesn't treat me like a... like a weapon with a cape who's useful in a crisis and invisible afterward."
"I'll take you on every date you want," I said, and the words came out raw, stripped of the flirtation I usually wrapped around sincerity to make it less terrifying. "I'll commission a Michelin chef to cook us dinner on a rooftop and—"
"Amara." She was laughing. Not the mortified laughter from before but something warm and crinkled and real, her eyes bright with it. "I meant Big Belly Burger. And a walk in the park."
I stared at her.
"You, Kara Zor-El, last daughter of Krypton, one of the most powerful beings in the known universe, who could eat dinner on the rim of Saturn's rings if she felt like it, are asking me for fast food and a walk?"
"With you." Her voice went quiet. "That's the important part. I don't care where we go. I just want to sit across from someone who chose to be there."
Her words made my heart flutter. Damn, she was so beautiful and powerful and innocent all at the same time, it was hardly fair. "...Then that's what we'll do. Big Belly Burger. A walk. Whatever park you want."
"And a movie after?"
"You get three choices and veto power over the snacks."
"You're paying?"
"Kara, I have more money than some countries. I will buy you the entire Big Belly Burger franchise if the mood takes me."
Her smile was... I didn't have a comparison. It was sunrise, which was irritating because I'd literally just told her I wasn't a morning person. "That's great then! And yes, I know I won't be the only girl in your life, and that's okay. I see how busy my cousin is and always thought that was unfair to Lois and don't want that for my partner."
"So," I murmured. "How do you feel about..."
Something suddenly hit me like a fist to the sternum! My vision went white. My jaw clamped shut.
The wards.
I felt them dying.
Morgana's wards, the protections she'd spent an entire evening weaving into the foundations of this house, the work of a woman who had survived a thousand years of assassination attempts and had refined her defenses into something approaching art. Something was tearing through them like tissue paper.
"Amara!" Kara's hands were on my shoulders, steadying me. The tender warmth was gone from her voice, replaced by something sharp and focused and very, very fast. "What happened?"
"The wards," I gasped. "Something just... something tore down every ward Morgana put up. All of them. At once."
Kara's head turned. The movement was subtle, a tilt, a fractional refocusing of her eyes, but I recognized it. X-ray vision. She was peeling back the layers of the house, seeing through stone and wood and enchanted plaster to whatever was approaching from outside.
"There's a machine," she said. Her voice had changed completely. Not Kansas anymore. Not Kara. This was Supergirl, cold and precise and calculating threat parameters with Kryptonian processing speed. "Humanoid. Approximately six and a half feet tall. Moving fast, very fast, on a direct heading for the house."
"What kind of machine?"
Her throat worked. "It has a bat symbol on its chest."
"A bat symbol?" I didn't think Batman would be attacking us out of nowhere. "What color is it?"
"Red. Not black. Wrong color, wrong... everything about it is wrong. And Amara..." She swallowed. "There's kryptonite inside it. I don't know if i should get near that thing…"
The building suddenly shook as the robot reached the manor, and presumably blew a hole in the side of our brand new renovated manor. Dammit, we just got it all fixed up! The walls started shaking and I could hear cursing and booms coming from downstairs.
The sound of fighting hit me before my vision fully cleared. Below us, through the floor, I could hear it all. The distinctive crackling explosion of Kori's starbolts striking something solid. Raven's dark energy displacing air with a low, thrumming bass note that vibrated in my teeth. And underneath both, the most human sounds of all: the thud of fists against metal, the sharp grunt of a man hitting something that didn't give, the crack of what might have been furniture or might have been bone.
Dick. Fighting without his suit, without his weapons, without anything except the body and training Bruce Wayne had given him. Against something that had just torn through Morgana le Fay's wards like they were wet paper.
That mechanical voice cut through the chaos again, carrying perfectly through stone and wood with the clarity of something designed to be heard regardless of ambient noise.
"Target: Nightwing confirmed. Engaging combat and capture protocols. Non-lethal force authorized for current threat assessment. Recalibrating."
Capture. Not kill. Whatever this thing was, it wanted Dick alive. I didn't know whether that was reassuring or more terrifying.
I pushed off the wall and my legs buckled.
The floor tilted. My vision swam, the corridor smearing into a watercolor of dark wood and flickering blue flame. My hands were shaking.
