Chapter 13 Harlow
Harlow
Skye is still shaking when Dante finds us on the sanctuary grounds.
I'm holding him upright, my arms locked around his waist, his body trembling with the aftershock of crossing between realms. The death realm leaves marks on the living that take time to fade, and Skye's whole system is fighting to readjust to a world with color and sound and warmth.
He'll be fine. He just needs a few hours to stabilize.
Dante comes running across the courtyard with his staff in one hand and divine light blazing in the other, and the relief on his face when he recognizes us lasts about two seconds before it's replaced by something much worse.
"How did you get inside the wards?" he asks, and his voice carries the particular tension of a man who has spent days watching his defenses fail from the inside.
"Death realm," I say. "Shortcut."
"The others?"
"Three days behind us. Maybe four."
He absorbs this with a nod that doesn't quite hide the disappointment. He was hoping for six. He got two, one of whom can barely stand. I watch him recalculate, adjust, accept, and I respect him for not wasting time on complaints. "I need to show you something," he says.
I help Skye to a bench in the courtyard and he waves me off with the stubborn insistence of someone who hates being carried. "Go," he says. "I'll catch up when the ground stops moving."
Dante leads me through the sanctuary, and I see the corruption before he points it out. My death-sight reads it differently than living eyes would. Where Dante sees shadows clinging to walls and pooling in corners, I see something closer to the truth.
The corruption is a network of tendrils extending from somewhere deep below the sanctuary, threading through the stone, the wards, the earth itself.
Each tendril pulses with a faint signature that I recognize from the death realm: consumed essence, digested and repurposed, the remnants of people who were eaten alive and turned into fuel.
The sanctuary is being consumed the same way Dmitri consumes individuals, slowly, from the roots up, dissolving what's there and replacing it with himself.
"It started days ago," Dante says as we walk through the eastern corridor.
Students press against the walls as we pass, their eyes wide and frightened.
Some of them have the glazed look I've seen on spirits who've been too long in the death realm, a detachment from their own bodies that makes my stomach turn.
"Nightmares first, then the aggression, then the shadows became visible. "
"It's not shadows," I say. "It's him. His essence, growing through the foundation. He's been feeding on the sanctuary the way he feeds on people."
Dante stops walking. "You can see the mechanism?"
"I can see all of it." I press my hand against the corridor wall and the tendrils recoil from my death-touch, pulling back a few inches before slowly creeping forward again.
"The corruption is rooted somewhere below us.
Deep. There's a massive concentration of consumed essence directly underneath the sanctuary, and every tendril connects back to it. "
"The old tunnels," Dante says quietly. "I found the entrance last week. I didn't go down."
"Why not?"
"Because I could feel what was waiting, and I knew I couldn't face it alone.
" He meets my eyes, and the exhaustion in his face makes him look mortal in a way that demigods shouldn't.
"My power has been holding the worst of it back, but I'm burning through reserves I can't replenish.
Another week and I won't be able to maintain the barriers. "
We don't have a week. We might not have three days, and the weight of that settles between us without either of us needing to say it.
Skye finds us in the eastern corridor. He's still pale and there's a tightness around his eyes that tells me the death realm hasn't fully let go of him, but he's walking on his own and his aura has steadied.
"You're good?" I ask.
"I'll manage." He lets out a small breath that's almost a laugh. "But I can't say I want to do that again."
"I'll find a different shortcut next time."
"Please do." He leans in and presses a kiss to my cheek, and then turns to Dante. "Show me everything."
Dante gives him the condensed version while the three of us walk the eastern wing together. Skye listens without interrupting, his expression getting grimmer with every corridor. When Dante finishes, Skye looks at me. "The students," he says. "How bad?"
"We need to check them together. You talk to them because they know you and they trust you. I'll read what your warmth can't see."
We spend the afternoon working through dormitories and classrooms while Dante returns to his post at the central ward anchor.
The corruption has touched almost every student in the eastern wing.
Their essences flicker with dark threads that don't belong to them, parasitic connections that feed their fear and aggression back to whatever waits below.
Some of them are barely affected, just nightmares and irritability.
Others have gone quiet in ways that frighten me, withdrawn into themselves, their life signatures dimming as the corruption draws on their energy.
