The nightmare fetches came for three nights in a row.
They didn't target Erik again. They switched to Kaitlyn, twisting her protective fury into claustrophobic visions of being trapped, of feeling the bond stretch thin and snap while she screamed soundlessly. They found Maria's deepest fear—her children, blank-eyed and strangers—and Jonas's—a cold, magicless void where his fire had been.
The house grew gaunt with sleeplessness. Defence was no longer about repelling attacks, but about enduring a psychic siege that seeped through the wards like a chill fog. Alistair spent his hours reinforcing mental barriers, his own glamour growing thin with fatigue, the occasional glimpse of his equine legs looking less like powerful myth and more like the trembling flanks of a hard-ridden horse.
"She's softening us up," Jonas growled on the fourth morning, staring into a mug of coffee he hadn't drunk. "A full assault is coming."
"It is," Alistair agreed, his voice gravelly. He stood at the garden window, staring at the too-quiet woods beyond their hedge. "The dream-weaving is a prelude. It drains, it distracts. The physical strike will follow, and soon. We must be ready."
His idea of readiness was a drastic change in training. No more woods. They drilled in the back garden, a cramped, muddy arena. It was no longer about finesse, but about brutal, reflexive synergy.
"Erik, you are the eyes and the mind!" Alistair barked, his centaur's lungs giving the command a parade-ground volume. "You sense the opening, the weakness! Kaitlyn, you are the fist and the will! You strike where he directs! Do not think! Link and act!"
They practiced until they were filthy and panting. Erik would sense a target—a marked garden gnome, a swinging sack of sand—and instead of calling it out, he'd push a single, sharp vector of intention down the bond. There. Now. Kaitlyn, moving almost before the thought finished forming, would unleash a controlled burst of telekinetic force or a searing lance of conjured flame. A gnome's head would pop off; the sandbag would jerk violently on its rope.
It worked. It was ugly, efficient, and terrifying. They were learning to fight as a single nervous system.
The assault came at dusk on the fifth day.
The wards didn't chime. They shattered.
One moment, the garden was still in the violet twilight. The next, the back gate exploded inward, not with fire, but with a concussive wave of bestial rage that tore the wrought iron from its stone posts and flattened a section of Jonas's fortified hedge.
Through the smoke and splinters, it came.
It was not a minotaur of mythic Crete. This was something older, darker, dredged from a more Celtic pit. A Bull-Man. Eight feet tall, its body a grotesque tapestry of matted, coarse hair and corded human muscle stretched over a bovine skeleton. Its head was a shaggy, horned skull with eyes that burned with a sick, intelligent yellow hate. In one fist it carried a crude tree-trunk club, spiked with rusted iron. The stench of bog, blood, and rotten hay rolled off it.
Morwen had sent a battering ram.
"Dyad! To me!" Alistair roared, his glamour dissolving entirely. In the space of a heartbeat, the tired scholar was gone, replaced by a warrior centaur. His lower half was powerful, dappled grey stallion, his hooves striking sparks from the patio stones. In his hands, he held not a weapon, but a long, rune-carved staff of blackthorn.
Jonas was already moving, fire wreathing his hands not as warmth, but as white-hot whips. "Maria! Inside! Now!"
The Bull-Man charged. It wasn't fast; it was inexorable, a force of nature given malignant purpose. Its club swept down towards Alistair.
"Erik! Weakness!" Alistair bellowed, parrying the blow with his staff. The impact was a sound like a falling oak, and Alistair skidded backwards, his hooves gouging trenches in the lawn.
Erik's mind, sharpened by terror and training, went ice-cold. He didn't see a monster. He saw a structure. A knot of muscles in the left shoulder, overworked. A slight favouring of the right leg. A flicker in the yellow eyes—not just hate, but a directed, magically-bound pain. The left knee. The binding spell is anchored there. It's a weak point.
He didn't speak. He shoved the knowledge, the image, the exact vector, at Kaitlyn.
She was already in motion. A telekinetic grip, not on the monster, but on a half-buried, head-sized river stone from the rockery. She didn't throw it. She accelerated it along the line Erik gave her. It became a blur, a cannon shot of mundane rock.
It struck the Bull-Man's left knee with a wet, crunching snap.
The creature bellowed, a sound of agony and fury. It stumbled, but did not fall. Its rage focused on the source of its pain: Kaitlyn.
Jonas's fire-whips lashed across its back, searing hair and flesh, but it barely flinched. It was built to endure. Its club swung in a low, devastating arc towards Kaitlyn.
Alistair lunged, placing his body between the club and the girl. He took the blow on his upraised staff. The blackthorn, magically hardened, held. But the force did not. The shockwave travelled up the staff and into Alistair's body with a series of sickening cracks—not of wood, but of bone.
The centaur was flung sideways like a rag doll, crashing through the garden fence and into the side of the shed with a final, terrible impact. He did not get up.
"ALISTAIR!" Jonas's scream was raw fire.
The distraction cost him. A backhanded swing from the Bull-Man caught him across the chest. Ribs snapped. Jonas was thrown back against the house wall, slumping down, the fire around his hands guttering out.
The Bull-Man turned, its hot, rank breath washing over Kaitlyn, who stood frozen, staring at Alistair's still form. Erik was at her side, yanking her arm. "The eyes! Its focus is shattered! Now, Katie! NOW!"
His use of her childhood nickname broke the spell. Her fear crystallized into a white-hot rage. This thing had hurt her father. It had hurt Alistair. She didn't grab a rock this time. She reached out with her telekinesis and squeezed the air in front of the creature's face into a superheated, compressed point, then let it detonate.