The wards were connected to me. To Morgana. They'd been woven into the house's foundations. When those protections died, I felt each one snap like tendons being cut.
Kara's arms caught me before I hit the ground. "Are you okay? Can you stand? Talk to me."
"The wards are connected to me and Morgana. Them going down was like..." I searched for the right comparison and couldn't find one that wasn't just agony. "A shock to the system. A bad one."
A crash echoed from below. Something heavy and structural giving way. Kori screamed something in Tamaranean that sounded like a battle cry and a curse rolled into one.
My mind raced even as my body protested. How? How did a robot take down magical wards? Magic and technology operated on fundamentally different principles. You couldn't hack a ward any more than you could fireball a computer virus. They existed in separate ontological categories. Unless this thing carried some kind of anti-magic countermeasure, some artifact or device specifically designed to neutralize enchantments?
It had kryptonite. Which meant whoever built this machine understood that threats came in multiple categories and had prepared accordingly. Kryptonite for the aliens. Anti-magic for the witches? What else was it carrying? What else had its creator anticipated?
Footsteps pounded down the corridor. Multiple sets, moving fast.
Bellatrix came around the corner first.
She was still wearing the frilly pink apron over her black dress because she'd been in the kitchen, probably mid-preparation for whatever elaborate dinner she'd been planning to surprise her "daughters" with. Her wand was already in her hand, the movement so natural it might have been there before the first explosion, summoned by reflex honed through decades of violence. Her wild dark curls bounced with every stride and her eyes were alight, burning with that particular manic brightness I'd learned to recognize as Bellatrix at her most dangerous.
Someone had attacked her family in her home.
"Who?" she demanded, skidding to a stop in front of me, her free hand gripping my jaw and turning my face side to side with a mother's fury. "Who did this? How many? Which direction do I point the killing?"
Behind her, Daphne appeared with the composure of a woman who'd been training for a crisis—which she had been—with me. Her wand was drawn and held in a proper dueling grip, her ice-blue eyes already sweeping the corridor in a tactical assessment that would have impressed Moody if he still had a head. "How many hostiles?" she asked. "What's the entry point? Do we have a defensive fallback position?"
Astoria was half a step behind her sister, gripping the back of Daphne's silk robe with her left hand while her right held her wand in a grip that was technically correct but visibly white-knuckled.
"We're under attack," I said, straightening up, forcing my legs to hold me, forcing my voice into the sharp command tone Morgana used when she needed people to stop panicking and start acting. "One hostile. Some kind of machine. Extremely powerful. It took down every ward Morgana placed on this house."
Bellatrix's eyes narrowed. The delight hardened into something colder. Every ward? Even she understood what that meant.
"I'll handle it," I continued. "Daphne, Astoria, I need you both upstairs. Create a secondary ward line on the upper floors. Anything you've got. Barrier charms, alarm hexes, proximity curses. If this thing gets past me and Kara, I need the upper level defensible."
Daphne nodded once. She was already turning, her mind visibly cycling through the defensive enchantments we'd practiced.
"I am not hiding upstairs while my daughter fights!" Bellatrix snarled, her wand hand twitching with the particular agitation of someone who wanted very badly to curse something and was being denied the opportunity. "I didn't escape Azkaban and cross an ocean and learn to use a bloody toaster just to cower in a bedroom while some mechanical monstrosity—"
A flash of darkness erupted next to my face.
Something small and fast and desperately scared, displacing the air beside my left ear with a pop of shadow-fire energy that smelled like embers and midnight. Weight landed on my shoulder. Tiny talons, almost negligible, gripping through the fabric of my dress with the frantic strength of something very small that had just done something very big and was extremely alarmed about both the doing and the bigness.
The baby phoenix.
It pressed against my neck, trembling, its shadow-dark feathers puffed to twice their normal volume, its purple-black flame-tipped wings folded tight against its body. It chirped.
It had teleported. Its first teleport to make sure I was ok.
My chest swelled with a pride so fierce it momentarily eclipsed the pain and the fear and the fury. My baby just did magic. Real, proper, difficult magic. Oh, sweetheart. Oh, you brave, stupid, wonderful little thing. Your first teleport. I'm so proud of you I could scream.
