“Fine,” I say, scanning the vertebrae of doors again, listening for the one that hums with the Order’s stink. There. A narrow plank of a thing, plain as a lie, inscribed with a circle of thorns. The oath chamber. “Give it the night you swore yourself to them.”
She goes very still. “That’s not a night. That’s my spine.”
“It’s a leash,” I counter, quietly. “And it’s strangling you. Keep your blade, your skill, your rage. Trade the obedience. Let the realm take what the Order used to own.”
Her throat moves. She hates that I’m right. She hates that it will hurt. Good. The ward wants pain. Let it choke on something useful.
“How?” she asks, the word ground out between her teeth.
“Bleed a memory into steel. Yours knows the way.” I touch two fingers to the back of her wrist, letting the cold settle her pulse. “Hold the blade. Speak it. Don’t look away.”
She steps to the thorn-door. The runes crawl under the surface like brambles shifting in a hedge. She raises her knife and lays the edge along her palm where the cut has already knitted. It opens obediently. The steel drinks.
“My name is Nyssa Vale,” she says, voice hoarse and steady, eyes fixed on that mean little door. “I swore to the Order in a damp room that stank of incense and mildew. Cormac watched like he was measuring me for a coffin. Taye touched my forehead and told me I belonged. Finnian said ‘we will keep you safe’ and I believed him because I was a child pretending not to be.”
The blade hums. The door listens.
“I gave you everything,” she breathes. “I give you nothing else. Not my name. Not my spine. Not anymore.”
The door shivers. The thorns flex like a creature waking, then sink back into the wood with a wet sigh. The sigil flares once and goes dull, as if I starved it mid-meal.
The ward takes its price.
She sways. I’m already there, catching her wrist before she folds. Cold pours through the tether from me to her, bolstering the part I just made her carve out and offer. She inhales sharply, eyes wide.
“What did it take?” I ask quietly.
“The bit that flinched when Cormac frowned,” she says, grimacing. “The bit that said ‘yes, sir’ even when I wanted to say go fuck yourself. It’s gone.”
“Good.” I shouldn’t be pleased. I am anyway.
The obsidian frame unhooks itself from its own shadow. A seam splits down the centre with a crisp crack, and blackness yawns beyond, not absence but depth.
Dastian and Dreven are behind us then, and the air around us snaps back to the grim reality.
Nyssa shoots me a look that warns of my death if I breathe a word of any of this to them. Her secrets are safe with me. I nod, and she averts her gaze in acknowledgement.
Then, all hell breaks loose.
Chapter 39
Nyssa
The doorway doesn’t open so much as detonate. The seam splits, and a thunderclap punches the breath out of me. The corridor buckles, doors rattling in their frames like teeth in a skull. The hum turns into a howl, and the howling becomes voices. Hundreds. Thousands. All of them are mine and not mine.
“Company,” I croak.
They pour out of the dark like smoke given claws with shapes that wear memories like skin. I see Cormac’s frown on a thing with too many elbows. Taye’s prim mouth over a split mandible. Rynna’s laugh from a throat cut ear to ear. Training drills stitched into spidery bodies with blades for fingers. They rush us across the broken floor.
Dreven is already moving, shadows shooting out of him in ribbons that snare the first wave and shred them into ash. Dastian hurls a crackling arc that ricochets off nothing and explodes in everything. Voren steps in front of me, one hand raised, and the wraiths hesitate mid-lunge like someone pressed pause on a nightmare.
“They’re not alive,” he says coolly. “They’re appetites wearing your past.”
“They still look stab-able,” I reply, and oblige. My blade meets the nearest thing, and it screams like a whistle kettle. The runes on my steel flare, drinking whatever passes for its essence. It collapses into dust.
The floor drops three feet without warning.
I stagger. Dreven’s hand clamps around my bicep, anchoring me as a chasm tears open under the path like the realm has decided gravity is optional again.
