Levi couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak.
It leaned down.
Slow. Folding through itself, the antlers tilting, the curtain of hair swinging forward and parting around the long snout as it descended. The skull came level with Levi’s face, close enough that he could see the sockets weren’t empty — fog moved inside them, slow, layered, deeper than the bone that held it. Close enough that the cold of it was on his skin and in his mouth and behind his eyes, and his breath fogged against the bone and disappeared into the dark of the snout.
It whispered.
“Alone.”
One word, low and layered and wet, coming from a mouth that didn’t exist on a face that couldn’t speak, and it went in and stayed.
His vision tunneled. The skull at the center of the dark, the antlers framing it like a crown, his lungs frozen, his hands numb. At the edge of the tunnel — peripheral, catching only because his eyes wouldn’t move — he saw the staff. The long jointed fingers were tightening on it. The branch was shedding bark in slow curls under the pressure, the way a hand tightens on something it’s about to use.
The door behind him opened.
Asher’s hands gripped him under his shoulders and pulled, and suddenly he was out in the hallway. He blinked, catching a glimpse of the giant creature through the closing door, its formswirling, displaced by the air that had been let in. Asher yanked the door shut and just held the handle, breathing hard, his lock picking tools clenched between his teeth, as if he were expecting the thing on the other side to start pulling.
Nothing happened.
Asher stepped away from the door and spit out the lock picks as he dropped beside Levi and pulled him close. He pressed his face against Levi’s hair, his chest still heaving, running his hands running over Levi’s arms. “You’re freezing baby.”
Levi breathed. Each breath pulled more of the weight out of his chest.
His own thoughts came back slowly, and strangely his mind decided to focus on the lockpicks. “You still have those?” he croaked.
“I always keep them in my boots.” Asher huffed a laugh against him. “Did that thing touch you?”
“No. It talked to me.”
Asher’s arms tightened. “What did it say?”
Levi closed his eyes. The word was still in his chest, smaller now but present. “It saidalone.”
Asher held him, his arms not loosening, the hallway returning to that eerie quiet as the ringing in Levi’s ears faded. “You’re not,” he whispered. “You’re not alone. You have me. You’ll always have me.”
Levi’s hand found Asher’s wrist and held it, using the heartbeat under his fingers to steady himself as he tried to force the feeling to fade. It didn’t fade all the way.
They sat there for a while. Then Levi said, “We need to seal the building. Every window. Every vent. Every crack. There was duct tape in the supply closet.” He gestured at the door, at himself. “If it can’t get in, it can’t do that.”
“Okay,” Asher said, stroking his hair. “Okay. We seal it.”
That’s one rule we have to follow. That’s enough to start.
19
Secret Level Unlocked: Date Night
Theysealedthebuildingin an hour and forty minutes. Any door that was already closed stayed that way, sealed along the door even if a gap wasn’t visible. Windows, latches, vents, even the outlets got a layer of duct tape from the box in the supply closet.
Door by door, room by room. They moved through the second floor the way they’d moved through the Daedalus and the sanitarium: Asher in front, Levi behind, the work splitting itself between them without discussion.
I like watching him work.
The thought was there before he could stop it. Asher was good at violence and good at sealing out despair fog, and both did the same thing to Levi’s chest.
Not thinking about that right now.
When they came back downstairs, the lounge was the same as they’d left it — Tyler in the armchair facing the fire, blank, theothers arranged around him like they were guarding a body that hadn’t finished dying. Asher set the box of duct tape on the bar.