But I couldn't scream, and I couldn't coo, and I couldn't cradle the tiny trembling body in my palms and whisper encouragement the way I wanted to, because below us another crash shook the foundations and time was measured in seconds, not sentiment. I scooped the phoenix off my shoulder with gentle hands. It chittered in protest, tiny talons trying to grip my fingers, not wanting to be separated. My heart cracked along a line I didn't know existed.
"Mother." I turned to Bellatrix, holding the phoenix out. "Take care of Nyx."
Bellatrix blinked. The manic fury on her face stuttered, replaced by something softer and more confused. "Nyx?"
"His name is Nyx."
"Nyx is a female goddess, technically, the primordial Greek—"
"I know." I placed the trembling bird into Bellatrix's cupped palms. "I like the name. And gender is a construct I stopped taking seriously around the time I grew a tail that functions differently when—uh—nevermind. He's Nyx. It fits."
The baby phoenix, hearing its name spoken directly for the first time, stopped trembling. Its tiny head tilted. Its dark eyes, deep as pooled shadow, fixed on my face with an intensity that shouldn't have been possible for a creature this small. Then it chirped. As if a piece of its identity had just clicked into place, a name finding its owner the way a key finds a lock.
Nyx.
Bellatrix looked down at the bird in her hands. The manic energy drained from her face so completely it was like watching a mask being removed "Hello, little Nyx," she whispered. Her voice was a sound I'd never heard from her before. Soft. Almost normal. The voice of a grandmother meeting a grandchild for the first time.
Nyx chirped at her and bumped his tiny head against her thumb.
"Daphne, Astoria." I met each sister's eyes in turn. "Protect Mother and Nyx. Ward the upper floors. If anything gets up those stairs that isn't us, I want it to deeply regret every decision that led it to that moment."
Daphne's chin lifted. Something fierce and proud settled across her aristocratic features, the look of a woman who'd been given an order she intended to execute flawlessly. "Nothing will get past us."
Astoria's grip on her wand tightened, but her jaw set with a determination that pushed the fear back behind her eyes instead of off her face entirely. It was still there. She was still scared. But she was holding, and holding was enough.
"Go," Bellatrix breathed, Nyx cradled against her chest, her wand arm free and crackling with barely suppressed violence directed at anything stupid enough to approach. "Go save your people, my dark little star. And when you're done, bring me back something to hurt."
I turned to Kara. She was already moving, at a slower speed so I could keep up.
The sounds from below had changed. The explosive crackling of Kori's starbolts had stopped. Raven's dark energy thrumming was gone. The human sounds of Dick fighting, the grunts and impacts that had been the most fragile thread in the auditory tapestry, were absent.
Silence was worse than fighting. Silence meant it was over.
We reached the ground floor.
The sitting room was gone. The room where we'd been sitting twenty minutes ago, where Dick had argued with Kori, where Raven had kissed me, was now an open wound in the side of the house. The exterior wall had been punched inward, stone blocks scattered across the floor.
Something stirred beneath a pile of wreckage in the far corner. A groan, muffled, followed by a flash of green light.
"Kori!" I crossed the room in four strides, and began pulling rubble away. Kara was beside me instantly, lifting the heaviest chunks of stone with casual one-handed efficiency.
Starfire emerged from the pile like a disgruntled goddess climbing out of a bad dream. Her metallic purple costume was torn in three places, her orange skin was coated in grey dust, and a thin trickle of green, Tamaranean blood ran from a cut above her left eyebrow. She was blinking rapidly, her green eyes unfocused, one hand pressed against the side of her head.
"Kori, look at me." I gripped her shoulders and steadied her. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head once, hard. The dazed quality in her eyes sharpened into something focused and furious.
"That... that horrible machine!" Kori's voice cracked with anger, her fists igniting with green starbolts that cast flickering shadows across the destroyed room. "It came through the wall and it was... it was so fast, faster than anything I have fought except perhaps Kryptonians. It identified Nightwing and moved directly for him. Dick fought well, he is always so brave, but it analyzed his combat patterns in seconds. Seconds. It knew every move before he made it."
My stomach dropped.
"What happened to Raven?" Kara asked.
