Chapter Thirty-Three
My feet kicked up rotten leaves as I raced to the bridge. Behind me, heavy boots tore through a tangle of twisted branches and thorny brush. Robert’s men were after me. After the grimoire.
But I was faster.
This was muscle memory, years of track meets and laps around the field. My body knew how to run, even as my mind frayed, overflowing with panic and fear.
Two more gunshots cracked in the distance, their echoes dissolving into the night. I didn’t look back. I clutched the knife in one hand and the grimoire in the other. The book buzzed faintly beneath my palm. I told myself I was imagining things, though I didn’t believe it for a second.
Pain flared in my shoulder as blood soaked through the shredded shirt, tracing my spine like warm fingers. Each breath scraped the inside of my throat. My abdomen clenched, but I didn’t slow.
The trees ahead bent unnaturally. In the dark, I didn’t see details, just shapes in the dead moonlight. To the left, I caught a flicker of movement, a shadow of a shadow. It didn’t look human.
Two screams—one, then another—sharp and sudden, slicing through the trees behind me. Then, silence.
I pushed harder.
Now, all I could hear was my own ragged breathing and the relentless pounding of blood in my ears. No one was chasing me anymore.
But something else was out there. A presence. Silent. Invisible. A pressure, constant and tightening its grip. It drove me forward, deeper. I forced a swallow, but the bitter sting of bile still crept up my throat.
Something caught my foot, and I went down hard. The knife slipped from my hand as I crashed through the ferns, leaves and branches, landing flat on my stomach. Air rushed out of me in a helpless gasp. For a second, everything went still.
Plastered against the damp earth and trying to catch my breath, I listened carefully. No footsteps. No voices. Just silence pressing in from all sides.
I had lost them.
A sharp ache bloomed across my knees where I’d landed on tree roots. The pain was jarring but survivable. The ground beneath me shifted, almost like it was breathing with me.
I pushed myself up slowly, the grimoire clutched tight to my chest. My free hand fumbled through wet leaves, searching for the knife. But my fingers found something else. Something out of place.
Hard. Rectangular.
Plastic.
I froze.
Leaves and dirt peeled away to reveal a phone, screen cracked and caked in grime. But I knew the case. Even though the old football team logo was barely visible.
Lucas’s.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The woods suddenly felt too close.
I stared at the phone, too stunned to think. My brain couldn’t catch up. How had it ended up here, hundreds of miles from where Lucas was last seen? Had it been here the whole time, buried under the leaves, waiting? As if it had been placed there. As if it wanted to be found.
And now I had found it.
This was real. Lucas was gone. Something had dragged him into the dark, and now I had willingly followed it straight into its den.
Overhead, the moon broke through the canopy again, a lifeless eye framed by a mouth full of crooked teeth. My skin prickled.
The silence was so heavy that it felt deliberate, like the woods were holding their breath. I didn’t dare move.
Then, a sharp crack.
I spun toward the sound, my heart slamming into my ribs.
A figure drifted between the trees, peeling away from the shadows.
But it wasn’t Lucas.
It was my father.
He stood before me, wearing the same navy-blue suit and tie he’d been buried in.
Now it clung to his mimic’s frame, damp at the hem, as if it had just climbed out of the grave.
He was barefoot and disheveled. A thin scar ran along his knuckle.
But his face—it was unrecognizable, hidden behind a stag skull, the dead sockets glistening.
It stood like him, wore his skin, his suit, his scars, but it wasn’t my father, it wasn’t the man who had come to my defence so many times, who’d reassured me that nothing was permanent, that someday we’d be happy and unrestricted and free.
No, it was a memory someone else had dressed up and sent to mock me. To haunt me. To claim me.
The deity.
I scrambled backward until my spine collided with weathered bark.
The entity took a step forward.
"Why are you afraid?" it asked in a voice that was so much like my father’s that its timbre shattered my already weeping heart. It echoed in my head like a thought I hadn’t meant to think.
It came from nowhere and everywhere. I felt it in the roots of my teeth.
In the marrow of my bones. The tree at my back hummed when it spoke.
Another step forward.
"It’s not real," I whispered, eyes squeezed shut.
Сold breath on my skin, like leaning over a stone well and feeling the chill rise up from the dark.
"Go away!"
