Page 103 of Haunt Me, Maybe

But the crows arrived first.

They slammed against the mill’s exterior in a black, battering avalanche, talons raking brick with ear-splitting screeches and red eyes flaring like embers from hell through every shattered pane and jagged gap in the roof.

They spilled across broken ledges in a writhing mass, blotting out the moonlight with twitching wings, and landed in such unholy numbers that the beams creaked and splintered under their weight.

Their shrieks burrowed under my skin like maggots. The stench of rot flooded the room and coated my tongue in decay. One lunged through the gaping hole in the roof, beak gaping wide—and the mill struck back.

A massive beam dropped with thunderous violence, slamming across the opening like a guillotine. Frozen wind howled in a sudden, punishing gale, ripping feathers and flesh and scattering the flock in bloodcurdling screams.

The survivors clung to the outer walls and circled with frenzied malice, testing every crack. But none dared to breach the threshold again.

I had no time to whisper my thanks to the mill or Wes. I had no breath to spare. Because he stepped through the doorway like a nightmare incarnate, as if the shadows themselves had birthed him. Gideon didn’t rush. He never had. Why hurry when doom was inevitable?

Impossibly tall, his frame was elongated by the light of the moon and cast a shadow that stretched across the floor. His face was a mix of features carved from marble and hate. He wore a black coat that reminded me of a shroud; it was immaculate despite the swirling dust, as if even filth was afraid to touch him.

But it was his eyes, those abyssal black pits, devoid of warmth, that peeled my defenses away layer by layer. His presence was a suffocating pressure that squeezed my chest, making each breath a struggle.

“Well, well,” he said softly, his voice a silken razor. I swore it was laced with the echoes of screams long since silenced, and the sound of it ripped through me deeper than any blade. It froze the blood in my veins. “There you are.”

My stomach lurched violently, bile surging hot and bitter into my throat. Fenn pressed against my ankle, lending me strength before I shattered, and I clung to my flare, willing it to steady even as my hands trembled.

“You’ve grown bold,” Gideon continued, his steps measured as he closed the distance to the circle’s edge with the patience of death. “Calling me instead of running.”

My pulse thundered in my ears. I grasped at my hatred for this monster, terror, the raw hurt he’d inflicted with the lives he’d stolen. I dug it up now and rode it like a warhorse charging into battle.

“I’m done running,” I said.

The words trembled in the air. Gideon’s gaze took in the circle, the blazing runes, the focused objects, and he dissected them with clinical disdain. Amusement twisted his mouth.

“You believe chalk and trinkets can protect you from me?”

I forced my chin higher, defiance burning in my chest even as fear clawed at my throat. The crows outside screamed in a rising, bloodthirsty chorus. Their wings battered the walls like war drums while Gideon’s hooks drove deeper.

Pain exploded up my spine in a lightning storm of agony that buckled my vision. Memories crashed in a tidal wave: my family’s guttural screams, the aunt’s cottage erupting in infernal flames, his iron hand closing around my fledgling magic like a vise, claiming it as his birthright while I begged and bled.

The red crystal at this throat, the one that held the magic of my entire line, throbbed. Greedily devouring the light I poured out. It glowed with stolen vitality that made Gideon’s skin writhe with something beneath the surface.

He smiled. “There’s my frightened girl.”

My rage detonated in a nuclear blaze that scorched away the fear.

“I. Am. Not. Yours,” I snarled, each word a weapon.

My flare surged brighter, wilder. The circle ignited fully, my light roaring waist-high in a shimmering, unbreakable barrier that cracked with the fury of a thousand suns. Gideon’s expression shifted. Not in fear, but interest. His eyes glowed with the dark, insatiable hunger of a void that could swallow worlds.

“Ah,” he murmured, almost reverent. “What power you’ve been hiding from me.”

The air trembled, thick with impending cataclysm. My knees threatened to buckle again, and the world narrowed to this moment. This was it. My final stand.

Wes

I was intimately familiar with death, had existed in the hazy limbo between breath and nothingness long enough to believe I understood power in all its raw, unforgiving forms. The kind that shattered bones, stole futures, left souls adrift like me.

I was wrong.

Fenn and Aven’s warnings were woefully insufficient. They hadn’t prepared me for this. For him. Gideon stood beyond the circle’s blazing edge, a distortion in the fabric of reality itself, as if the world bent inward to accommodate his presence.

His face might have once been handsome, the sort that could blend into a crowd or charm a stranger with a fleeting smile. But now? Now it was a mask stretched too tight over something…wrong. And his eyes—God, his eyes—were voids. Blackened pits that didn’t reflect the violet-gold light pouring from Aven.