Chapter 41
The darkness swallowed us whole. One second we were in that small stone room with the dead oil lamp and the red sky pressing down on everything, and the next there was nothing.
No floor, no walls, no Sanguinarium. Just the cold and the black and the sensation of falling without falling, spinning without spinning, the void wrapping itself around us like something alive.
Something that was deeply indifferent to our survival.
I didn’t let go.
My fingers were locked around Trace's shirt on one side and Dominic's forearm on the other, and I held on with everything I had even as the darkness tried to pull us apart, to separate us and reduce us to nothing.
I felt it licking at my skin, tugging at the spaces between our bodies as if it were testing the grip.
I tightened my hands until my knuckles ached, refusing to let either one slip away from me.
Just like I’d always done.
Port us. Now. Dominic’s voice came through the bond like a crack of sound in total silence, sharp and urgent.
He was talking to Trace but I already knew before the thought finished forming that it wasn’t going to happen.
I could feel Trace through the bond, feel his soul and the shape of him, but where there should have been that steady, deep reservoir of Reaper power, there was almost nothing.
Barely a flicker. The dregs of something that had been full an hour ago and was now scraped clean.
He’d given me everything he had, and I’d taken it.
I had to. And now we were spinning through the in-between with no way out but forward and nowhere to aim but home.
So that’s what I did. Squeezing my eyes shut, I did the only thing left to do.
I thought of home. The Blackburn Estate.
Not the idea of it or a vague, desperate want.
I thought of the specifics, the creak of the third stair, the way the corridors smelled like sage and old wood, the exact quality of light that came through my bedroom window in the late afternoon and fell across the floor in a stripe of gold.
I held the image of my room in my mind the way Trace had taught me, layering detail over detail until it felt less like a memory and more like a place I was already standing in, and I held it.
The cold wrapped its arms around us and moved as the darkness thinned and the spinning slowed, as though we were suddenly a ship with a sail—with direction.
Within seconds, the world began to solidify around us, our bodies lurching as though we were being thrown through a void and then dropping down out of thin air at our destination.
Only something was wrong.
I knew it even before my eyes opened. The smell hit me first. It wasn’t the familiar smell of home, of old wood and sage and familiarity.
It was the smell of charred wood. Of ash and soot, as though something that had burned so completely and thoroughly that there was nothing left to decay.
Just the cold ghost of what had once been there but wasn’t anymore.
Planting my feet firmly against the ground, I opened my eyes as everything inside turned to ice.
For the longest moment of my life, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.
The black floor beneath my feet was scorched and warped, boards buckled and split, some of them collapsed entirely into the darkness below.
Walls that were nothing but charred studs, stripped of plaster and paint and life.
My bed, my dresser, the nightstand, all of it reduced to the same gray ash littered across the ruined floor as I stood in the gutted skeleton of a house that had been burned to its bones.
My mind kept trying to find the room underneath it all, to map the wreckage back onto what it remembered, but there was nothing left.
It was all gone.
My chest felt as though someone had reached inside it and closed a fist around my heart.
Everything I owned. Every photograph I had left of my father.
The wooden box of keepsakes I’d held onto from my childhood.
Every small, ordinary, irreplaceable piece of the life I’d built inside these walls.
It was all gone. Erased. Turned to ash while I was trapped somewhere else, powerless to stop it.
“What the fuck is this?” Trace’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Where are we?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed over entirely. The tears burned under my eyes but didn’t fall, just built and built as I stood there staring at the ash that used to be my bedroom. My home. My life.
“The Blackburn Estate,” answered Dominic, his voice low and somber. “Or whatever’s left of it.”
Trace stepped forward into my sightline, picking his way carefully across the ruined floor, hands shoved through his hair as he turned and looked at what surrounded us from every angle. “How did this happen?”
“I’ll give you one guess,” I said, feeling the grief in my chest curdle into something harder. Something dangerous.