The temperature dropped and a breeze snaked around my ankles. I opened my eyes. In the exact spot where my father had stood, Nick now appeared—barefoot and shirtless, his pale chest exposed. His face was hidden behind the same ghastly stag mask, but I recognized his frame, his body, his tattoos.
He moved closer, each step slow and unnaturally deliberate, as if he were learning to walk in borrowed skin.
The mask’s empty sockets seemed to lure me with a magnetic force I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t look away.
"You came," it said, now in Nick’s rich, velvet voice, and my belly warmed, instantly comforted.
The mask leaned in from the darkness, thick and heavy like jelly. The skull hovered inches from my face. At this distance, I should have seen eyes, a glint, a flicker. But there was nothing. Just blackness. Like the mask wasn’t hiding anything at all.
Its putrid, sour scent reminded me of death, and I tried not to vomit. I turned away, unable to bear the sight as my tears flowed unchecked.
It’s not Nick. It’s not Nick. It’s not Nick, I repeated over and over, stuttering, desperate to drown out the crushing fear, desperate to wake up, to claw my way back to reality.
Its hand reached out slowly. I watched, transfixed, as it drifted past my face. Only when its fingers touched my back did I feel how cold and inhuman it was.
This was it.
My body trembled violently, my mind shutting down, emptied of everything but the raw, primal terror of dying.
I gasped as the fingers pressed into my shoulder’s open wound, where a fresh cut had torn through the burn. It pulsed like it had a heartbeat of its own. My vision blurred and distorted, the world around me trembling, like I was seeing it through shattered, grime-smeared glass.
The hand withdrew, and the creature wearing Nick’s likeness rose to its full height, towering over me. I watched as it dragged stained fingers across the mask, smearing my blood in uneven streaks. The fingers moved down its neck and bare chest, marking itself with my pain. Then it went limp.
It wasn’t looking at me anymore. It was staring at the grimoire clenched tightly in my hands.
I felt like I’d ingested something toxic, trapped in a psychedelic nightmare.
My thoughts were a tangled mess of what-ifs and maybes. What if I gave it the grimoire? It could spare my life. But what if it didn’t? What if this were all just a twisted game?
But then something shifted. A stark, terrible clarity cut through the haze in my mind. I realized I was essentially already dead. There was nothing left to lose. Nothing to go back to.
I lifted my gaze to the deity, still standing before me, waiting. The moon hung high above, an unblinking, cold eye watching everything like an unhelpful God.
"Take it," I said, forcing the words out.
It didn’t move.
My feet dragged, but I forced myself to stand and stepped forward all the same.
"Take it," I repeated, this time with more defiance. I wasn’t bargaining. I wasn’t begging. I just wanted it to end. I held the book out with trembling hands.
The creature seemed to shrink into the shadows. Frozen above us, the moon cast everything in an eerie, unnatural stillness. The black holes of the deity’s eyes had changed. They weren’t empty anymore. Now, they held a glint, orange and alive, like flames swaying in silence.
"Where’s Lucas? Where’s Amanda? Where are you taking us all?" I demanded.
I moved closer, no longer feeling fear, but an overwhelming sense of purpose. The deity either sensed my resolve or was simply summoning me deeper, for it took a step back, its eyes flickering like embers.
I didn’t care. I followed, agonizing step by agonizing step.
But the closer I got, the more it seemed to fade.
I could see right through it.
The deity wasn’t real.
It was never there.
I’d been so foolish. This thing, this spirit, was a projection, a twisted creation born from my grief and desperate need to make sense of everything. It was a figment of my broken mind, a reflection of my fear.
I had longed for it. I had called it into existence with my own terror.
But it had to be real, brought to life by faith and sacrifices. Robert had willed it so in exchange for his wants.
But the figure refused to hold its form, dissolving into the night. Only the orange orbs of its eyes were an indication of its presence.
"No, wait!" I pleaded, but the flames had already snuffed out.
I ran without direction, desperate to bring it back, to make it obey, to reverse it all.
The little flames kept drifting farther away, teasing me, disappearing and reappearing again in the distance.
Only when I drew closer did I realize what I was looking at.
I burst into the clearing, uncertain how I’d circled back. Two torches, the ones I had mistaken for the eyes, still burned, but the others lay on the ground, knocked out by either Robert’s men or Mitchell.
My hands were full—the grimoire in one, the knife in the other.
Wait.