The cloth-wrapped bundle in Ira’s lap begins to move.
She screams. Throws herself backward, scrambling away from the bundle—but it’s too late. The fabric tears. Bone fragments shift and click, rearranging themselves into patterns that shouldn’t be possible. And where there should be nothing but dead remains, two points of dull light flicker to life.
Eyes. Eyes that shouldn’t exist. Eyes that are looking directly at me.
“—they forgot to let us say goodbye.”
The voice pours through my throat with enough force to make me gag. I’m not channeling anymore. I’m beingused—a vessel for a presence so vast and hungry that Kellan Venn’s spirit is nothing but a whisper beneath its roar.
I try to break the rite. Try to sever the thread I’ve pulled, to slam the door shut before anything else comes through. But my magic is slippery, weakened by blood loss, and the Veil refuses to close.
Let go. Let go. LET GO?—
The corpse-bundle sits up.
Ira’s scream cuts off into a choking sob. She presses herself against the chamber wall, hands clawing at the stone behindher, fingernails scraping against rock. The thing that used to be her son turns its reconstructed head toward her with a grinding sound of bone against bone.
Run. Run, you stupid woman, RUN?—
But Ira doesn’t run. She stares at the moving corpse with the paralyzed horror of prey facing predator, frozen by the impossible reality of what she’s seeing.
Her son. Her dead son, reaching for her with fingers made of reassembled fragments.
I lunge forward, trying to put myself between them, but my legs won’t cooperate. The blood loss is hitting me now—dizziness, nausea, the edges of my vision going gray. I crash to my hands and knees on the stone floor, gasping.
The candle goes out.
Darkness swallows the chamber. Complete. Absolute. The kind of darkness that has substance, that presses against skin and fills lungs and whispers with a thousand voices.
Those whispers rise now, pouring from the walls, from the ceiling, from the very stones of the crypt. They speak in languages I don’t recognize, words that predate human tongues, syllables that make my bones vibrate with frequencies that should not exist in the world of the living.
And beneath it all, cutting through the cacophony with terrible clarity, a single name.
Drokhar Stoneveil.
I don’t know that name. I’ve never heard it before. But the way the voices speak it—with hatred, with hunger, with the promise of reckoning—tells me everything I need to know.
Whoever Drokhar Stoneveil is, the dead want him. Badly.
“Find the Ashwalker.”
The words rip from my throat without my permission, my voice layered with harmonics that make the shadows themselves seem to flinch back.
“Tell him we have not forgotten.”
Ira screams again—a wet, gurgling sound that cuts off abruptly. I hear the snap of vertebrae. The rip of tendons. The soft, final sigh of a life ending.
Then silence.
The whispers fade. The presence retreats, sliding back through the Veil with the satisfaction of a predator that has made its point. My throat closes. My voice returns to my own.
I’m alone in the dark with a dead woman and the thing her grief awakened.
Move. Move, move, move?—
I drag myself upright, swaying, one hand pressed against the wall for balance. My other hand finds the doorframe by memory—I’ve been in this chamber a hundred times, I know every stone, every crack, every shadow that pools in the corners.
I don’t look back. I can’t. If I look back, I’ll see what’s left of Ira Genn, and then I’ll start screaming and I won’t be able to stop.