And she directs them toward my father.
He feels it immediately. I can see it in his face. The shock. The pain. The runes aren’t attacking him physically. No, they’re doing something worse. They’re severing his connection to this realm’s energy and starving him of the power that keeps him anchored here.
Instead of being real and solid, he’s becoming just a memory of something that once was.
“What are you doing?” he gasps. His form flickers. Becomes less solid.
“Starving you of everything that makes you real in this realm,” I say. My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Colder. More certain. More like the creature he wanted me to be. “This is the monster you made, isn’t it? Let me show you true starvation, Father. Let me show you what it means to hunger for something you can never have.”
The runes tighten around him like chains. My father tries to break free, thrashing against the constraints. But the students’ spirits hold him ruthlessly in place. The combination of their net and my runes is working. He’s weakening. I can feel it and see it as he flickers with translucence.
But it’s not enough. He’s still too strong. Too ancient. Even starved of this realm’s energy, he still has power from the Great Hall flowing through him.
“Phoenix,” I grit out. “Now.”
She nods. She’s been waiting, preparing herself for what comes next.
At her extended hand, the glass around the central atrium shatters and she steps into the center of the circle where the sacrificed body lies. Her bleeding hand leaves a trail of crimson droplets behind her. Each one glows as it hits the marble. She kneels down beside the quartered body of the last dead student and presses her bleeding palm against the cold flesh.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to the victim. Her voice breaks on the words. “I’m so sorry this happened to you. But I’m going to make it count, I promise.”
Then she begins to speak.
The language that comes from her mouth is nothing I’ve ever heard before. Not words, exactly. More like sounds that shouldn’t exist. They hurt to hear, digging deep inside my mind and reminding me of the cold dread of emptiness that comes when you hunger and are not fed. The endless craving that becomes your entire existence.
Phoenix’s eyes roll back in her head, showing only whites. Then the whites turn black. Completely, utterly black, so that it’s like looking into a void.
The temperature plummets even further. Frost spreads across every surface. The shattered glass. The marble floor. My own skin. I can feel ice crystals forming in my lungs with each breath.
“Phoenix,” I say. Alarm courses through me. “Phoenix, can you hear me?”
She doesn’t respond. Her body is still kneeling on the floor, hand pressed against the dead student. But something about her presence has changed. She, like my father, is becoming less substantial. More like the students’ spirits.
Like she’s not entirely here anymore.
No. No, this is wrong.
She’s going too far. Reaching too deep into that dark realm.
“Phoenix!” I shout, my voice cracking with fear.
Her head turns toward me, but the movement’s all wrong. Too deliberate. Like she’s trying to remember how to be human. When she speaks, her voice echoes like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. From somewhere impossibly far away.
“I can feel it,” she says. Each word reverberates. “The dark realm. It remembers me.”
Oh God. This is what she was before she clawed her way into this world. This is the hunger that drove her to make those blood bargains. The desperate spirit that would do anything to escape the cold. She’s opening herself up to it again.
“The dark is so cold,” she continues. Still in that echoing voice that makes my bones ache. “So hungry. And it wants me back.”
Her hand is still pressed against the dead body. It begins to glow. Not with light because that is not the right word. It is more like an absence of light so profound it creates its own presence. Like a hole in reality.
A hole opens in the air above the sacrificed body, too. Just a small one at first. No bigger than my fist. Through it, I can see nothing. Literallynothing. An absence so complete it makes my mind want to slide away from looking at it.
The dark realm.
Phoenix’s home realm. The frozen hell she escaped from.
And it is such a hungry, hungry darkness.
