At the fault line.
At my seismometer, now utterly, eerily quiet.
“You can’t just walk up to a woman at a job site and say, ‘Hi, I’m a Demon Lord thingy from another world and I’ve come to collect you,’” I tell him. “That’s not how this works. That’s not how anything works.”
“I can,” he says. “I just did.”
I snort despite myself.
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Yes.” A glimmer of something like dry humor flickers in his gaze. “Your world has many rules. Most of them are inefficient.”
“Oh my God,” I mutter. “You’re arrogant and weirdly literal. That’s great.”
“I am also running out of time,” he says quietly.
That hits something.
The tired lines around his eyes. The way his shoulders carry weight that has nothing to do with muscle.
The distant rumble I can feel more than hear—a resonance deep in the earth that doesn’t belong to New Jersey.
“What happens if you fail?” I ask, because I’m an idiot who needs to know.
His jaw clenches.
“Nightfall fractures,” he says. “The ore mines dry. The dream forges go cold. Hope dims across every world touched by our magic. Including yours. Earth’s children will sleep without dreaming. Its artists will create without inspiration. People will live without wonder. The SoulTakers want the silence that comes after.”
Silence.
Every instinct I have rebels.
“No dreams?” I echo. “No hope?”
“Only bare survival on dead worlds,” he says. “I will not allow that. I cannot. But I am not enough alone. I have never been enough alone.”
Something in his voice cracks on that last word.
Lonely, my brain supplies.
This massive, terrifying, too-beautiful man is lonely.
“And you think I can what?” I ask softly. “Fix that? Just because I can read a seismograph and have weird dreams?”
“The bond would give me what I lack,” he says. “Ground me where I split. Anchor me where I break. Your strength is not just in your hands, Alina. Not just in your degrees or your machines. It is in the way you stand when everything under you moves.”
My throat tightens.
He has no right to sound like he knows me.
I open my mouth to tell him so.
He exhales.
And the world changes.
At first, I think the floodlight on the nearest pole blew. The edges of him blur, crackling with faint light. The air shimmers, heat-haze on a summer road. The smell of wet concrete and diesel is suddenly overlayed with something else—rich soil after rain, lightning, stone dust.