Trace met my eyes, confusion drawing his brows together. “Why would The Order burn your house down when they already had us?”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t explain why but I knew it was them.
I knew they had come back here while we were gone, while we were trapped in Sanguinarium with no way home and no way to stop them, and they had burned my entire life to the ground.
“Maybe they did it to destroy the evidence or to send some kind of message. Or maybe they just wanted to wipe out the last fucking trace of me from this earth,” I answered, bitterness and fury bleeding into my voice in equal measure.
“Maybe they just did it for the fuck of it.”
Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the latter.
One final nail to my coffin, just because they could.
“This doesn’t look fresh,” noted Trace, tilting his head back to look at the open sky through the hole where the ceiling used to be, then glancing down at the gap in the floorboards that dropped straight through to what was left of the floor below. “How long do you think we were gone.”
My stomach turned over at Trace’s question.
I hadn’t let myself think about that yet, hadn’t even had a chance to even if I’d wanted to, but now that he’d said it out loud, I couldn’t put it back.
I knew time moved differently in Sanguinarium, but what exactly that meant for us now that we were back on this side, I still had no idea.
“By the looks of it, it’s been a while,” said Dominic, his jaw tightening as he looked around the room with the measured calm of someone doing rapid, unpleasant arithmetic in their head. His gaze dropped to the corner of the room and stayed there. “Quite a while,” he amended indistinctly.
I followed his gaze to the dense pile of dead leaves that had drifted in through the open walls and settled against the scorched baseboard. Layers upon layers of them, none of them the right color anymore. Whatever season we’d left behind had come and gone without us.
The knot in my stomach pulled tighter.
“We’ve seen enough.” Dominic’s voice cut through the noise in my head.
“It isn’t safe here. We need to go,” he said, his eyes cutting briefly to the open structure around us before coming back to me.
I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the state of the floors or the fact that we were standing exposed in the Order’s handiwork where they could easily descend on us again, but something told me it was probably both.
Despite knowing he was right, I still hadn’t moved. I couldn’t seem to do anything other than stand there in the ashes and be useless.
“Angel.” A beat. “Are you hearing me?”
When I still didn’t answer, he crossed the ruined floor to where I was standing. He said nothing as he curved two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up to his.
Whatever he read on my face made his composure slip for a second.
“It’s all gone,” I breathed, my eyes filling before I could stop them.
He pulled me into his chest and wrapped his arms around me, holding me firm against him without a word, as though he had no intention of ever letting me go again.
The angry, grief-stricken tears I’d been holding back broke free all at once.
I gripped his shirt in both fists and pressed my face into him, my body shaking with silent sobs that hurt somewhere deeper than bone, deeper than anything I had a name for.
“Every picture I had of my dad,” I managed, barely above a broken whisper. “They’re all gone.”
Behind me I heard Trace exhale a sharp, quiet curse. He didn’t come closer. He held his position and let Dominic hold me, as though somewhere in the silent language the three of us had developed over everything we’d been through together, they’d already agreed on who was needed where.
Dominic’s hand moved to the back of my head. “Every last one of them is going to answer for this,” he said, low and unhurried, the promise in it so absolute it didn’t need volume to land. “I’ll see to it personally, angel.”
I knew he meant it. He’d burn down everything they’d ever built if it came to that, and he wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it. As much as that meant to me, in that moment it didn’t do anything to bring those pictures back. Nothing would.
“We need to leave,” he said, turning toward Trace. “Can you manage to port us to the Manor?”
“I think so,” answered Trace as he moved to where I was still standing in Dominic’s arms. His cool hand came down against my back, and I instantly felt his emotions pouring into me through the bond.
Everything from anger to sadness to something that almost felt like helplessness, as though he knew he couldn’t fix this for me.
Couldn’t make it go away the way I desperately wanted it to.
The warmth of it lasted only a moment before the whipping cold came down and swept us away.
And with that, we were gone.
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