I tried the first one. It groaned open—a gutted bedroom, cobwebs draping everything like a burial shroud. Empty. I moved to the next. Empty.
Selena was already ahead of me, shoving open a door on the opposite side of the corridor.
“Nothing,” she said, her voice strained.
No baby. No Vex.
I shut the door and kept moving. The crying was louder now—raw, exhausted, the kind of wailing that came from a child who'd been screaming so long its voice was giving out.
My chest seized. Every second we spent opening wrong doors was a second that baby suffered. I glanced at Selena—her face was pale, her eyes bright with tears she refused to shed. She felt it too. That primal, gut-wrenching pull toward a child in pain.
Two doors down, something pulled at me. Not the scent this time—something deeper. Instinct. A gut-level certainty that made my hand reach for the handle before my brain gave the order.
I opened it.
A spiral staircase wound upward along the inside of a tower wall, disappearing into shadow above. The cries echoed down the narrow stairwell, amplified by the stone, bouncing off the curved walls until they filled every inch of the space. Freshfootprints tracked through the thick dust on the steps—leading up. Recent. Deliberate.
Vex had walked these stairs. Maybe hours ago. Maybe less.
This was it.
Selena met my eyes for half a breath—all the confirmation I needed. We moved.
Footsteps thundered behind us—the others following, their boots pounding against the spiral stairs, the sound echoing up the tower like a war drum.
I reached the top and slammed my shoulder into the door. It flew open, crashing against the stone wall with a boom that shook dust from the ceiling.
The room was round—a tower chamber, windowless except for narrow slits that let in the last dying light of the sun. The air was thick with the smell of sulfur and something sweeter, darker—incense mixed with blood. Symbols had been painted on the floor in a wide circle around a stone altar that sat in the center of the room. The markings pulsed with a faint, sickly glow, like something alive was trapped beneath them.
And on the altar, a baby.
My body lurched forward—but something stopped me dead. An invisible force, thick and suffocating, pressed against my chest like a wall of cold air. The keep itself was holding me back. Dark magic, ancient and vicious, pulsing from the stones beneath my feet.
I scanned the room. Every shadow, every corner, every alcove where a demon could hide. No Vex. Not that I could see. But the absence of him was worse than his presence—it meant he was either gone or waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
The baby’s cries shredded what was left of my composure.
Tiny. Wailing. Its small fists clenched, its face red and scrunched with terror, its fragile body writhing against the cold stone. Two black candles burned on either side, their flamesflickering an unnatural violet that threw twisted shadows across the walls. Next to the baby, a gold vase sat on the altar, its surface etched with symbols that seemed to writhe in the candlelight.
Vex stood behind the altar.
He was nothing like I expected and everything I feared. His form shifted at the edges—never quite solid, never quite still—as if the darkness in the room was part of him and he was part of it. But his eyes were fixed. Burning. Two points of molten gold that locked onto me with a recognition that made my skin crawl.
He smiled.
And in his hands, he held a blade. Curved. Black. Etched with symbols that matched the ones on the floor. It hummed with a sound I could feel in my teeth.
My eyes swept the altar in a fraction of a second—the baby, the blade, the candles—and there, resting on the edge of the stone, catching the violet light like a trapped star.
The shard.
It was right there. The thing we'd crossed an ocean for. The thing that had destroyed my life and dragged everyone I cared about into a war none of us had asked for.
Right there. Inches from a demon's blade and a baby's blood.
Vex raised the blade with both hands high above the screaming baby, the muscles in his arms coiling, the symbols on the floor blazing brighter.
"You're too late."
