Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Selene
I woke reaching for him.
My hand slid across the sheet, expecting heat, expecting weight, finding only cold cotton.
“Riven?”
My voice was a rasp. No answer.
I pushed myself up. The space beside me was empty. The pillow was indented, smelling of rain, static and him, but the flat felt hollowed out.
I swung my legs out of bed. His black shirt lay in a heap on the floor where he’d dropped it last night, a dark shadow against the wood. I stepped past it, unease prickling at my chest, and yanked on a pair of comfy trousers and a thick jumper.
I dressed with fumbling haste, needing the thick wool between me and the biting morning air before I walked into the kitchen.
Empty.
But there, on the counter, was a piece of paper torn from a notebook.
I’ll call you later. Stay here.
Seven words. A clinical directive left in the space he had occupied only hours before.
I stared at the handwriting—sharp, severe angles resembling carvings in stone.
I set the paper down. He expected me to sit tight and wait for the all-clear.
He was trying to protect me, to keep me static while he managed whatever fallout waited outside. He was wrong.
Sitting still made me a target. Varessia had marked Eamon at the station yesterday, and without Riven here, the flat offered no real cover.
Waiting invited the inevitable strike. Riven understood the mechanics of the Silverite and the siphoning, but he lacked the context.
He only held fragments of the history. Eamon held the rest. I remembered the shadow that crossed my father’s face whenever the past came up.
He knew exactly what kind of monsters we were dealing with.
He had survived them for hundreds of years.
Riven was hunting the result, but I needed the cause.
I had to stand before my father and extract the truth he had buried for two decades.
I dressed quickly—jeans, boots, leather jacket. I snatched my keys and headed for the door.
Riven could handle the present. I intended to fix the past. And this time, Eamon wasn’t shutting me out.
The front door of my Dad’s terrace house was unlocked.
That was the first wrong thing. Eamon locked everything. Always.
I pushed it open. “Dad?”
Silence.
I stepped into the hallway. The air smelled wrong. The usual comfort of cedar and toast had vanished, replaced by the stench of violence—sweat, pulverised plaster, and the lingering, copper taste of aggressive magic.
I walked into the living room.
It was a wreck.
The armchair was overturned. The bookshelf—the one holding old books—was smashed, pages scattered across the floor like dead birds. The lamp lay in shards.
“Dad!” I screamed it this time.
Nothing.
I ran to the kitchen. The table was shoved against the wall. A chair was splintered.
On the floor, his mobile phone sat in a pool of cold tea from a knocked-over mug. I stared at it. He never left the house without it. Never.
He was gone.
A sudden gasp trapped a sob in my throat. Varessia. It had to be.
Yesterday at the station. The way she had looked at him. She sensed the power. She thought it was him.
The air in the hallway cracked. A picture frame on the wall shattered, glass raining down onto the floorboards.
I ignored it.
Stupid. We were so stupid. We let him walk out of that station, let him go home, thinking he was safe because he was just Eamon.
But to her, he was the source. And now she had him.
I recalled Jack Preston’s report of the active operation at Blackwood Mill and Riven’s warning that the site served as a disposal ground for Highspire’s problems. Varessia had marked Eamon at the station yesterday, and the mill was the specific location of the dead zone she used for extractions.
That was where she took him. I felt the certainty of it.
I spun around, running for the door. I threw myself into the driver’s seat, jamming the key in. The engine roared to life. And I just drove.
The city blurred past in a grey smudge of rain-slicked concrete and iron as Eamon’s disappearance drained the colour from the world.
Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.
The words screamed inside my head, a mantra beating back the rising panic.
I hit the Industrial Crescent doing sixty. The car skidded on the wet cobbles, tyres screeching as I slammed the brakes near the old Blackwood Mill.
I scrambled out, leaving the door open, my hand diving into my pocket. I needed backup. I needed Riven.
I tapped out the message with shaking thumbs: Industrial Crescent. She has Eamon.
I hit send.
The screen fractured into pixelated blocks, tearing and bleeding colour before stabilising into a greyscale smear. The signal bar vanished into the vacuum. The dead zone was back, swallowing the physics of the device.
“Damn it!” I hissed, shoving the useless brick back into my pocket.
Then the pain hit.
It slammed into my left shoulder—an immediate, agonising strike.
It was the same searing heat I’d felt beside Talia Merrin’s body, the visceral reaction of my own magic screaming against the proximity of the Silverite alloy.
I faced the old brick structure of the Mill, where the side entrance opened like a gaping maw ready to swallow the remaining light.
If the metal was here, Eamon was here. The site felt predatory, the derelict walls closing in as the screaming ache in my scar told me he was in danger of being drained. The air usually tasted of rust and rot here. Today, it tasted of ash and burnt copper.
“Dad!” The shout tore from my throat.
Then it slammed into me—a broken scream.
The energy struck the centre of my chest in a blast of pure agony, bypassing language entirely: a burning, draining sensation of a soul being scraped hollow. I doubled over, gasping and clutching my ribs as the depth of his torment became a crushing weight.
I forced myself upright, following the pull east towards the hulking, windowless shell of the old pneumatic exchange station.
And I ran.
I moved towards the side of the building, skidding on the wet concrete, aiming for the external freight lift where Riven had saved me a few days ago. The twisted metal cage still hung partway down the shaft, a rusted reminder of the fight and the augmented guard.
