Boston was cold as hell.

Blunder had the misfortune of coming when the city was hit with record-breaking lows, freezing winds sweeping in from the sea and plummeting the temperature into the negatives.

Blunder wasn’t about to complain, though. She could cheat.

A bit of fire magic was all it took for her to march around in her usual get-up as toasty as could be.

Blunder strolled through the alleyway, her oversized workman’s coat open despite the cold.

She liked the city well enough. Fine sights, nice people, and she knew a shop that served terrific sandwiches.

Blunder raised a sandwich to her lips: fresh tomatoes, smoked turkey, homemade mayo, and crisp bread mixing to produce heaven.

She sighed, the quiet sound lost in the hubbub of a city at night. Though that hubbub was quieter than usual, the cold chasing people into an early sleep.

She rounded a corner, the alley opening into an industrial district. She walked for a ways before a large warehouse loomed in front of her, its windows dark and stained with grime.

Everything about the building looked abandoned: rust on the walls, the aforementioned grimy windows, and not a light in sight.

If Blunder hadn’t followed the careless fools here, she would never have suspected it was a staging ground.

But she had followed the vampires right to their little hidey-hole.

She cracked her neck before taking another bite of sandwich. Blunder gave the thing an appreciative look. She’d need to go get another on her way back.

She walked up to the warehouse’s front door and knocked.

They’d probably noticed her by now; vampire senses were no joke, but now they definitely knew.

After almost a minute of silence, the door opened, revealing an absolute bear of a man.

He was probably pushing six-eight and had the kind of face that looked like you could break rocks on it. Assuming he was even moderately powerful, he could.

“Excuse me, miss. But this is private property.” His voice was deep but surprisingly refined, not at all belonging to a brute.

Blunder pursed her lips. A polite one.

“Well, can I come in?”

He blinked at her slowly as one hand shifted behind his back.

“No, I’m afraid not.”

She couldn’t see behind him, the man’s bulk completely filling the doorway, but she heard people behind him stop in place.

“Well, time for more aggressive diplomacy, then.”

The man blurred, and Blunder stopped time.

Well, not really. Mages couldn’t actually affect time, but her perception of time? Blunder cranked that baby way up.

The man froze, the sounds of the city froze, the sandwich she was slowly raising to her lips froze.

Her aura didn’t.

With a thought, she covered the entire warehouse, getting a bead on its occupants.

Two dozen vampires, all focused on her and the door.

Every vampire was currently frozen as if encased in ice, which gave her a rough estimate of their age and power unless some of them were faking it.

Very unlikely, but possible.

Blunder readied her magic, and then she let time speed up a bit.

The world began to move, much more slowly than normal, but it was moving.

The giant was caught in a quick pillar of wind, ripping him from his feet before he could react and hurling him into the air.

The pillar followed him, forming itself into a ball that pushed in on the man from every angle.

He turned into mist, but the wind was too strong, keeping him packed into a tight ball.

The man seemed to have some restraint or, at the very least, discipline. He might live through this, depending on what she found.

She finished taking a bite of sandwich.

She walked inside the warehouse. Vampires charged her, their desperate runs only barely above a fast jog to her eyes.

She waved a hand, the motion painfully slow. But her aura wasn’t.

A group of slower-moving vampires were pulled under.

She seized control of the earth around them and drove it down, burying them in a box twenty feet underground in a heartbeat.

The next group caught a blast of wind, sending them hurtling back.

Blunder sighed as she continued tearing through the warehouse.

She’d noticed the emblem on one of the vamp's coats, removing the little mystery of which house these fools belonged to.

With that question removed, this whole thing became wholly routine.

The emblem, a broken bone crossed over a bloodstained knife, belonged to the Beltok.

A screaming vampire reached her, and Blunder barely spared them the attention needed to nudge her aura.

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A blast of fire crashed over them, incinerating the vampire in a fraction of a second.

The Beltok wasn’t one of the great vampire houses tied to the Pact. They were rogues, or well, independent.

Blunder didn’t resent them for that. If someone didn’t want to be in the Pact, it was no skin off her back.

She used a wall of stone to crush a charging group of three. They’d heal, but it would take some time.

Where she did take issue with Beltok was their utter disregard for human life and contempt of concepts like subtly or restraint.

The only reason she’d been able to find this place was that someone had gotten peckish, and instead of contacting a blood bank or paying someone in the know for their blood, they had left five bodies in a dumpster.

And they hadn’t even properly covered their tracks.

Her fire split burned in her vision, the fiery red causing the air to warp and twist as she cleared the room.

There were plenty of reasons a faction didn’t join the Pact. Animinity, for one, a general desire to be left alone or a hatred for authority of any kind.

Maybe a strong sense of independence. The Pact didn’t meddle much with its members, but the possibility was there. An old race that had hung onto their culture for thousands of years didn’t want some other power to have any amount of control over them.

