Chapter Five
Autumn’s Hollow was a place where the past never stayed buried for long.
No matter how far I ran, no matter how many years I spent trying to forget this town, it found a way to drag me back in.
Like a wound that never fully closed, it bled through the surface of every memory I had, reminding me of everything I'd tried to leave behind.
It reminded me of Cian, the way he used to smirk and ruffle my hair, promising he'd be back soon. Promising he'd take me to the park the next day, push me on the swing high enough that I'd swear I could touch the stars.
It reminded me of how he never walked back through that door again. No matter how many nights I'd stayed up as a kid, begging whatever was listening to let him.
The walk to our dad's old house felt longer than I remembered it, the streets of the Hollow unnervingly quiet under the rising moon.
The air had cooled fast, the last of the daylight bleeding into a soft violet dusk.
Lanterns lined the street in both directions, casting flickering pools of amber light across the cobblestones — enough to keep the shadows at bay, not enough to make the night feel any less like it was holding its breath.
"You could've warned me it looked like this," Orias said from beside me, hands in his pockets, eyes tracking the treeline the way mine kept doing.
He'd caught up to me outside the Pines an hour ago, hadn't said a word about where I'd been or what I'd fought out there, just fallen into step like he always did when something in his gut told him not to let me go somewhere alone.
"You've seen it before." I drawled. "You literally live in this town and have a key to use at any time."
"Not in daylight sober and not planning to torch the place out of spite." He kicked a pile of leaves off the path. "Different experience - and we both know I lost that key the second you gave it to me."
We turned down the narrow side street that led to the house neither of us had set foot in for over twenty years.
It sat on the outskirts of town, past the ridge where the land sloped down toward the Whispering Pines, close enough to the treeline that I'd always wondered, even as a kid, whether that was an accident or a choice our father had made on purpose, wanting to stay close to something instead of us.
Our mother had walked out with the two of us in her arms before we were even old enough to remember the sound of his voice.
He'd never come after her. Never tried to see us, not once, not for a birthday or a Christmas or any of the milestones that were supposed to matter to a father.
As far as I knew, he was still alive somewhere, still a Thorne in name, still tangled up in whatever business the older generation of our family got into out here in the Hollow.
He just hadn't cared to be a father while he did it.
I hadn't thought about him more than a handful of times in the last decade. Standing outside his house now, I found I still didn't feel much of anything. Just an old, worn-down kind of nothing, the kind that came from grieving a person who was still technically alive.
"Cheerful place for a family reunion," Orias muttered, tipping his head back to take in the house properly.
It loomed above us at the end of the overgrown path, dark and silent, its silhouette cutting hard against the black wall of trees behind it.
It had unsettled me as a kid, the few times Mum had dragged us out here before she gave up entirely on the idea of him being part of our lives.
Even now, windows boarded, gate hanging crooked off one hinge, it felt alive in a way that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with how thoroughly it had been left to rot.
Houses weren't supposed to feel like they were watching you. I knew that. I still didn't quite believe it, standing there.
I shoved the rusted gate open, metal shrieking against metal loud enough that something in the trees behind us went quiet in response.
The path was buried under weeds and dead leaves, the lawn gone entirely wild, and I found myself already mentally listing off everything that would need tearing out if either of us ever actually wanted to live here again.
Neither of us did. We were only here because the whispers had led us here, because whatever was unraveling in the Pines had a thread running straight through this house, and neither of us had figured out yet how to ignore that.
"Cian's initials are still carved in the gatepost," Orias said quietly, running his thumb over the wood as he passed it. "Little shit did that the week before he disappeared. Mum hit the roof."
"I don't remember that." I frowned.
"I only remember it because Mum told the story every Christmas until she died." He said it light, the way he said most things about our family that actually hurt, and I didn't call him on it, because I understood the impulse better than anyone alive.
The front door groaned when I pushed it open, the sound rolling down the hallway and dying somewhere in the dark.
Dust coated everything. The air sat thick with decay and abandonment, and underneath it, faint but unmistakable if you knew what to feel for, the remnants of old protection wards, their power long since bled out but not entirely gone.
Furniture sat shrouded under white sheets like a house full of ghosts still waiting to be introduced to each other.
It didn't feel like a home. It felt like walking into a museum nobody had bothered to curate.
We moved through the front hall together, boots loud against floorboards that hadn't held real weight in decades.
The house had been grand once, back when the Thornes still cared what the rest of the Hollow thought of them.
Now it was a shell — walls cracked and peeling, portraits fogged under years of cobwebs, the whole place gone gray with neglect.
The painted portrait of our great-uncle Elias, once the pride of this hallway according to every story our mother used to tell, had a family of spiders nesting in the frame above his head.
Mum had kept it spotless out of some grief I never fully understood, mourning a relative of her own she'd lost before either of us were born.
I felt a low, useless guilt looking at it now, like I owed it to her to have kept that going and hadn't.
Orias reached out and brushed a layer of dust off the frame without a word, which told me he was feeling something similar and didn't want to talk about it either.
We were good at that. Twin telepathy, if you wanted to be generous about it.
More likely just two people who'd learned early that talking about the things that hurt didn't actually make them hurt less.
We stopped together in the center of what used to be the sitting room, in front of the old mirror hanging over the dead fireplace.
The glass had cracked sometime in the last twenty years, a jagged line running corner to corner, the silver backing tarnished nearly black.
Even broken, it held our reflections well enough.
We looked wrong to stand next to, most people said.
Too identical, too sharp-edged, the kind of similar that made strangers do a double take and then look away fast. Same black hair, same the sharp points of demon ears we'd both given up trying to hide under our teens.
Same eyes — his glowing a shade closer to violet tonight, mine sitting duller, more pink than purple, the way they always ran when I hadn't slept properly.
Whatever our mother's blood had softened in us, our father's had sharpened right back, cheekbones cut too clean, skin carrying that faint, wrong sort of glow that never fully passed for human even under bad lighting.
Something darker sat behind my eyes in that reflection tonight, though. Something that hadn't been there the last time I'd looked properly.
"You look like hell," Orias said, echoing his own line from earlier without seeming to notice. "Like really fucking rough, and ugly, and boring. What the hell happened to you?"
"Nothing." I said honestly. "I just..." A shrug. "I guess I just needed to come home sooner."
I dragged my gaze off the mirror and toward the stairs, old wood groaning under both our weight as we climbed to the second floor, toward the room that had been mine before I was old enough to remember living in it.
The house sat too quiet around us, the kind of quiet that had a texture to it, a held breath.
I felt it before I could name it — the sense that we weren't alone up here, something lingering just past the edge of what either of us could see.
Orias went still beside me at the top of the stairs, and I knew he'd felt it too.
"Tell me that's just old wards settling," he said, voice dropped low. "Something one of the local witches did to hex the place when the old bastard inevitably pissed them off."
"It's not." I swallowed hard.
There was a shift in the air, faint and almost imperceptible, a ripple of magic that raised the hair on the back of my neck and dragged a low, wordless growl out of Orias beside me, the kind of sound that meant every soft, joking edge of him had gone somewhere else entirely.
We weren't the only ones who'd come back to the Hollow.
Something else was here. In our father's house, in the one place we'd both sworn we'd never willingly set foot in again.
And it had been waiting for us the whole time.