Page 112 of Death Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

It was smaller than I expected. Not a crown or a staff, not some dramatic movie prop. It looked like a carved stone heart, dark-green shot through with veins of gold. Its surface was engraved with tiny symbols that moved when you looked at them too long. The relic pulsed, slow and steady, as if it were breathing.

When Tegan reached in, it pulsed faster.

The gold veins brightened.

It knew her.

It wanted her.

Tegan’s hand hovered for half a second, like even she felt the pull, then she grabbed it anyway. The moment her fingers closed around the stone, the relic flared bright enough to paint the cave ceiling in green light.

My stomach dropped. The bond with the egg shuddered like it had been yanked.

Eve swore softly. Greyson’s posture snapped tight. Nishi moved one step forward, blade angled down but ready.

Tegan sucked in a breath through her teeth. “It’s keyed to my vault wards.”

Aurora leaned closer. “Can you hold it?”

Tegan’s jaw clenched. “For now.”

The relic pulsed again, and the air outside the cave answered. A low vibration rolled through the ground, like the forest itself had felt the theft and wanted to complain.

Greyson’s shield device, still sitting near the seam behind us, began to whine.

“That’s an alarm,” he said.

The cave mouth darkened.

Not because the sun moved. Dawn was still hours away. This was shadow doing something deliberate.

Then Dagna stepped into the entrance like she was arriving late to a party she expected to host.

Her robe was torn at the shoulder where Eve had burned her. The fabric around the wound looked stiff and blackened, like it had been seared into a permanent reminder. Dagna’s smile was still intact, which told me it hurt her a lot more than she wanted to admit.

Drathar came in behind her.

His presence filled the cave, heavy and foul, like the air itself took a step back. He looked pleased, which was never a good sign on anything that wore death magic like perfume.

“You opened it,” Dagna said, voice bright with false cheer. “And you touched it. I was hoping you would.”

Tegan tightened her grip on the relic, knuckles whitening. “You stole it.”

Dagna shrugged. “Borrowed. You are so sensitive.”

Eve moved in front of Tegan instantly, hellfire flickering at her fingertips like a warning. “Leave.”

Drathar’s smile widened. “Little flame. How devoted you are.”

Behind them, movement surged in the trees.

Not the slow stagger I had come to expect. Not even the fast, aggressive rush from downtown.

These were worse.

Shapes slipped between trunks, some too thin, some too large, all of them animated with the wrong kind of energy. A corpse with a deer skull where its head should be. A body that moved like it had no bones, limbs swinging in ways that made my skin crawl. A cluster of spirit-driven shells dragging themselves forward with that same poltergeist twitch I recognized from the hospital.

The forest had become a staging ground.