Kori's expression darkened with a mixture of rage and something that looked disturbingly like guilt. "Raven tried to contain it with her dark magic: she wrapped it in shadows, tried to pull it into her dimension. But the machine... there was a pulse. Some kind of energy discharge from its chest. It disrupted her magic, broke her concentration. She screamed and the shadows collapsed and before I could... before I could reach her..." Her voice fractured. Her starbolts flared brighter, scorching the debris beneath her fists. "It grabbed them both." Kori looked at me with those burning green eyes, and the guilt I'd glimpsed hit full force. "The evil Batman robot captured Nightwing and Raven and ran off with them. I tried to pursue but it... it had some kind of concussive weapon, it hit me and I..." She gestured helplessly at the pile of rubble she'd been buried under. "I failed them."
"You didn't fail anyone," I said, and meant it, even as my mind was already sprinting ahead through implications. The robot had taken Dick and Raven.
Batman robot? The phrase bounced around my skull, colliding with fragments of memory. Kara had mentioned the bat symbol on its chest, red, not black, wrong, and it was only now, standing in the wreckage of my sitting room with dust in my hair and blood drying under my nose, that my [Cursed Knowledge] finally decided to be useful.
Fragments surfaced. But I remembered something. Batman building a contingency robot. A failsafe: the word itself felt significant, capitalized somehow, a proper noun rather than a descriptor. A machine designed to take down threats that Batman himself couldn't handle.
Or... threats that Batman himself became?
I couldn't remember the specifics. The fragmented nature of [Cursed Knowledge] meant that some things came through crystal clear while others were smeared and distorted, like trying to read a book through dirty water. What I did remember, with a certainty that settled cold and heavy in my gut, was that Failsafe, if that was what this thing was called, had been bad news.
And I was going to DESTROY that robot for daring to harm people I cared about!
Suddenly, two teenage boys ran through the hole in my wall before both of them skidded to a halt. One of them wore the classic Robin costume. The other was just in jeans and a t-shirt, and yet he looked familiar for some reason. Maybe I knew his parents or something?
"Shit," said Damian Wayne, and the profanity sounded strange coming from someone who looked like he should be worrying about algebra homework. "We're too late! It got away, Jon!"
Jonathan Kent, Superman's son?
He was looking at Kara. "Aunt Kara? What are you doing here?"
– Morgana –
The spotlight was giving Morgana a headache.
It was, she supposed, meant to obscure the identities of those seated around the curved obsidian table, each member positioned in their own cone of merciless illumination while the spaces between them remained swallowed in theatrical darkness.
Theatrical. That was the operative word. Because every single person at this table already knew exactly who sat in the other chairs. They'd known since the first meeting. Probably before. Vandal Savage's intelligence network predated most nations. Lex Luthor owned satellites that could read a newspaper headline from orbit. Ra's had an entire international operation of assassins and information gatherers. Queen Bee's pheromone-addled servants had infiltrated every government agency with a mailroom. And Klarion—well, Klarion was a Lord of Chaos who existed partially outside the fabric of reality and likely knew things about everyone at this table that would make their skin crawl, though he was usually too busy being a catastrophic idiot to leverage any of it.
The spotlights were pageantry. A performance of secrecy for an audience of people who had no secrets left from each other. It was the kind of self-important ritual that men who craved power but feared vulnerability invented to make themselves feel protected, and Morgana found it deeply, viscerally tedious.
Merlin would have loved this nonsense, she thought. All this dramatic posturing over a conference table. He'd have installed the spotlights himself and added thunderclaps for emphasis.
She sat perfectly still in her designated chair—third from the left, the position allocated to the newest member, far enough from Savage's central seat to communicate subordinate status without being insulting. She'd arranged herself in the specific geometry of a woman who was comfortable, attentive. The quiet new member. The magical consultant. The useful specialist brought in to fill a gap in their expertise, who knew her place and was grateful for the seat.
The performance was flawless because Morgana le Fay had been performing for longer than anyone at this table had been alive, with one or two exceptions—if Klarion counted as alive—and she had elevated deception to an art form centuries before these people's civilizations had developed written language.
Beneath the performance, she was cataloguing.
Vandal Savage occupied the center chair with the settled gravity of a man who had been sitting at the head of tables since before tables existed. Fifty thousand years old. Born in the Paleolithic, bathed in the radiation of a fallen meteor, rendered immortal through cosmic accident rather than design or merit.
