Chapter 35
For a long, suspended moment, I couldn’t move. I just knelt there between Trace and Dominic, staring at the space where Alford had been standing, as though if I looked hard enough the air would give back some kind of explanation. Some reason. Some logic I could fold into something that made sense.
But there was nothing but empty space.
The sky bled overhead a deep crimson red that covered everything, soaking into the cracked earth beneath my knees and the still, airless distance in every direction.
All I could hear was my own breathing coming out too fast, too shallow, the sound of it too loud in a place that was otherwise completely and unnaturally silent.
We can’t be here. We can’t be. This isn’t real.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs, felt my nails dig into the skin just below my sleep shorts as I tried to stop the trembling.
The heat was wrong here, the way it sat against my skin without source or direction, pressing from everywhere at once like the air itself was trying to suffocate me.
My chest felt like something had lodged inside it, like my ribs had drawn inward and were slowly, deliberately, closing around my heart.
Sanguinarium.
We were in Sanguinarium.
I was going to be sick.
I'd read about it. I'd heard it described in voices that flattened out as the person speaking tried to keep the fear out of them.
I had looked at those mountains of bodies from a distance without fully believing what I was seeing, had let my mind offer the kinder explanation of hills, rock formations, geography.
The mind was remarkable in how long it would insist on the comfortable lie.
But I’d looked harder. And now I couldn’t stop seeing it.
This was the place Revenants went to die.
The place they were banished to when there was nowhere left for them to go.
A place that existed for the sole purpose of eternally torturing creatures who could otherwise exist forever.
A place that would make them suffer for it.
I knew only what I’d been told about it; what I had read that in textbooks and grimoires so old the pages had gone translucent at the edges, and I’d processed it the way you processed any piece of information too large and too terrible to fully hold: at a distance, intellectually, as a fact about a world that would never touch mine.
But it was touching mine now.
I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and held it there until the nausea passed.
Wiping my hands against my thighs, I looked down at Trace and Dominic as they lay on the ground absolutely still, their skin the color of old melted wax, their faces slack and their chests empty of any movement.
The stakes were still there, wooden and ugly and deeply, obscenely wrong, lodged in the centers of their chests.
I needed to pull them out. I needed to bring them back to me.
Oh, god…
What if they didn’t come back? What if they couldn’t be brought back? What if the laws of Sanguinarium were different than the laws of our mortal Realm?
I yanked my hands back and wrapped them around my waist, the fear of finding out suddenly worse than not knowing.
The panic was rising again, climbing up the back of my throat, and I knew if I let it crest I'd be useless.
I squeezed my eyes shut, dug my fingers into my hair, and forced myself to count.
One breath in. One breath out. Again.
It didn’t really help, but it gave my hands something to do besides shake. I opened my eyes and stared out at the landscape instead, fixing my gaze on anything that wasn’t them. If I looked at them I would fall apart, and I couldn’t fall apart yet.
The ground was the color of dried rust, cracked into irregular plates stretching in every direction under that bleeding sky, flat and featureless except for those shapes rising in the distance.
No trees. No water. No sound. Just the broken earth and the silence pressing against my eardrums as though it had physical weight.
I was still staring at it, still counting breaths, when the sky moved.
A seam tore open above the piles of bodies, ragged at the edges, dark behind the red. It lasted only long enough for a body to fall through it before closing again. The body hit the top of the nearest pile and the pile gave to receive it before everything went still again.
I stared at it, the counting forgotten entirely.
What in the fuck?
Cinderdust…That had to be it. It was the only plausible explanation for what I had just seen; for how those piles came to be in the first place.
Every time it was used to vanquish a Revenant, this was where they ended up.
Another body on an endless pile of bodies, and it was clear by the endless mountains of it that the Order had been filling this place for centuries.
I’d sent a few here myself, once upon a time, not knowing what I was doing. At least not completely.
And now I was on the other side of it.
We’re going to die here, said the part of my brain I was trying very hard not to listen to. There’s no way out of this.
I looked back at Trace and Dominic. At my lifelines.
My anchors. I didn’t know if this place played by the same rules as ours.
I didn’t know if pulling those stakes would do what it was supposed to do, or if the physics of death and revival worked differently here.
But either way, I had no way of knowing until I tried.
And the not knowing was the most terrifying part, because once I reached for those stakes there was no taking it back.
I would either bring them back or I wouldn’t, and I would have to live with whichever one it was.
I shuffled forward on my knees, the packed ground scraping against my skin as I repositioned myself so that I had both of them within reach.
My hands had steadied some. Not much, but enough.
I gripped both stakes at once, one in each fist, took a single calming breath and pulled them free in one fell swoop.
Both stakes came out easily, and I quickly tossed them into the dirt behind me without looking at them.
For a handful of seconds, nothing happened.
Panic and dread rushed into my blood as I held my breath and kept my eyes on their faces, waiting, silently praying they’d come back to me.
It took every bit of strength I had not to scream out, because I knew that if I started, I wasn’t going to be able to stop.
And then the color came back. Slow at first and then all at once, like watching a bruise run backward, the gray and white of them warming and flushing until they looked like themselves again. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding myself together until I felt it start to come undone.
Trace’s eyes snapped open first. His whole body drew in a sharp breath like he’d been held underwater, his hands going to his chest on instinct, and he blinked at the sky above him with the dazed, disoriented focus of someone who’d just come back from very far away.
Dominic sat up before the breath had even finished leaving him, his body moving as though being still was physically offensive, already taking stock of the terrain before he was fully upright.
And I was crying.
