Zzzt! Zzzt! Zzzt!Six bursts of lightning, faster than his own movement, struck the exact spot he had just vacated. Then they curved to track his sideways motion without missing.He leapt into the air at the last possible second and threw both hands toward the hole above. His fingers stretched rigid, every last drop of his internal energy collapsing into their tips. A narrow bolt of lightning fired from his palm straight up at the six.Five of the staffs swung in unison and slapped the incoming bolt sideways into the wall.CRACK!The wall there began to crumble too, bricks tumbling loose.Elijah dropped to his knees on landing and coughed up a mouthful of blood, his face draining of color. His vision blurred at the edges, and his legs had gone completely unreliable beneath him.He had seen this coming. Most of his spiritual energy had already gone into putting down one of the Seven Calamities tonight, and he hadn’t recovered any of it. His plan had been to be gone before the other six

The sun had barely risen over Brooklyn Heights the next morning when the city realized something had changed overnight. The name Elijah Langston, the Insolent Expert, had been circulating through every district of the city for days now, growing louder with each passing morning. But this morning, the name had stopped it's involvement to individual great families alone. The entire city was inside it now.The guests from the Stonewell welcome party had scattered across Brooklyn Heights through the night, and with them went everything they had seen and heard. The state of the Stonewell mansion and the sounds of violence they couldn't explainA few of those guests, the ones who had been close enough to the great hall when the doors opened, had caught the unmistakable sight of the patriarch of the Stonewell family on his feet, making sounds that no grown man should ever make. That detail passed from mouth to mouth through the night, growing with each telling. Each person added what their

Meanwhile, at the Stonewell Mansion....The building looked nothing like what it had been the previous day. The doors were sealed again. Every layer of security that had been stripped away to lure Elijah Langston in the night before had been doubled and restored. The guards standing at their posts took the posture of men who had been given instructions they took personally.But none of that changed what daylight now made impossible to ignore: the physical state of the mansion itself.Sections of the upper floor had collapsed entirely. The areas that had taken the worst of the exchange the night before had been reduced to rubble and exposed sun beams. The hole in the roof still opened to the sky above the great hall. The building that had once announced the Stonewell name simply by standing was now announcing something else.Deep inside the mansion, Peter Stonewell came out of his father’s bedroom and found the rest of the family gathered in the hallway. He looked at them all for a m

The great hall of the Ainsworth Mansion was quieter than it had been earlier that morning. Most of the family had cleared out. Only a small gathering remained seated around the table, with Grace at the head and Eleanor’s chair sitting empty beside her.Standing to one side of the room was a woman in a well-fitted navy business suit and her dark hair was pulled back. She was swiping rapidly through the screen of an iPad, her movements quick and slightly frantic. A line of sweat ran visibly down the side of her face and soaked into her collar.This was Yelena Mason, the new Senior PR Manager at Ainsworth Media. Andrew Stone’s replacement.“Is that what tops the headlines right now?” Grace’s fingers tapped slowly against the oak table, her eyes fixed on the woman.A visible swallow went down Yelena’s throat. “There is a considerable volume of material topping the headlines at this moment, Madam Ainsworth. The lead story shifts every hour depending on which part of the data dump the pub