Skye handles the students. He sits with them, asks how they're sleeping, touches their arms and lets his aura reach for theirs.
I stand behind him and read what he can't see: the dark threads latched onto their essences, the depth of the parasitic connections, which students are being drained and how fast. We develop a rhythm without discussing it.
He soothes, I assess, and between the two of us we get a clear picture of how much damage has been done.
A girl with water magic sits alone in a classroom, her hands pressed flat on the desk, staring at nothing.
Her life signature pulses unevenly, bright then dim then bright, and the dark threads wrapped around her essence tighten every time it dims. She's being drained so gradually she probably thinks she's just tired.
Skye crouches beside her and rests his hand on her arm. I watch his aura reach for hers, warm light pressing against the dark threads. Some of them loosen and fall away. Others hold tight, rooted too deep for a single touch to dislodge.
"What's your name?" he asks.
She blinks, focusing on him with effort. "Aria."
"Aria, we'd like you to move to the western dormitories tonight. Can you do that?"
"Why?" Skye glances back at me. I give him a small shake of my head. She doesn't need to know what I can see wrapped around her essence. "The western side is safer right now," Skye says. "Will you trust me on that?"
She nods without questioning it, and Skye squeezes her arm gently before standing. Outside the classroom, he exhales hard through his nose.
"How many like her?" he asks.
"She's one of the better ones." I keep my voice low. "Nine need to be moved tonight. Three are in worse shape than her, deep enough that moving them might not be enough."
"We move all of them and we keep checking on the worst three."
"Agreed."
We continue checking, moving through an additional seventeen students that afternoon.
I memorize their names and their life signatures and I add them to the list of people we are going to protect whether they understand what's happening to them or not.
Skye carries a different version of the same list, mental notes on which students responded to his bonds and which ones are too far gone for a single session.
Between us, we have a map of the damage.
It's worse than either of us wants to say out loud.
Liz's door is at the end of the eastern corridor, and the corruption around it is so thick I can barely see the wood through the dark threads.
They cluster around her room, drawn by something in her blood that resonates with the essence below.
Skye stands beside me and I can feel his concern through the bond, sharp and complicated.
I press my death-sight through the walls.
Her life signature is erratic, bright flares of fire essence alternating with deep troughs of something dark that matches the corruption's frequency exactly.
She's fighting it. Whatever is happening inside that room, she hasn't surrendered.
But the fight is costing her, and the intervals between the bright flares are getting longer while the dark troughs are getting deeper.
I knock. "Liz. It's Harlow. Skye's with me."
She doesn't answer. I wait, counting the seconds by the pulse of her life signature through the wall.
"I can see your life signature through the wall. I know you're awake and I know you're fighting. You don't have to open the door, but you should know that help is here."
Then, so quiet I almost miss it through the wood: "Go away."
Skye opens his mouth, and I put my hand on his arm. Not yet. Pushing her now will do more harm than good.
"I will," I say. "But I'll be back tomorrow."
We leave her door together. Skye's jaw is tight and his bonds are reaching toward the closed door even as we walk away, instinct pulling him toward someone who needs help whether she wants it or not.
"She's fighting," I tell him. "That's something."
"It's not enough."
"It's what we have."
In the courtyard, the sun is setting over a sanctuary that used to feel like home and now feels like something wearing home's face. We sit on the bench together and I let our shoulders touch. The warmth of his essence, threaded with my own cold, pulses against me and I lean into it.
"The entity is agitated," I say when he asks. "It knows what's down there and it wants us to act. Soon."
"We need the others."
"I know. Can we hold until they get here?"
I reach through the bonds, feeling for the four distant presences moving toward us from the south. They're alive and they're moving fast, but they're still days away.
"Dante and I can reinforce the wards. Your bonds can counteract the corruption's effect on the students, pull them back toward themselves instead of letting the darkness drag them under. Between the three of us, we can slow it down."
"But not stop it."
"Not without the full six."
Skye reaches for my hand. I take it, and the cold of my fingers against his warm ones feels different now, the threads of each other's essence humming where we touch.
"Two days," Skye says. "We hold for two days, and then the others will be here."
I just hope we can truly hold off the darkness for two days.