Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives-Chapter 134: Forty Minutes

"Someone," Victor said, "start talking. Now."

The words hit the table like a fist.

Everyone looked at me.

I looked back at all of them — Victor's bloodshot eyes still sharp despite everything, Mariabell sitting straight-backed and composed in the way she always was when she was running calculations behind a calm face, Liliana with her arms folded and her chin up, the playfulness from earlier this morning burned clean off. Aisha with her hands in her lap, fingers laced tight. And Mephistopheles—

Mephistopheles wasn't looking at anyone.

Her gaze had gone elsewhere again. That particular unfocused stillness that meant she was reading something in the air none of the rest of us had the equipment to sense.

"One moment," I said to Victor.

"You've said that—"

"Victor."

He stopped. Looked at Mephistopheles. Looked back at me. Sat back in his chair with the expression of a man choosing patience over instinct, which I knew from experience was one of the harder things he did.

The room waited.

I watched Mephistopheles instead of the clock.

Her hands were flat on the ruined tablecloth. Her shoulders were still. Her violet eyes moved slightly — tracking something that had no physical location, something pressing in from beyond the walls of this abandoned town, out across the flat grey English morning.

Several seconds passed.

She came back.

"It's closer," she said. Precise and even. "Still disciplined. Still coordinated." A pause. "They've dropped the suppression."

"Why would they do that?" Aisha asked carefully.

Mephistopheles folded her hands. "Because whoever is leading them has decided there is no longer any point in hiding."

I turned that over quietly and said nothing about what I concluded from it.

Victor leaned forward. "And what does that mean for us?"

"It means we don't have long," I said. "So." I looked at him directly.

"You want answers. Short version — there's a Duke-level mage called Austin Astor. He's been trying to get his hands on me for months. His mana circuits are crippled and he wants to use my blood to rebuild them through a ritual called a Blood-Mana Transfusion. We've spent a few days setting a trap: I walk in willingly, let him run his ritual, except my blood will already be carrying a Cursed Blood Catalyst. The moment his broken circuits try to absorb it — it detonates inside his own veins."

Silence.

Victor stared at me.

"You're the bait," he said.

"Yes."

"For a Duke."

"A weakened Duke."

"That," he said, with great restraint, "is insane."

"It's elegant," Mephistopheles offered.

"Nobody asked you," Victor said.

Mephistopheles looked at him with the mild patience of something that had been alive long enough to find most things mildly amusing. "And yet here I am, being helpful anyway."

Victor opened his mouth, closed it, looked back at me. "And the mana pressure outside. The thing that isn't Austin. What is it."

"We don't know exactly," I said.

"What we know is that it's powerful, it's organised, it moves like a military formation, and it's heading here."

"So it could be anything," Mariabell said quietly. Mapping the problem, not challenging it.

"Yes."

"It could be hostile."

"Yes."

Victor looked between us. "And you're proceeding with the operation anyway."

"Yes."

He let out a breath that contained approximately seven different opinions. "On what basis?"

I paused.

This was the honest question. And Victor deserved an honest answer.

"When Mephistopheles first sensed the pressure," I said, "I felt something at the same time. Through a bond — one of the connections I have with people close to me. Something was moving alongside that thread. Close to it."

I kept my voice level. "That isn't proof of anything. It doesn't tell me who or what is out there. But whoever is coming is near someone I trust. And something that travels alongside that kind of bond..." I paused. "It's probably not here to make things worse."

"Probably," Victor said.

"Probably," I agreed. "Which isn't certainty. I know that."

The table sat with that.

"And if you're wrong?" Aisha asked softly.

"Then we deal with it after we've dealt with Austin," I said. "Because Austin doesn't wait. The window doesn't move. And a Duke with a ritual prepared is a more immediate problem than a probably-ally on a road thirty minutes out."

Victor looked at me for a long moment.

Then at Liliana, who said nothing.

Then at Mephistopheles, who returned his gaze with the particular stillness of something too old to be rattled by uncertainty.

He exhaled.

"Fine," he said. "Who is it. The person in the bond."