She could understand that. She could respect that.

And then there were the Beltok. Their desires were as simple as they were boring.

Wetting their appetites. Power, and fulfilling whatever sick little thought entered their heads. They didn’t want to be told no by anyone or anything.

And to top it all off, they were vampire supremacists.

A nasty group, all in all, and exactly the kind of fools that the Barrow King could recruit as mid to low-level soldiers.

Blunder rounded a corner, her aura telling her three vampires were waiting.

Stone-broke, bones crunched, and three vampires fell into torn pieces.

The house had a few heavy hitters. That was the only reason they had survived for so long while being this annoying.

But Grundy wasn’t in this warehouse, and neither was Mia.

These vampires were already dead. It just hadn’t gotten through their skulls yet.

Blunder moved towards the next group, but she already knew they weren’t vampires.

A metal door sat against one wall, its rusty hinges thick and sturdy, just like the lock and chain wrapped around its handles.

With a quick flex of her aura, she tore the door from the wall, metal shrieking in protest.

Four humans lay in the cramped closet, and only one was still alive.

The bodies were ravaged, clothes torn, and throats bloodied. The closet reeked, blood and filth and death mixing together in a toxic miasma.

They hadn’t been treated with a shred of dignity, even in death.

As she continued to annihilate the room behind her, Blunder reached out, lifting the survivor with gentle strands of air.

The woman was in rough shape, barely conscious, but alive.

Blunder clamped down on her fire split before it began to combust. She didn’t need reports of a bomb going off in the middle of a city.

She started walking, the survivor floating behind her.

The Barrow King was playing a game of cups. There had been signs in Boston, nothing definitive, but lots of small hints that he was planning something big here. And since one of the Knull clan's branches was located in Boston, it was a decent target.

But there had been over half a dozen similar hints all across the country.

He didn’t have the forces they did, but many of their assets were known. His were not. He could be anywhere in the country, if he was in it at all, and could strike at anyone.

They could only fortify so many places.

And the man was recruiting fast. The Pact had made plenty of enemies in its time, and they would flock to the Barrow Kings banner.

The longer this went on, the worse it got for them.

If Solomon could court the right player onto his side…well, he probably couldn’t beat them, not in a straight fight. But the collateral damage would be so devastating that it almost wouldn’t matter.

If the old powers threw down without restraint, little of this country would remain after.

With a crack of flame, Blunder killed the last vampire in the building.

She considered leaving the trio she had trapped underground in their little cell. It would take them a while to suffocate. Even young vampires could hold their breath for a good beat.

But they might escape and kill someone else.

She sighed. And she had to be careful with cruelty. These punks deserved it, but Blunder was old. And there were very few beings in this world that could stand up to her. If she let herself slide, even in tiny steps, those would compound.

Maybe not today, but in 10 years? 100? Eventually, those little concessions would build until she didn’t recognize the person she had become.

She’d seen it happen time and time again over the centuries. She’d had to put down friends.

So, she didn’t let the vampires suffocate to death. But she also didn’t spare them.

She reached down with her aura and crushed the box into a space no bigger than her fist.

The vampires died instantly.

That trick would never work on an elder; the rocks would break before their bones, but these weren’t elders.

She continued outside, carrying the woman in her wake.

She turned her attention to the vampire trapped in her wind ball.

He’d run out of magic at some point, snapping back into a human shape.

She lowered him but didn’t let him touch the ground.

“You were in charge of this outpost.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He’d moved the quickest when she slowed time. Not enough to move when she didn’t want him to, but still faster than the others.

The Beltok ruled by strength. “You were in charge. Which meant you let this happen.” She didn’t point at the woman behind her.

She didn’t need to.

Finally the vampire opened his mouth, his eyes burning with disdain. “You…are an affront to the natural order. Huma-“

Blunder snapped her fingers, and the vampire was covered in a wash of flame.

She sneered at the burning vampire, contempt roiling in her chest.

“An affront to the natural order? Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard that by spooks who think they can take what they want? Do you have any idea how many centuries I’ve had to put up with nonsense like this?”

Blunder seized the corpse with strands of air and hurled it back into the warehouse.

Without looking, she gathered the other vampires up into a pile. Red seethed around her, snaking over the ground and curling up the walls. With an effort of will, Blunder stopped the building from catching fire.

She contained her fury to the pile of dead vampires and lit it with a thought.

Flames licked the ceiling and cast dancing shadows across the walls and into the alley.

She didn’t let the flames burn for long, and when they were done, not even bones remained.

She opened up the floor and let the ashes fall, then she gathered their victims and laid them out.

She closed their eyes and adjusted them slightly. Let them have a shred of dignity.

A team would be on the way to tend to the clean-up.

Blunder turned and walked into the city, the survivor floating in tow.

She would get the girl to the hospital, and then it was back to figuring out this game of cups.