The roots withdrew the moment she left.
Not dramatically. They simply receded — back into the stone, back into wherever they had come from, the way borrowed things returned when the one who lent them had no further use for the situation. Austin straightened slowly, rolled his shoulder once, and looked across what remained of the nave.
The roof was open sky. The walls had cracked from floor to ceiling in long, clean fractures, the old stone splitting the way old stone split when something vast and very uninterested in it had passed nearby. The ritual circle between them had gone dark. The stained glass was gone entirely — not shattered, carried outward, scattered across the street outside like coloured gravel.
And in the space where the doorway used to be, Vanir Alucard de Transilvania Tepeș stood and looked at him.
Austin had read the file.
He had read every file.
