Chapter 43
My heart hammered in my chest, the word trap lingering on my lips as I struggled not to allow the panic to overwhelm me.
“Cassidy,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “You look like hell warmed over.”
He let out a wet, gurgling laugh that was nothing like the sound I remembered. “I missed your smart mouth. Especially having it wrapped around my cock.”
I threw up a little in my mouth. “The only thing rising on you is the stench.”
The wet laugh died in his throat, and in a movement faster than anything Cassidy should have been capable of, his hand shot out and clamped around my neck with a grip of iron.
He lifted me onto my toes as if I weighed nothing and dragged me close enough to smell his fetid breath on my face as he snarled.
I clawed at his wrist, vision spotting as the darkness collected around him into an overlay of familiar, yet horrifying, shadows.
“Such a mouthy little vessel,” a voice rasped in a ruined blend of Cassidy’s death rattle and something much darker. “A tool shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”
“I’m not the tool in this equation,” I choked out.
Cassidy tilted his head at an unnatural angle. Was he already dead? I swallowed hard as the shadows around him solidified into a silhouette of woven darkness. I knew even if I changed my vision to view the weave of him, he’d be nothing but shadow, using Cassidy’s decaying body as a macabre puppet.
“Erlik, I presume?” I wheezed, trying not to panic over facing down a god, or whatever sort of nasty demon-thing this was.
His grip tightened, and for half a heartbeat I thought he’d crush my trachea, then he shoved me away, dropping me to the floor like a broken doll.
I panted, rubbed my throat, and sucked in air.
“What’s the game here? Take over the mortal world?
It’s not a great place, I promise. Billionaire assholes suck the life out of everything. ”
The nightmare laughed, and Cassidy spattered blood and ichor across the floor with the sound.
“You think your tiny world matters at all? The realms beyond are limitless, full of tasty delights. The more I peel back the Veil like the thin skin it is, the more I feast upon the raw, screaming life beneath.”
Gross, and wow. This thing wanted to eat all the realms? “And when you’ve picked the bone clean? What’s left? Just you, alone in the dark, with nothing left to consume but your own bottomless hunger?”
“There is no end. Beyond the Veil lie countless realms, infinite dimensions screaming with life I have not yet tasted. I will consume your world, and it will make me strong enough to tear open the next. And the next. Your realm is not my finale. It is merely my next meal.”
“You’re a supernatural tapeworm and our whole realm is just the cosmic black butthole you’ve decided to feast on? Gross. Let me off this ride.”
“You mistake your part in this equation, little mortal,” the darkness grated against my nerves as he wrapped his shadows around me in a chokehold that vanquished any remains of light. “You are not a passenger. You are the engine.”
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 made my 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 far more 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 into the 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.
And really, that was no choice at all.
I wouldn’t be Erlik’s weapon, but I could make myself their shield.
An eerie calm deadened the panic, and I sank into the idea.
I refused to become the nightmare, and had instinctively protected Angel by restitching an old rune.
Why couldn’t I do the same at a larger scale?
There might not be anything left of me when this was over, but they’d all be safe, and that had to mean something. Right?
The vibrant tapestry of the world brightened behind my closed lids, and I could see it as easily as if I had stared at a video screen magnified to define all the threads.
My power knotted close at heart, but a growing pulse of strands led off into the distance, tying to my developing friendships and turning into family.
The connections shimmered like constellations, some brighter than others—the strongest two were Nox and Angel—Ivan’s not far behind.
I was held together by a thousand knots, a tapestry of memories, love, and will.
It was a staggering truth, a person wasn’t a solid thing, but a careful weaving of a million interactions, connections, and directions.
To unravel it was to unmake them. This was a power far beyond the necromancy everyone had feared.
I didn’t just command the threads of the dead.
I held the very threads of life itself, and I knew, with chilling certainty, that I could unmake it.
And the only way to save the lives woven into mine was to unravel myself.
I turned my focus inward, to the brilliant, shimmering cords connecting me to my world—to Nox’s warm silver, Angel’s blazing gold, Ivan’s bright, brave strand. I poured all my love, all my regret, all my hope into a final, silent message down those lines.
I love you, I sent, the thought sharp and stinging my very soul with tears. And I’m sorry. I’d have hoped to be stronger, to have learned how to stand and fight this shadow nightmare.