"One of my wi—"

I stopped dead.

My brain caught up with my mouth about half a second too late.

I looked at Victor.

Then I thought about Victor.

Then I thought about what I had been about to say.

Then I very carefully closed my mouth.

"...You shouldn't bother yourself with that," I said, in the most normal voice I could produce.

Victor stared at me. "You literally started a sentence."

"I misspoke."

"You misspoke."

"Yes."

"Valerian." He leaned forward. "Who is it."

"The operation is in thirty-three minutes," I said.

"That is not an answer—"

"Liliana," I said, not looking at her.

From my left came the sound of someone who was very much not laughing but was thinking about it very hard. When I glanced over, Liliana was wearing the smile of someone watching a fire they had absolutely no intention of putting out. "Mm?"

"Don't."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You were."

"I was simply sitting here, supporting my husband in a very difficult moment—"

"Mariabell," Victor tried.

"I don't know anything," Mariabell said pleasantly. Which was a comfortable distance from the truth, but diplomatically constructed.

Victor looked between all of us with the dawning expression of a man realising he was being collectively managed and finding it personally offensive. "This is deliberate. All of you. Deliberate."

"Victor," I said. "After this is over. I promise."

He stared at me with the suffering of someone being denied information he felt was personally owed to him — which, to be fair to him, it probably was.

"After," he said flatly.

"After," I agreed. With the full and entirely sincere intention of handling that particular conversation at a time and place that was significantly more survivable than this one.

Mephistopheles had been observing all of this with an expression I wasn't entirely sure how to read — somewhere between faint bewilderment and the precursor to something that might, in another life, have been amusement.

"Are we finished?" she said.

"No," said Victor.

"Yes," said everyone else.

She nodded once and stood. "Then we have thirty-two minutes."

She crossed to the far end of the table and picked up the obsidian vial. Small and dark, sitting in her palm like it weighed considerably more than it looked. She examined it for a moment without expression, then set it down and lifted the needle beside it.

The room changed.

Not loudly. Just — the quality of the silence shifted. Liliana's arms unfolded. Aisha went very still. Even Victor seemed to read the temperature drop without knowing what it meant.

"Sleeve," Mephistopheles said.

I pushed up my left sleeve and held out my arm.

She was quick about it. Efficient and precise the way she was precise about everything — uncapped the vial, drew the catalyst, reached for my arm.

And then she stopped.

Not long. Less than a second. Her fingers were already wrapped around my forearm, the needle already poised at the inside of my elbow.

And she stopped.

Nobody else in the room would have seen it. Victor didn't know what he was watching. Aisha was looking at my face. Liliana had her eyes closed.

But I was watching Mephistopheles' hand, and I felt the slight, unmistakable tightening of her grip. The smallest hesitation before the motion completed.

In all the weeks I had known her — through every manipulation, every calculated move, every dry comment delivered with the composure of something that had survived centuries of being the most dangerous thing in any given room — I had never seen Mephistopheles hesitate.

Not once.

Until now.

It lasted less than a second. Then the needle went in — clean, cold, precise — and the catalyst hit my bloodstream like ice water spreading out from my elbow, crawling up my arm and settling somewhere behind my sternum, quiet and dormant and waiting.

She withdrew. Capped the needle. Set it on the table.

She did not look at me.

"Forty minutes to integrate fully," she said, to a point somewhere past my shoulder. "You'll feel resistance at twenty. Don't fight it — breathe through it."

"And when it triggers?" I asked.

"You'll know." A pause that was a fraction too long. "Three minutes of discomfort. After that, Austin will have considerably more pressing concerns than you."

She turned and began organising the remaining items on the table, her back to the room, her movements as controlled and deliberate as they always were.

I pulled my sleeve down.

I didn't say anything about what I'd seen.

I filed it away in that growing collection of things about Mephistopheles that didn't fit the version of herself she showed the room — piece by piece, building toward a picture I hadn't finished yet.

One day, when this was all over, I was going to actually sit down and look at it properly.

"Alright," I said, turning back to the table. "Here's how the rest of this works."

...

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