I hadn’t known I was until Trace turned his head and looked at me and I felt the wet on my face and registered that it had been there for a while.
My throat ached with it, that specific kind of ache that comes from crying without sound, from swallowing it and refusing it and having it come out of you anyway.
“Jemma.” Trace pushed up onto one elbow, the disorientation clearing from his face as his eyes moved over me, then around us, then back to me. “What’s going on?” He was already reaching for my arm, already trying to make his voice steady for my benefit. “What happened? Where are we?”
Dominic was already on his feet.
He turned in a slow, full circle, his jaw tight, his eyes moving across the landscape with the kind of methodical attention that meant he was cataloguing everything.
He looked at the sky. He looked at the ground.
He looked at the distance, at those shapes that had fooled me into thinking they were hills, and something changed in his face. Every line of him went very still.
He didn’t say anything, but I knew he knew.
He always knew.
“We’re trapped…he tricked me. He, he—” The words came out broken, stumbling over each other. “He said William wanted a meeting. I didn’t want to go. He threatened to use Cinderdust on you, and I…he…we…”
“Hey.” Trace sat up fully and caught my chin between his fingers, tilting my face to his. “You’re freaking out. Breathe, okay? Just look at me and breathe.”
“I can’t breathe, Trace. I can’t!” A sob cracked through the middle of it. “We’re in Sanguinarium!”
Trace froze as I continued crying and hyperventilating.
“Sanguinar—” He cut himself off as though the very idea of it were preposterous. “That’s impossible, Jemma.”
“Is it? Is it?” I sucked in a ragged breath, gesturing at the horizon with a hand that wouldn’t quite stop trembling. “Because it doesn’t look impossible from where I’m sitting. Those aren’t hills, Trace. They’re mountains of bodies. Bodies!”
Trace’s gaze moved past my shoulder, slowly, the way you looked at something you were bracing yourself to confirm. His eyes tracked the distance, and I watched the moment it landed, the flicker in his expression flattening into something carefully contained.
“We’re in a fucking vampire graveyard with no way out!” I shouted, my voice coming out far too loud and fast to be helpful in any way at all.
“Come on. Look at me,” he said, turning away from the horrifying hellscape and focusing his eyes on me. On calming me. He picked up my hand and squeezed it, letting his energy flow into me through our bond. My skin insanely hummed at the contact. “That’s it. Just breath, nice and slow.”
The crimson sky sat above us, indifferent and absolute. Somewhere in the distance, those shapes rose against it and didn’t move. I made myself stop looking at them and did what he told me to do, focusing only on his face and our bond and the way he pushed his calming energy into me.
I hated that it worked, hated how badly I needed it to, but I kept my eyes on his and followed the rhythm he was setting, one breath and then another, my chest gradually loosening its grip on itself.
“What are we going to do?” The question came out far more hopeless than I intended, scraped hollow by everything clamoring underneath it.
Trace exhaled, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I’m not sure yet.” His forehead furrowed as his gaze flicked briefly to the landscape again before coming back to me. “Have you tried porting out?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t done anything except this,” I said, and made a vague gesture at myself, sitting on the ground with a tear-streaked face.
Something soft moved through his expression. “Alright. Let me try.”
He looked up at Dominic, who gave a short nod, and then Trace closed his eyes. The air around him went still, the space almost seeming to draw in on itself. A beat passed. Then another.
Nothing happened.
His jaw hardened. He opened his eyes and looked out at the ground a few feet away, studying a bare patch of earth as if committing it to memory. He inhaled once, sharply, then shut his eyes again.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes. The look on his face was one I recognized: the familiar stillness of someone absorbing something they didn’t want to be true. “It won’t hold,” he said. “I can’t move through space or time. Nothing’s connecting.”
“Oh, god.” My stomach dropped clean out of me. “We’re never getting out of here!”
“Angel.” Dominic’s voice was low and controlled, but something in the tone of it made the back of my neck prickle. “I need you to keep your voice down.”
Trace looked up at him. “Why?”
Dominic’s gaze moved across the landscape in a long, careful sweep before it came back to us.
He didn’t answer immediately. He was still watching the distance with those dark, assessing eyes, the way he watched things he hadn’t finished deciding about yet.
“If she was able to be ported here without needing to be a Revenant or incapacitated then it only stands to reason that she’s likely not the first or the last.”
“You’re saying we’re not alone,” surmised Trace.
“Precisely.”
I pressed my knuckles to my mouth, swallowed the sound trying to climb out of my throat, and looked around.
The cracked ground. The bleeding sky. Those distant shapes I could not stop seeing for what they were.
The silence that wasn’t quite silence, I realized now, if you listened past your own fear.
There was something underneath it. The faint, barely-there suggestion of movement.
Of presence. Of something in this place that breathed.
Or had, once.
“But if they were able to port us here and then leave,” said Trace slowly, his eyes narrowing as he put it together in his mind, “then there’s a way out. Alford came through. Alford left. That means—”
“There’s a door,” confirmed Dominic. “We just don’t know where it is yet.”
He said it the way he said most things: with a certainty that didn’t invite argument, as though the door’s existence was simply a fact to be filed and acted on, and the not knowing where it was amounted to a minor logistical inconvenience rather than the most terrifying sentence I had ever heard spoken aloud.
I decided, right then, to borrow that certainty. To take it and hold it the way Trace had told me to hold his hand and just breathe. Because the alternative was looking at those shapes on the horizon again, and I had looked at them enough.
It wasn’t much. It was barely anything. But I felt it anyway, some small, stubborn thing kindling in the center of my chest, pushing back against the weight of everything pressing down on it.
A way out existed.
We just had to find it.