The silence broke all at once.
Glass shattered somewhere on the pack house's eastern side, and I felt the whole room tense in unison, gammas already moving toward the sound before the echo had finished traveling. Kael's grip tightened around my hand, and beside me, Amara's light had already begun to gather, silver and sharp, no longer the slow, offered warmth of the assembly hall but something faster, harder-edged, built for exactly this.
"Stay together," Thorne called, his voice cutting across the room with an authority I hadn't heard from him before, the particular command of someone who'd spent a lifetime studying exactly this moment even though he'd never lived through it himself. "Whatever comes through those doors, do not let them draw you apart. That's what they want. That's the o
