We collapse together, tangled and slick and breathless.
“I don’t want you to go,” I whisper.
He pulls me close, his body wrapped around mine like armor. “I won’t. Not tonight.”
Outside, the wind howls louder.
From the shadows beyond the tree line, something watches.
But inside this cabin, there’s only us. And the fire. And the promise that this isn’t over.
CHAPTER 12
KURSK
The sun is pale today. Weak. Like it fears what walks beneath its sky.
I stand at the edge of Olivia’s cabin, one boot in the grass, the other on blackened soil. The trees here are wrong. Even the crows won’t land.
I kneel, pressing my palm into the earth.
Cold. Damp. Dead.
The Rot.
My jaw tightens as I rise. I’ve seen this before—back in the Ravenspine Wastes, when the Veil trembled and the wind spoke in backwards tongues. It begins small. Unseen. It grows like a sickness, and before long, the air itself turns against the living.
The Vorfaluka has seeded itself here. A foul root taking hold.
Across the clearing, a squirrel jerks across a branch, spasming mid-step. It hisses at nothing. Then throws itself from the limb with a scream that doesn’t belong in any animal’s throat.
I hear children on bikes down the hill. One of them cries out.
“Did you see it?” a young voice shouts. “The man with two faces!”
I turn sharply, but the kids are already riding off, laughing, unaware that their nightmares are now prophecy.
Inside the cabin, Olivia sips coffee with dark circles under her eyes. She hasn’t slept. I feel it in her silence. Smell the worry on her skin.
“I saw another patch,” I say. “More Rot. And animals behaving as if touched by madness.”
She sets her mug down. “I know. The neighbors’ dog bit through a chain-link fence. And three kids at school said they saw shadows in the trees. Not one, not two—three.”
I nod. “The realm weakens. The veil thins.”
“You need to go to the cops.”
“No.”
“Kursk—”
“No human blade, no badge, no lock or law will hold it back.” My voice rises before I mean it to, and I see her flinch. Damn. I step closer, quieter. “Forgive me. But your laws were not made for things like the Vorfaluka.”
She leans against the table, fingers tapping, mouth tight.
“So what do we do? Just wait until it decides to kill again?”
“It is not waiting. It isnesting. It’s shaping this world into one it can survive in. The longer it remains, the more your world will become mine. Or worse.”
