“Ruin,” I correct. “Radiant kind. If the light woke in me, there will be echoes. Places it remembers.”
Dreven tips his chin. “There’s an abbey on the headland. Fell into the sea in the eighteenth century. The bones still hum when the sun hits them.”
“Field trip,” Dastian crows, already crackling.
“We do this quietly,” Voren says. “No Order. No witnesses. If the Devourer tastes you in the open, there will be nothing left of any of us.”
“Motivating,” I mutter. “Let’s go charge my invisible jewellery before something ancient decides to eat me for kicks.”
The shift from Marrow House to the headland is a cold slap. Wind howls off the Atlantic and slams into me like it has a grudge. The abbey isn’t even ruins anymore; it’s scars. Black teeth of stone jut from the grass, and the cliff’s edge shows fresh bites where the sea keeps trying to eat history.
I walk between the broken foundations. The air smells sharp. Clean. It stings the cuts I’ve collected today, yesterday, and the day before that.
Dastian whistles. “Moody. I like it.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Voren says.
I head for the broken apse, the suggestion of an altar now just a slab with lichen like old lace. The wind tears at my hair. My palm burns under the scar, a steady throb that syncs with the distant smash of waves.
“Do it,” Dreven says quietly at my shoulder. Not a command. Permission. Which is worse.
I plant my palm on the stone.
The light in my blood answers. It surges up, impatient and certain, and the world does that tilt I’m starting to loathe. The abbey wakes beneath my hand. Not to me. To itself. Sun that isn’t here presses against my skin. The stone remembers heat. It remembers a voice like bells. I am not bells. I am knives.
“Steady,” Voren murmurs, cold slipping over my spine to keep the surge from chewing through me.
The snake coils off my neck and drops onto the slab, metal striking stone with a sound like a note struck true. It’s small. It’s enormous. It’s a problem.
The wind shuts up.
“Right,” I say, to the snake, to the stone, to fate. “Terms.”
It lifts its head. It doesn’t have a mouth, but the thought lands anyway.
Mortality.
I take a step back.
“What did it say?” Voren murmurs.
I consider lying. I consider telling them that I heard nothing, but they will know I’m not telling the truth. “Mortality,” I croak.
“Yours?” Dastian asks.
“Are you mortal, Chaos Kid?”
He narrows his eyes. “Are you?”
His question lands like a punch to the head. Am I mortal? “Yes,” I rasp. “I can die. Ididdie.”
“But you came back changed.” It’s Dreven’s voice that says these words. Calmly. No fuss, just fact.
“I’m not willing to test that theory,” I grit out. “Are you?”
“Dying once was not enough.”
“Oh no!” I snap at the snake. “You don’t get to start talking, and especially about killing me.”