Annoying immortal dramatic caveman…
"The League has been uncharacteristically quiet," Savage said, and his voice carried. "For the past eleven days, coordinated patrol activity across all monitored sectors has declined by seventy-three percent. Response times to criminal operations in Metropolis, Gotham, Central City, and Star City have increased by a factor of four. Satellite surveillance shows minimal Watchtower activity — power output consistent with standby mode rather than operational deployment." He paused. Let the data settle. "This does not match any known League strategy in our records." His eyes moved around the table, and Morgana felt the assessment pass over her. "Something has changed. I want theories."
"I'll offer a theory," Luthor said. "They're exhausted. The AMAZO incident in Star City pushed several key members to their physical limits. Superman took damage. Their magic user—" He waved a dismissive hand. "—the half-demon girl, Raven. She was the deciding factor, which means she expended significant power. And then the cruise ship incident, the sea creatures. Multiple Titans deployed, multiple civilian casualties. They're licking their wounds."
Wrong, Morgana thought immediately. You're not wrong about the exhaustion, but you're using it to explain a pattern it doesn't fit. The League has fought through worse injuries without reducing patrol coverage. Superman once continued operating with a kryptonite shard in his chest for thirty-six hours. Exhaustion doesn't produce a seventy-three percent activity reduction across all sectors simultaneously. Something else is happening, and the fact that you can't see it because you're too busy celebrating your profit margins is exactly the kind of blind spot that will destroy you, Lex.
She said none of this. She sat in her cone of unforgiving light and kept her hands still and her expression attentive.
"My operations have been largely unimpeded for the past week," Luthor continued, and here was the note she'd been waiting for. Ego. Always ego, with this one. "Three shipments that would normally have triggered League intervention passed through Metropolis harbor without incident. Two LexCorp subsidiaries completed acquisitions that Superman's reporter girlfriend had been investigating. I've made more progress in eleven days than in the preceding four months!"
And that doesn't concern you? Morgana kept the thought off her face with practiced ease. Years of matching wits with a man who can hear your heartbeat from orbit, and suddenly the board is clear? A mind like yours should be hearing alarm bells so loud they shake the windows. But you can't. Because the profit is too sweet, and men who define themselves by their enemies can't resist the taste of victory even when it's been poisoned.
He reminded her of Merlin. Merlin's fragility had cost Morgana everything she'd ever loved. She wondered, with detached curiosity, what Luthor's would cost.
Queen Bee spoke from her position two seats to Savage's left. "I agree with Savage. The pattern is anomalous and warrants caution rather than celebration."
"If I may—"
The voice came from the far end of the table, and Morgana didn't suppress her irritation quickly enough to prevent a fractional tightening of her jaw. Fortunately, the spotlights made micro-expressions difficult to read, and no one was looking at her anyway.
They were looking at Klarion.
The Lord of Chaos occupied his chair the way a bored teenager occupied a classroom desk.
"If I may," Klarion repeated, and then made a sound that could generously be called a giggle but more accurately resembled the noise a knife might make if knives could laugh. "Continue not knowing what I know. Because this is hilarious." He dissolved into snickering. High-pitched, nasal, the kind of laughter that crawled into your ear canal and set up permanent residence.
Savage's expression didn't change. "If you have intelligence relevant to this discussion, Klarion, share it."
"Where's the fun in that?" Klarion picked at something invisible on his sleeve, examining it with exaggerated fascination. "You're all so busy counting your pennies and tightening your borders that you can't see the—" Another snicker. "—the hilarity of the situation. It's like watching ants build a very impressive anthill right next to a volcano. Very industrious. Very doomed."
Teekl meowed. It was not a pleasant sound.
"Is there a point coming," Luthor said flatly, "or are we simply enduring performance art?"
"Oh, Lexy." Klarion's grin was too wide for his face, stretching in a way that reminded Morgana less of human amusement and more of a wound splitting open. "There's always a point. You just wouldn't understand it. Chaos is—" He made a sweeping, theatrical gesture. "—an acquired taste."
The table's collective attention moved on. It always did with Klarion.
The conversation moved on to other evil and dramatic topics.
She drew a measured breath.
I need to tell them about the ritual. About Trigon. About what's coming.
This was why she'd come today. Not for Savage's reports or Luthor's profit margins or Queen Bee's paranoia. She'd come to play the most valuable card in her hand—information about an apocalyptic-scale threat that none of them had detected.
