The shape flickered, condensed, and for one heartbeat, I saw Catherine as she’d been: wild and scared, but brave. Alive.
She reached for me.
I reached back.
For the first time since waking in that grave, I didn’t feel cold. Not even a little.
The wind picked up, this time from below, cold and mean, whipping up the candle flames and bending the grass flat. The city faded, the sounds of Dublin peeling away until the only thing left was the wet, slow beat of my own heart.
Celeste’s hum rose to a shout. The ground started to tremble, not a proper earthquake, more like a muscle tensing so hard it threatened to snap. The air shimmered. The colors all went wrong—blue shadows, green light, the world leaching into sepia and then to white.
Scarlette’s pupils blew wide. Moab bared his teeth and laughed, a short, sharp bark. I felt the shamrock tattoo crawling up my arm, spreading, the veins beneath branching into new and ugly shapes.
Then Celeste screamed. “NOW!”
Reality tore.
The space between us split, a vertical gash opening from the grass to the sky, edge-to-edge with howling light. The wind roared, shoving us backward, but Moab locked his arms around Celeste, and Scarlette grabbed my sleeve with both hands.
Inside the split, colors danced, impossible and wrong. I saw glimpses: faces, rivers, armies in the rain. Fields burning, black dogs running across the sun. I saw Catherine, over and over, her hair wild and her arms outstretched.
Celeste shouted, “HOLD!” but it sounded like she was yelling underwater.
The rip in the world expanded, sucking us forward. Scarlette howled, Moab roared, and I just focused on not letting go. The world tilted, twisted, the sky above flipping upside down, and the headstones rolling like marbles on a sheet.
The wind changed direction and yanked us straight into the rift.
It wasn’t like falling. It wasn’t like flying. It was both, and neither, and it hurt so much my teeth vibrated in my skull.
We tumbled end over end, all sense of up and down destroyed. The hum of the earth became a scream, and I tasted smoke and blood and rain on my tongue. Everything I’d ever forgotten came at me in a rush: every fight, every touch, every breath I’d ever stolen or lost.
Catherine was at the center of it, her voice calling my name, her fingers curled in a fist that punched straight through the veil.
I reached for her. I missed, then reached again.
Time didn’t matter. Space didn’t matter.
Only the promise.
The last thing I heard was Celeste’s voice, far away, “Focus on her, Sully! Bring her to you!”
I did. With everything I had, I did.
And then the world went black, and the only thing left was her.
Catherine.
Waiting.
Toolie
Iwoke up face-down in six centuries of shit.
The first thing I noticed was the cold, then pain, then the thousand little agonies of a hangover weaponized by time travel. My mouth was stuffed with something that tasted like rotten moss and the back wall of a whiskey barrel. My ears rang with a high, synthetic whine, like the echo of the world splitting open.
I rolled over and tried to sit up, only to bash my forehead on a ceiling that seemed to have dropped about three feet since the last time I was conscious. The stones pressed against my back were slimed and rough. I spat, cleared my mouth, and found enough light to see that the floor was moving: a slick, lumpy river of water and other things running toward a black, grated hole. My hands came away slick and stained.
Above me, a single torch guttered in a sconce set just far enough from the bars to make escape a bad joke. I squinted. The bars were iron, twisted into shapes that meant business, andbanded every twelve inches with rivets the size of baby teeth. Moss bled down the walls in veins, feeding on a centuries-old cocktail of damp and despair. The stink was chemical and alive: human waste, black mold, the vinegar reek of old bodies packed in too tight.
