The safe house settled into silence long before midnight. Guardians had left them with lanterns, bandages, and a thick ward-net layered over every wall and window. Poppy had checked each rune twice; Mingxi had checked them thrice, breathing through the pain in his ribs.
He lay quietly on the cot, and she could tell he was half dreaming, half listening, his fox ears flickering into view every time the wards hummed.
Poppy sat beside the door, daggers across her lap. She couldn’t sleep. Her moonlight, or whatever had awakened in her earlier, rested like a low-burning ember under her sternum. Warm. Steady. Too loud in its quietness.
Outside, the city was still. Too still. Even the lanterns didn’t flicker. Something in the air pulled tight, and Poppy’s fingers curled around her blades.
From behind her, she felt Mingxi stir.
“You feel it too,” she stated, finally looking back.
He shifted upright, golden eyes faintly luminous in the dim light. “The wards are uneasy. Something is pressing from the outside,” he said.
“Revenants?”
“Maybe, but not only revenants.” His voice went low. “This feels… sharper. Intentional.”
Poppy crossed to the window, feet silent over stone. She reached the frame and then stopped. The glass reflected nothing, not her, not the room, and not the lantern behind her. Only black.
A shadow deeper than shadow.
“Mingxi,” she whispered. “It’s here.”
She heard his breath sharpen and felt the air tighten, as if her lungs were drawing in a scream.
He pushed to his feet, pain flaring across his ribs. “Poppy, step back.”
She didn’t.
A crack split across the warded window—silent, delicate, spidering through the sigils etched into the glass.
Then another. Then another. The sigils flickered, guttered, and went dark.
Mingxi reached for her—too late.
The wards buckled. Not broken—bent as though something enormous pressed a hand against the safe house from the outside. The lanterns blew out. Darkness swallowed the room, and then…
A revenant’s hand emerged from the wall. Not breaking through it, passing through it, as though the stone were water.
Poppy wasn’t afraid.
She was furious.
Chapter 31
She lunged before Mingxi could warn her, steel slicing through the revenant’s wrist. The creature screamed without sound, maw stretching open as the rest of its body peeled out of the wall like a nightmare unsticking from the dark.
Another form rippled through beside it—hollow-eyed, teeth clicking.
Mingxi braced himself, breath ragged.
“They’re phasing through the wards. How—”
He didn’t finish. A third revenant lunged straight for him.
Poppy moved faster. Her blade drove upward, piercing the creature’s jaw. It convulsed, dissolved into cold dust. One down.
Two more surged at them.