The strategic value was considerable. By presenting the Trigon intelligence, she would accomplish several things simultaneously: establish herself as the Light's newest member, demonstrate that her magical expertise provided access to threat categories that their technological and political networks couldn't reach, and position herself to influence whatever response the Light mounted—steering resources and attention in directions that served her interests while protecting Amara.
She would need to be careful about what she revealed. The cruise ship attack had involved Amara directly, her apprentice had fought alongside the Titans, had been intimate with Raven, had been identified as a succubus by a demon lord.
None of that information could reach this table. These were not people she trusted with Amara's vulnerabilities.
Frame it as magical intelligence. The ritual, the pentagram, the summoning structure. Attribute the source to divination rather than personal involvement. Keep Amara out of it entirely—
Morgana bit her lip. Her teeth drove into the soft tissue of her lower lip hard enough that copper flooded her tongue and crimson beaded against her skin, because in the space between one thought and the next, something had reached across hundreds of miles and driven a spike of white-hot agony directly through the center of her consciousness.
Her wards.
Her wards were gone.
She had spent fourteen hours layering those enchantments across Black Manor's twelve acres, weaving protection into the earth itself, binding defensive magic to the stone foundations with techniques older than English. Every ward was an extension of her will, her power, her intent — each one invested with specific purpose and personal energy in a way that meant destroying them didn't simply trigger an alarm.
It felt like having teeth ripped from her jaw.
Amara is in that house. Amara, Daphne, Astoria, Bellatrix — they're all in that house and my wards are GONE—
She forced herself to breathe.
In, slow, controlled. Out, slower, more controlled. The techniques were ancient — breathing patterns she'd learned from a Tibetan mystic in the thirteenth century who'd claimed that the body's autonomic responses could be overridden through disciplate respiratory rhythm. He'd been correct, and she'd killed him afterward because his methods were too useful to risk falling into Merlin's hands, and now, seven hundred years later, his breathing exercises were the only thing preventing Morgana le Fay from launching herself out of this chair and tearing a hole through dimensional space in the middle of a Light meeting.
Think. You are a thousand years old. You have survived worse than panic. THINK.
The wards hadn't simply been overpowered. Overpowered wards felt different — like pressure building against a dam until the structure failed. This had been negation. The magical energy sustaining her enchantments had been stripped away in a single pulse, every ward collapsing simultaneously because the foundational magic itself had been annihilated.
There was only one class of weapon capable of that.
Anti-magic.
Specifically: her anti-magic.
She knew that signature. She knew it the way a mother knew the sound of her own child's voice, because she had created it — had spent eleven years in a workshop carved into a Norwegian mountainside, forging an instrument specifically designed to unravel magical defenses of the highest caliber. She had built it to kill Merlin. To strip away the enchantments that protected him, to negate the wards around his sanctums, to reduce the most powerful wizard in history to a mortal man standing naked before her vengeance.
The weapon had been stolen from her four centuries ago, during one of the periods of imprisonment that had characterized her existence since Camelot's fall. She'd been hunting for it ever since — it was one of the stolen treasures she'd been quietly recovering, the ones that had periodically taken her away from the manor and from Amara for days at a time.
Someone had found it first.
Morgana swallowed blood. Her bitten lip throbbed, but the pain was useful—an anchor point, a tether to the present moment and the political reality of where she was sitting. She could not leave. The thought was visceral and immediate and absolutely, inarguably correct.
She could not leave.
Departure now—sudden, unexplained, mid-meeting—would communicate panic to every predator at this table. Vandal Savage had survived fifty millennia by identifying and exploiting moments of weakness in powerful adversaries. Lex Luthor's entire strategic philosophy centered on finding the fracture point in seemingly invulnerable beings. Queen Bee built empires on the exploitation of others' emotional vulnerabilities. If Morgana bolted from this chair with terror in her eyes, every one of them would see it, catalogue it, and file it away for future leverage.
She has people she cares about. She can be hurt through them. She can be controlled. That was the conclusion they'd reach. And they would be correct. And they would use it.
Amara can handle herself. She is powerful, resourceful, and brave. She has her wand, her fire, her wings. Morgana believed in her apprentice and knew that Amara would be fine and handle things without her for a few more hours.
XXX
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