Chapter 23
I don’t remember picking up the broken pendant.
One moment I’m standing in the ruined church with Dominik’s body twisted at my feet, rain pouring through the shattered stained glass, Paul breathing hard beside me. The next, we are pushing through the side door into the storm, and the silver eye is in my fist.
What’s left of it.
The pendant is warped and jagged now, its polished black stone smashed into splinters. The eye at its center is no longer an eye at all, only a broken socket filled with fragments that cut lightly into my palm when I close my fingers around them.
I doubt it holds any more power over the grotesque but a part of me can’t leave it behind in the church. Perhaps some of its dark magic remains.
Thunder rolls over the city as Paul and I stumble down the church steps.
The rain is coming hard enough to blur the streetlights, turning the sidewalk into black glass and the gutters into small rushing rivers.
Paul tries not to lean on me, which means he leans on me too late and almost goes down on the sidewalk.
His left arm hangs close to his body. The hammer caught him across the shoulder, but the damage seems to have spread through his ribs too. Breathing makes him wince and every few steps, he has to stop and gather himself before continuing.
I stare down at the pendant in my hand.
Dominik’s words move through me again.
The pendant controlled it, but it wasn’t the anchor.
Dominik was wrong about the object, but he had the right idea. The creature is bound to our world by something.
“My mother spent her whole life running from Eleanor’s darkness. Dominik tried to destroy it. Both failed to stop this evil.”
Paul looks at me through the rain, face pale under the streetlight.
“Sara, what are you talking about?”
I open my hand. The broken silver eye lies in my palm.
“The pendant was never the anchor,” I say. “It was the leash. That’s how Eleanor made it obey her.”
Paul’s gaze lands on the shattered pieces.
He understands before I say the rest. I can see it happen in his face, the same quick assembling of facts I saw in his apartment, only this time the conclusion terrifies him.
“If that was the leash,” he says, “then what’s keeping it here?”
“The thing Eleanor used to call the grotesque into this world.”
We stand there in the storm, both of us knowing the answer.
Paul says it first.
“The book of rituals.”
Lightning flashes.
For one hard white second, the city appears around us in perfect detail: wet street, black windows, the torn silhouette of the church behind us, and far beyond the rooftops, the Overton rising above everything like some cursed fortress.
Waiting.
Then darkness folds back over it.
“I have to go back,” I say.
“No.”
“I have to destroy the book.”
“No, you have to get away from the building.”
“The book is in Eleanor’s apartment.”
“And so is that thing.”
“It’s already coming after me. I must face this.”
Paul steps in front of me, blocking my path as much as his injured body will let him. Rain runs down his face.
“Sara, listen to me. You’re way over your head.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. You think you know because you’ve been scared for days. This is different. This is a matter of life and death.”
The sharpness in his voice cuts through the rain.
For a moment, neither of us says anything.
The storm fills the space between us.
“We call the cops, Detective Reyes,” Paul says.
“And tell them what? That my dead grandmother conjured a familiar, and I need police backup to destroy her spell book?”
“Say Dominik attacked us, say there’s evidence in the apartment. Say anything.”
“By the time anyone believes us, it could be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
I look toward the Overton.
I can’t see it now. The rain has swallowed the skyline again.
“Dominik said my blood gives it strength.”
Paul goes still.
“He said Eleanor’s bloodline feeds it. Anchors it. Whatever word you want to use.”
“He was insane.”
“He was also right about many things.”
Paul looks away, jaw tight. He wants to argue. I can see him looking for a rational foothold and finding none.
The worst part is that I’m not afraid in the way I was before.
Fear is still there, deep and alive, but it has changed shape. It is no longer flooding everything. It has burned down into something harder, something that sits in the center of my chest.
Resolve, maybe. Or acceptance.
I accept my legacy, my dark inheritance. And I have decided to confront it head on.
I reach for the crucifix around my neck.
Paul sees the movement, and his expression changes.
“Sara.”
I unclasp it.
The chain slips free, and for a second the small cross rests in my palm beside the shattered eye. My mother’s crucifix. The last thing she put on me before she died. The one object I have treated like protection, almost as if I could still feel her hands placing it on me.
Taking it off feels like an act of betrayal.
I close my fingers around the crucifix and push it into Paul’s hand.
He looks down at it, alarmed.
“What are you doing?”
“Hold this for me.”
I lift the broken pendant and fasten the chain around my neck.
The damaged silver eye settles against my chest, cold and wrong and sharp along the edges.
Paul stares at it.
“You cannot be serious.”
“Maybe if it thinks I’m finally ready to take Eleanor’s place, it’ll let me get close enough.”
“That is the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s the only plan I have.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
I look at the Overton, hidden somewhere beyond the rain.
There is no good answer.
Paul shakes his head. “I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“Sara—”
“You can barely stand.”
“You really think I’m going to let you do this alone?”
I look at him, and maybe he sees something in my face because he backs off.
This is not courage on my part. I must confront the grotesque alone.
“No one else dies tonight,” I say.
Paul’s face changes. The fight goes out of it, replaced by something worse… Fear for me.
“Sara, don’t.”
His voice is quieter now, and that almost breaks me.
“I have to do this alone.”
Then I step around him.
He reaches for me, but his injured shoulder stops him before his hand closes around my arm. Pain folds him slightly forward. He curses under his breath, helpless and furious.
I don’t look back until I reach the corner.
Paul is still on the church steps, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other closed around my crucifix. Rain runs off his hair and down his face. He looks smaller from here.
I turn away.
The Overton waits somewhere ahead, hidden in rain and darkness. I start walking toward it with the broken pendant against my heart, every step taking me closer to the building, the book, and the thing my grandmother called into the world.
Thunder rolls over the city.
I walk faster.