Aaron #2
Kade keeps her gaze on the empty street ahead.
“The witches and warlocks who manifest turn into the things humans put in their folklore—the monsters parents use to keep their kids under the covers at night. Past a certain point the dark magic owns them instead of the other way around, and it remakes them into whatever’s been waiting underneath. ”
“Why would anyone choose that?” I ask.
“You don’t understand the hold dark magic gets on you when you ride it too long.
” She steps over a crack in the pavement without looking down.
“It stops being something you use and turns into something you need. By the end you’re not driving it anymore—it’s driving you.
And when it runs out of things to feed on, it turns on you. ”
“‘The thing you swallow to feel whole is the same thing that hollows you out.’” Josiah says it pleasant and clear, still taking in the rooftops. “Chapter forty-one.”
Kade scoffs and ignores him, but her mouth tightens. “Think of the worst hunger you’ve ever had. Then imagine starving it down to nothing and finding out there’s something living inside you that’s hungrier.”
The street is empty. Whatever should be here—voices, footsteps, the hum of a living place—is just gone, and the only sound left is us breathing. The silence presses against my ears, heavy enough to feel, and every part of me wants to stay quiet inside it.
We keep moving, Kade talking low beside me. I hold onto every word, because each one shows me a side of my mother I never knew was there.
“Your mom tried.” Kade’s pace eases, and she keeps her eyes off me while she says it.
“Harder than anybody. For a while it even worked. They listened to Angie. Whole families walked out of this realm and made lives on Wintermoon. They started covens, put their kids in the Academy. Some took plots on the community lands, others found work out on the tourist island. They were our neighbors.”
My mouth’s gone dry. “So why’d they stop?”
“Because they started demanding she stay.” Kade glances at me.
“Rule them, be their queen. She’d been coming in to help where she could, a little at a time.
But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted all of her, shut behind these walls for good.
She wouldn’t give them that. So they shut the door. ”
I stop in the middle of the street, and Mara stays close behind me, still holding my arm.
“Wait.” The word scrapes out of me. “My mother’s been coming here? All this time? She never said a word about it to me. Not one.”
Kade lifts a shoulder, and the hard line of her mouth goes soft. “You were a kid, Aaron. She wouldn’t have—“
Josiah stops ahead of us.
He’s gone still in the middle of the street, his head cocked, every easy line of him turned to attention at a small storefront tucked between two taller dead buildings.
The whole front of it is furred over in webbing—thick gray rope of it strung corner to corner, and dark in the strands, brown-black and crusted, like something bled into the silk a long time ago and dried there.
We come into the market. The stalls stand shuttered and caving in, the awnings rotted down to ribbons. Every door we pass is shut, every window behind it dark.
“Do Carla’s children visit this realm?” Josiah asks, mild as anything, his eyes never leaving the webs.
Kade’s brow pulls down. “No. They never come here.” She follows his stare to the webbing, and her voice drops. “Sometimes they manifest into—“
The door explodes off its frame. The thing that comes through it lands square on Josiah and takes him down to the ground. Kade barks “oh, shit,” and I hear myself say it too. Mara’s hiss tears out of her loud enough to rattle the glass in the windows. Josiah laughs.
The thing used to be a man. From the waist up it’s a warlock, bare-chested, the gray skin pulled thin over a ladder of ribs.
It has the starved look of something that’s eaten everything already and is still hungry.
But its eyes are wrong. Too big, and gone solid black edge to edge, no white left anywhere.
Its mouth is already opening wider than a mouth is built to open, the skin splitting at the corners to make room for a crowd of teeth like wet needles.
And below the waist there is no waist. The torso runs down into the swollen gray bulb of a spider’s body, slick and veined and twitching, riding on a cluster of thin jointed legs that fold and stab at the street, too many of them, far too fast.
So that’s what Kade’s been circling. Whatever’s left in these people, it ends here, in something like this. The cold that drops through me isn’t all for the thing on the street. Some of it’s for me—because I know my own power, how it strains to get out of me, and how little it would take to let it.
Mara grabs a fistful of my shirt and hauls back, trying to drag me with her.
I plant my feet and won’t go. The creature rears up off Josiah, all those legs unfolding under it at once, and on them it stands taller than anything that size should.
It wheels around and goes straight back for Josiah—who’s already on his feet, brushing grit off his sleeve like none of it touched him.
It hisses—a wet, rattling sound from somewhere deeper than a throat—and that ruined mouth shapes it into a word. “Vampire.” The hiss drops lower. Its legs settle flat against the ground, and the black eyes drink him in.