“Choose,” I bite out, closing the small distance, not touching, my power wrapping her like a circle drawn in soot. “What do we show?”
“Nothing,” she spits.
“Not an option. Lies need a spine.” I split a thread of shadow and feed it to her seam, a clean line between breath and bone. “Pick.”
“Quickly,” Dastian murmurs.
She flares, and the black ripple aims straight for her. Then she catches herself and shoves the blaze down, halting the Devourer’s progress. My heart is thudding erratically. We’ve never been this close to the fucking thing. It’s like walking on a knife-edge with a thousand other knives underneath, ready to slice you to shreds if you fall. The gold under her skin dims, condenses to a hot knot low in her chest. The hum drops another notch.
The wave hits the walls. The house groans.
I pull the room tight, folding every edge into the same lie: empty, old, boring. The Devourer’s sense skates along it, sniffing. It wants the lighthouse. I hand it a ruin.
Nyssa’s jaw is a hard line. Sweat beads at her temple, and the invisible crown hisses against my senses, braiding tighter through the seam. She’s doing it. She’s choosing.
The light in her pulls in another inch, painful and precise. I feel the click when she sets the rules: damp air, dead house, no feast. Shadow wraps it like lacquer.
The pressure prowls the perimeter. A long, slow scrape of teeth along bone. It pauses over her heart. I don’t breathe. She doesn’t either. It presses, tasting for the flare it knows it felt. I brace the lie tighter, lacquer over rot.
Something old and greedy drags its tongue across the seam in her chest. The crown around her soul hisses through my senses and threads another loop. Nyssa doesn’t flinch. She holds the light exactly where I told her to put it: low, mean, deadly.
A heartbeat. Two. The pressure slides off the walls like oil down slate. It prowls once around the house, slow as a hearse,then drifts toward the lane and thins into the night, not ready to devour this realm.
Dastian exhales an obscenity like a prayer. Voren’s cold eases a fraction.
I don’t let go of the fold. Not yet. “Don’t move,” I murmur.
Another breath. The last scrape fades. The house remembers how to be a ruin again and sags with relief.
“Done,” I say, and loosen the shadow from her, thread by thread.
She sags into the wall, and I catch her wrist. Her pulse jackhammers, then settles under my thumb. Hot, stubborn, alive. The gold in her dims to a banked ember.
Dastian flops back on a half-collapsed chaise and drapes an arm dramatically over his eyes. “That was a near-death experience. Let’s never do it again.”
“You think?” Nyssa murmurs, her face pale. “Was it really here?”
“In part,” I reply. “It wasn’t the real thing, or the realm would be gone, including us.”
It brushed us. If the real thing had crossed the threshold, there’d be nothing left to argue with.
Nyssa swallows, throat working, the ember under her skin steady but mean. “How long before it tries again?”
“Hours,” I say. “Maybe less if you flare.”
“So I don’t flare,” she mutters, pushing off the wall. She wobbles. I catch her elbow. She lets me without complaint. Small victories.
“We need to move out,” I murmur. “The longer you stand here in this realm, the more likely it is to come back and eat it.”
She nods. “Pantheon it is then.”
I nod and move us to the old crypt where the fissure is still active. Nyssa pulls away from me and goes straight to it to bleed on it. She is growing less defensive and more accepting of herrole. Only to be handed a bigger role that she neither wants nor knows anything about.
The fissure tastes her blood and opens like a sulk. The split widens with a sound like old bone grinding. The air beyond is black and thin, and it leans toward her like hunger pretending to be a welcome.
“Stay folded,” I murmur.
She nods once. The ember under her skin tightens, banked and mean. Good girl.
