The whole world turned in a single moment.

Bain ordered her to Hoyle's side though she was already in motion, wrapping one powerful arm around the elder wolf's back, beneath the shoulder and pulling him upward. There wasn't time for words or niceties, only a few tentative, limping steps across the ruined, glass-strewn floor. 

[i]Silver.[/i] The dual scars on her back and her underbelly hissed with a phantom pain, remembered agony that burned like no other, she knew all too well. Yet even that pain was nothing compared to the horror on Aislinn's tear-soaked maw as the vampire all but dragged her away from her brother. Already bleeding from hundreds of little cuts - and now the cruelest of them all - Veti knew she could give precious little comfort, only the unseen, unspoken reassurance that her brother would not be abandoned. 

Through her tears, Aislinn's attention turned to Thad, shouting to him for rain, rain to reveal the assassins - the very instant she was opened up by an invisible blade. 

Semyon was already in motion, had been in motion from the moment he bolted back into the great room. The wight caught her gaze and he knew, the unspoken understanding passing between two soldiers as he took her place, some feet shorter but just as strong nonetheless.

Veti could barely bring herself to look to Reginald's stricken face, but she did. Yet again, Veti had no comfort to give, only steadfast resolve in her amber eyes, a tacit vow before she scrambled to Aislinn's side. 

One black-tipped claw turned crimson as she reached beneath the wolf's belly, over the gaping wound as, tenderly as she might a child, Veti rolled Aislinn over. "Please, let me, Mr. Bain," she somehow managed to choke before she rose. One arm was wrapped surely about Aislinn's shoulders, her massive head cradled by Veti's hand to her thickly muscled chest. The other was wrapped about her back and haunches and lifted easily to the younger wolf's underbelly, her long legs and once-wagging tail hanging limply. 

She had no shield for Aislinn but her arms, and a body as vulnerable to silver as any werewolf's, but Veti was not alone. The greatest strength of a wolf was always in her pack. The power that had first quickened the beast inside all those years ago thrummed through her body again, currents of sorcery wielded by her lover's deft hand coursing through her like furious rivers of fire and ice. Her brilliant lover, his mind the very match of hers, traveling alchemical and mathematical paths with a prodigious ease. Thad lifted his hands above his head with a cry that resonated to her bones, and conjured Aislinn's deluge. He was magnificent, and beautiful and by her side in an instant wielding a power that could still leave her breathless with awe.

The growl of Semyon's automatic pistol rumbled in her belly and, somewhere in the back of her mind, she heard Atticus' triumphant shout over the torrent's sibilant hiss across marble and wood and leather. Siya would come, burning Siya of the shadows whose true depths she doubted anyone had yet seen.

Veti whined softly in the back of her throat, gently nuzzling the top of the old wolf's head where she lay in her arms, comfort and reassurance that might be futile as whistling in a wind storm, but it was all she had to give. Amber eyes snapped to the sword-wielding vampire once more, her own welling tears camouflaged beneath her lover's enchanted storm.

"[i]Go.[/i] Please, lead us there Mr. Bain. Get us to the shade gates. I'll carry Aislinn."