I sputtered; air sucked from the room as his grip on me solidified.
Cassidy’s decaying body dropped to the ground beside me, oozing nastiness from every pore. “This vessel was a rusty spoon, barely able to scratch through the layers of magic, even with draining the life from dozens of others. You will help me shred the barriers of space and time.”
My heart flipped over in terror as he surrounded me, a crushing weight on all sides. I fought, thrashing against the shadows, but it was like trying to push back the ocean.
“I won’t,” I refused, though it sounded weak and powerless to my own ears. How could I hope to challenge a god? Weren’t they supposed to be all-powerful?
“Your defiance is merely a spark against the storm,” Erlik whispered in my ear, cold and fetid air breezing across my face. “I knew the second I saw you the first time that you’d have to be mine. Submit, and I will make you the divine blade to cut through the realms.”
“Fuck you,” I growled. “I won’t be your meat suit.”
“Then gaze upon the cost of your futility.”
The darkness clarified into a window of blinding brightness. Bowman’s apartment, now filled with the chaos of movement as the entire team flooded the place. Angel’s voice, tight with fear, called my name. Remi scanned for magical traps, Wade had his back to a wall, weapon drawn. Bobby waved around equipment, using science to combat insanity. Ezra, Victor and his whole team, guarded the door. They were all here, searching for me.
Overlaying the entire room—etched into the floorboards, crawling up the walls, staining the very air—was a sprawling, intricate web of symbols. They glowed with a vicious, hungry purple light, a complex spell of such malevolent elegance it mademy stomach heave. It wasn’t just a trap, it was a siphon. A vast, invisible net designed to do one thing. Draw the life from every living thing inside the room and channel it directly into Erlik.
This was what they’d been doing with the spells. Not draining people to open the Veil, but to give Erlik power to open the Veil himself. And my team was standing in the belly of the beast none of them could see or sense.
They couldn’t see the marks, could they?
Fuck! No, get out!
Remi’s hands pulsed with light, his magic, I realized, not nearly as strong as the nightmare symbols, but they would be enough to accidentally activate the entire net.
“No,” I breathed, heart racing. “Please don’t,” I begged.
“Submit and spare them.”
I didn’t believe that for a second. “I won’t be your weapon to destroy them.”
“No?” Another window of light tore open in the darkness.
Ivan.
My heart leapt, then plummeted. He was safe, sitting at a table with the Murder Twins, laughing as he pointed across the room. For a single, blissful moment, it was just a normal scene. Then a faint, purple-tinged darkness seeped from the floorboards, coiling around their ankles like insidious smoke.
A heartbeat. That’s all it took.
Keanan moved first, his head snapping up, instincts screaming. He jerked out of his chair, lunging for Ivan. Sylas reacted a half-second later. It wasn’t enough. The smoke erupted, swallowing them all in a crackling storm of violent, purple energy.
“Your young attachment,” Erlik mused, his voice a predatory purr in my mind. “Bright, and full of potential life. Malleable.” The implication was a blade of ice in my chest. “He would make a fine vessel. Not as powerful as you, perhaps, but farmore persuadable. The choice is yours, Weaver. Which life will you sacrifice? All of them?” He hummed as he pressed me to the floor, darkness suffocating, as the frozen images of them hovered above me, threatening their deaths. “Nothing of them will remain when I finish. Not even a shade to flicker.”
The frozen images of my family—Angel’s determined face, Ivan’s terrified eyes—hung above me, a gallery of my failure. Erlik’s darkness crushed the air from my lungs, the hope from my heart. He was right. I couldn’t win. I couldn’t save them by fighting.
“Submit, and I will ensure their freedom.”
Lies.The promise was a poison, and my soul recoiled, throbbing with the certain agony of the nightmare to come, a horror I would be forced to inflict with my own hands if I yielded. Why didn’t he just force his way in? Overpower me? This thing was a god, and I was just a mortal with a few parlor tricks. What was he waiting for?
The answer struck me with a cold clarity. A forced possession would be a violent siege. My soul would fight him every second, a constant war of attrition that would shatter his new vessel from the inside out.
The truth clicked into place with horrifying clarity. Was that why Cassidy had rotted while still alive? He hadn’t been a willing vessel; he’d been a battlefield. He’d fought until his body was a decaying husk and his soul was a mangled, trapped thing, all while still craving the power that was destroying him. The power he craved would be a tangled, useless mess without my will, and he’d be left with another broken tool. But a willing submission would hand him the keys to my power, allowing him to seamlessly merge his will with mine.
I closed my eyes and let my perception change. The suffocating darkness and coil of the monster controlling it remained shadowed, but my threads and those reaching out intothe ether solidified. Angel, Ivan, the team, even my grandpa, all tied to me via a supernatural connection of life threads that spanned the cosmos and a million realms.
Not simply a necromancer, or demon-touched as I’d heard whispered in the work breakroom, but something beyond. More powerful than a Reaper, and yet limited by my human flesh. Perhaps that was for the better, keeping me from reaching for stars that would burn the universe like this monster of shadow and hunger wanted.
Nat had warned me of pushing too hard, and reweaving too much of anyone’s life, even my own, I supposed. But I understood in that moment that I had two choices. Surrender to the nightmare, or to them.