Next to it, a service staircase descended into the trench—the throat of the building.
I took the stairs three at a time, my boots ringing against the metal grating. The air grew colder the deeper I went, smelling of wet earth and old grease. Down and down.
At the bottom, a heavy steel door stood slightly ajar. I slipped inside.
The corridor beyond was a tunnel of peeling paint and stuttering sodium lights. This was the old pneumatic exchange, the guts of the industrial city before the high-rises took over. Thick brass tubes ran along the ceiling like arteries, silent now, coated in decades of dust.
I moved fast, keeping close to the wall. The pain in my shoulder was stronger here, a magnetic agony that dragged me forward.
Closer. He’s closer.
I rounded a corner and stopped dead.
A guard stood at the end of the hall, stationed in front of a iron door. He wore the standard gear of a private contractor and looked bored as he tapped away on his phone. He didn’t hear me over the hum of the building’s ventilation.
I stopped. I needed to rely on the discipline Riven had drilled into me.
Control. Reach. Push.
I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, finding the heat hidden beneath my ribs. Unlike the wild fire of the alley, this heat settled like a block of lead.
I stepped out from the corner.
The guard looked up. His eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to shout.
I thrust my hand forward. I crushed the rising flare, compressing it into a single, solid wave of force.
The air warped. A silent, invisible hammer slammed into the guard’s chest. The blow lifted him off his feet, sending him flying backward.
He struck the steel blast door with a resounding clang, the breath driven out of him instantly.
His head snapped against the metal, and he slumped forward, unconscious.
I lunged, catching him by the vest before he could hit the concrete.
I lowered him silently to the floor, dragging him clear of the door.
He didn't make a sound.
I stood up, my hand tingling with the remaining heat.
I lunged for the blast door and yanked the handle, but it was deadlocked.
A frantic pat-down of his pockets yielded nothing.
I slapped my palm flat against the mechanism and drove a spike of concentrated heat into the metal.
The tumblers groaned, clicked, and melted internally. I shoved the door open.
The smell of rust vanished, replaced by the scent of ozone and antiseptic.
I stepped onto a narrow metal gantry that hung twenty feet above the floor of a massive, converted storage facility.
The metal grated under my boots, vibrating with the hum of the machinery below.
From this height, the darkness of the old factory had been scrubbed away, replaced by a white, sterile box—a lab built inside the ruin.
I crouched low behind the safety railing, peering down at the activity in the brightly lit space.
The room below was vast—white tiles, harsh strip lighting, like an operating theatre built inside a submarine. Men and women in white coats moved with efficient, terrifying purpose.
And in the centre of the room, separated by glass walls, was a containment cube.
And trapped inside was my father.
Eamon lay strapped to a metal table inside the glass cube.
His shirt had been cut away. His chest heaved, his face a mask of grey agony.
Three clear, thin tubes connected to his right forearm, running up to a complex array of glass and chrome machinery hanging above him. Silver flowed through them.
A gleaming, viscous liquid that glowed with its own internal light. It pulsed through the lines, drawn out of him beat by beat, flowing into a small metal canister on a trolley.
The sight punched the air from my lungs.
My shoulder screamed. The scar seared, an iron twisting deep in the muscle, reacting violently to the raw, concentrated magic bleeding out of him.
Bile rose in my throat, hot and acidic. The room tilted dangerously.
They were draining him. Siphoning his magic—his life—right out of his veins.
He looked so small. So old.
If I didn’t stop this, he would be a husk in minutes.
I scanned the room below frantically. I couldn’t fight them all; there were too many guards, too many scientists. I needed a distraction. I needed chaos.
A red box stood out on the wall next to me on the gantry. Old. Rusted.
Emergency Fire Suppression.
I didn’t know if it still worked, but I clenched my fist, wrapping my fingers in the hem of my jacket, and smashed it into the glass cover.
It shattered. I slammed my palm onto the button.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
A bell, deafening and mechanical, screamed through the facility.
Then the ceiling opened up.
The old, rusted sprinklers burst into life.
Water—brown with rust and age—hammered down into the sterile lab. It hit the hot machinery with a hiss of steam.
Screams tore through the lab. White coats scattered, boots slipping on wet tiles as the staff scrambled for the exit in a blind panic.
The guards pushed back. Weapons raised, they advanced against the flow, barking orders over the noise.
“Stand down! Get back to your stations! Move!”
They grabbed at the fleeing scientists, trying to hold the line, but the stampede crushed them against the double doors. Fear drowned out authority. The mob surged, forcing the soldiers backward into the corridor until the shouting faded into the distance.
I watched from my vantage point on the gantry until the scrum spilled out, taking the security team with it.
The floor cleared. Only the hiss of falling water and the pulsing flash of alarms remained.
I vaulted the railing.
I dropped, boots slamming into slick concrete. Landing in a crouch, I bolted, keeping the containment cube's shadow between me and the main doors.
The door to the glass cube remained sealed. The modern magnetic locks ignored the obsolete alarm system, refusing to release. I ran to the partition, adrenaline screaming in my blood, and hammered my fists against the surface.
Eamon turned his head.
His eyes found mine through the glass and the steam. He looked devastated seeing me.
His lips moved, forming a shape I couldn’t hear over the alarm, but I knew it intimately.
Run.
I ignored him. I wouldn’t leave him.
I slammed my body against the unyielding glass, screaming his name, bathed in the blinding silver light of the machine.