The flash-bang of heat and force blinded the beast. It roared, swinging wildly.
"Together!" Erik shouted. He didn't give her a vector. He gave her power. He opened the bond wide and poured every ounce of his focused will, his analytical certainty of the creature's weak points—the knee, the strained shoulder, the base of its horn—into her. He was the guidance system. She was the warhead.
Kaitlyn didn't attack with one thing. She attacked with everything. A hailstorm of patio stones, a focused jet of flame from Jonas's guttering embers, a telekinetic push against its good leg, all striking in a synchronized, brutal symphony of violence guided by Erik's cold, streaming data.
The Bull-Man staggered, then fell to its knees. With a final, combined heave of their minds, the twins lifted the creature's own massive club telekinetically and brought it down upon its horned skull.
The silence that followed was louder than the fight.
Maria was already in the garden, dragging a barely-conscious Jonas towards the house. "Erik! Kaitlyn! Help me!"
But the twins were staring at Alistair. They reached him together. The mighty centaur was broken, his human torso at a wrong angle, blood flecking his lips. His eyes were open, clouded with pain, but aware.
"Good…" he rasped, a bloody bubble forming on his lips. "The link… you used it… not as a bridge… but as a conduit. Well done." His gaze found Jonas, who was watching, agony in his eyes beyond the broken ribs. "The training… is yours now, Fire-Heart. Remember… the box… in my room. For… the dyad. Keys… of blood."
His breath hitched, then stilled. The ancient, patient light in his eyes went out.
---
The aftermath was a numb blur. There was no calling the police. They dealt with the monstrous body themselves, with grim, magical efficiency under a moonless sky. They laid Alistair to rest in a secret, deep part of the woods he loved, the earth itself seeming to fold around him.
Two days later, moving like sleepwalkers, Maria entered Alistair's room to pack his things. It was spartan: books on folklore, geology, and advanced mathematics; maps with strange annotations; a smell of leather and stone.
In the bottom of the wardrobe, she found a long, narrow box of dark, oiled wood, bound with tarnished silver. A small, elegant note was tied to it with a black ribbon.
For the Dyad, upon the breaking of the first seal. - A.
She tried the clasp. It didn't budge. There was no keyhole. Examining it, her breath caught. The locking mechanism wasn't mechanical. It was a subtle, swirling pattern in the wood and silver—a blood ward. And not just any blood. She'd seen its like only once before, in the complex magical signatures that now intertwined her children. It required a blood sacrifice from both halves of the dyad.
With a heavy heart, she brought it to the kitchen, where Jonas, his torso tightly bound, sat with the silent twins.
"He left this for you," she said quietly, placing it on the table.
They understood immediately. Without a word, Erik took a clean knife from the block. He nicked his thumb, then handed it to Kaitlyn, who did the same. Together, they pressed their bleeding thumbs against the swirling pattern on the box's lid.
The wood drank the blood. The silver bindings glowed with a soft, blue-white light. There was a series of soft, precise clicks, and the lid swung open.
Inside, nestled on midnight velvet, were two objects. They looked like inert, polished rods of a dark, non-reflective metal, each about a foot long. There were no features, no carvings.
As the twins stared, the rods shivered. Then, they flowed. Like liquid shadow given purpose, they reformed in their hands.
In Erik's grip, the rod elongated, thinned, and shaped itself into a perfect, elegant longbow, sleek and impossibly light, a string of silvery light appearing between its limbs.
In Kaitlyn's, the metal pooled and rose into a vicious, beautifully balanced war hammer, its head sleek and deadly, the haft fitting her grip as if grown for it.
They both gasped, not at the weight, but at the awareness. The weapons weren't just tools. They were… attentive. A faint, intelligent hum resonated in their palms, and a whisper of understanding entered their minds: Think. Will. Form.
Erik pictured a short, balanced throwing knife. The bow melted and became one in his hand. Kaitlyn imagined a wide, tall shield. The hammer dissolved and flowed up her arm, forming a lightweight, formidable barrier of dark metal.
The only limit was their imagination, and their bond. They looked at each other, a spark of bleak wonder in their eyes. Alistair's last gift. Hunter weapons. The ultimate tools for the dyad he had helped create.
Their moment of awed discovery was shattered by a heavy, deliberate knock on the front door. Not the frantic pounding of an attack. An official, portentous sound.
Jonas and Maria exchanged a glance of dread. They weren't expecting anyone.
Maria went to the door, peering through the peephole. Outside stood a man and a woman in impeccably tailored, modern-cut suits that somehow still managed to look antiquated. They had the sharp, pale features and unsettling stillness of predators. Behind them, idling at the kerb, was a sleek, black Rolls-Royce.
The man held up a crested, obsidian-black card.
"Good afternoon," he said, his voice cultured, carrying a soft Welsh lilt. "We come on behalf of His Majesty, King Bertram of the Cŵn Annwn. We extend his regards, and his invitation. He is aware of your recent… troubles. He offers sanctuary, and the proper guidance the young Dyad requires to fulfil their destiny as hunters of the dark."
The woman smiled, a thin, needle-like expression. "He believes he can offer what your recent… casualty… could not. A structured path to power."
Maria's blood ran colder than it had during the Bull-Man's attack. The Cŵn Annwn. The spectral hounds of Welsh myth. A royal family of supernatural hunters, yes, but their reputation in the hidden world was not one of benevolence. It was one of cold ownership, of treating powerful beings as assets to be collected and deployed.
They hadn't just survived Morwen's battering ram.
They had just appeared on the radar of something far more organized, far more patient, and arguably, far more dangerous.
The siege had a new player. And he wasn't knocking the door down.
He was politely asking to be let in.