Chapter Twelve #2
Just teeth stretched into the rough shape of a grin, like something wearing a man’s face, learned that smiles are supposed to make people feel safe but never understood why.
It pulls too wide across his mouth.
Stays there too long.
And the whole damn thing is pointed straight at me.
Run, my instincts say, which means stay and fight.
“Formation,” I declare, low and flat. “Rhett, I need your position sense. Track where it goes. Call it.”
“You got it,” he says, and his voice has dropped to the register he uses when the hellhound is closer to the surface than the prospect.
“Bennett, I need you to compress it. Push it into a smaller space. Can you hold that?”
Something settles in Bennett’s expression, like he’s slipping into the thing he was built for. “Yes.”
“Then do it.”
Bennett’s wings manifest without drama, white feathers edged in light that doesn’t belong to this dock, this city, or this world.
Divine authority pours out of him in waves, and the temperature in the hold spikes upward by ten degrees as he pushes, not physically but in some other register entirely, compressing the space the hollow has to move through.
The dock worker’s body staggers, and the hollow inside it screams through his throat, the sound high and jagged, sharp enough to set my teeth on edge.
Rhett tracks it. He’s half shifted, shadows gathering around his boots, eyes burning orange-red and cutting through the dark.
Every time the hollow tries to move, to jump, to find a new host, to retreat into the unlit spaces between containers, Rhett calls it, “East, south, doubling back, trying the rafters… no, going low. It’s fast,” he grits out. “It’s really, really fast—”
“Direction, Rhett.”
“I’m giving you direction! I’m also having a very bad time!”
It works, barely. Bennett holds his line, pouring everything he has into a single, stationary wall of divine containment, his face white with effort and utterly expressionless, the angelic serenity stripped back to something rawer underneath.
Rhett calls it move for move, voice tight, the hellhound’s instincts doing what five centuries of training couldn’t prepare anyone specifically for.
And I calculate.
The containment crate.
If it went in, it can go back. Psychic entities follow appetite before logic, and the oldest, deepest appetite is the one that pulls toward the richest source available. I am five hundred and forty years old. My mind has held things that would dissolve a younger consciousness.
Languages dead before this country existed.
The texture of every war I’ve outlasted.
Grief compounded over centuries into something unrecognizable as grief anymore. It is dense, layered, and exactly what a starving hollow would reach for.
So, I offer myself as bait.
“Rhett,” I say. “Get to the crate. The moment I walk it back, you close it.”
“Walk it back?” He stops, reading what I mean before I say it, “Scar.”
“Crate, Rhett!”
I step into the compressed space, into the thick, waiting dark. I look at the thing wearing the dock worker’s face, at what sits just beneath the borrowed skin, and I lower the walls I keep around my mind the way you open a window, only as far as I intend.
It hits me like a blade driven clean between the ribs.
The hollow pours into the gap I’ve made, a presence that feels older than anything that should still exist, its appetite pressing in from all sides as it forces its way through my mind.
It doesn’t search the way a man would search.
It spreads, seeping into every fracture line, every place that has ever carried weight.
It finds my grief.
It finds my loneliness.
And then it finds…
Her.
The shift is immediate and violent, the world around me dropping away as something deeper takes hold, something that lives beneath memory, thought, and reason.
Snow crunches under my boots with brutal clarity. The air burns cold in my lungs. The metallic scent of blood sits thick and suffocating at the back of my throat.
Astrid stands in front of me, and she is already slipping.
Her breath tears out of her like something is ripping it free, her chest rising and falling too fast, too uneven, her eyes too bright, too wide, that wild, uncontained edge already taking over.
Her teeth bare at me, not in a smile, not in anything that belongs to the woman I knew, but in something feral, something that looks at me and sees a threat instead of the man she once trusted.
My chest tightens, not with panic, but with recognition that cuts deeper than anything clean.
I know this moment.
I know exactly where this ends.
No!
I force the word down through everything the hollow is trying to drag to the surface, but it presses harder, curious, feeding on the fracture it has found, pushing into it with intent.
Astrid’s hands fist in my shirt, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, shaking me with a strength that doesn’t belong to her anymore. “Do something.”
The memory doesn’t sit still. It drags me into it, forces me to feel the heat of her skin, the desperation in her grip, the impossible weight of knowing there is no version of this where I save her.
You were too late. The thought slides in smooth and cold, not mine, and yet it lands exactly where it knows it will do the most damage.
I lock my jaw against it, but the hollow is already deeper.
A laugh tears out of her, broken, followed by a snarl that makes the sound into something unrecognizable. She moves, faster than she should, and her claws rake across my face. Pain explodes, sharp and immediate, tearing through me with enough force to fracture my vision.
It is not memory. It is happening again, fresh, brutal, and unavoidable, my body reacting before I can stop it.
You let her get that close.
The voice again, colder now, certain in a way that makes it feel like truth.
I chose to keep the scar.
I chose to carry it.
And now it burns like it was carved into me only seconds ago.
“Scar!” Rhett’s voice tries to reach me, but it comes through fractured, distant, like it’s fighting its way through water.
The hollow doesn’t care. It pushes deeper, into the place where grief doesn’t stay clean, where it twists into something heavier, something that never softened with time.
Astrid drops to her knees in front of me, blood staining her mouth, her body shaking as she fights herself and loses ground with every second that passes.
Her voice breaks when she speaks, raw and desperate in a way that cuts straight through everything else, “Don’t let me…
” she chokes, her hands curling into the dirt as if she can hold herself together through force alone. “Don’t let me become…”
The rest never comes.
It doesn’t have to.
Guilt slams into me with crushing force, stealing the air from my lungs in a way that feels just as real now as it did then. The feeling has never dulled. Not once. Not in three hundred and fifty years. It lives in me exactly as it was the day I earned it, sharp and waiting.
The blade is in my hand.
I feel the weight of it, heavier than any weapon has a right to be, because it isn’t just steel. It is consequence. It is the line between what she was and what she is becoming.
She looks at me.
And for a single, brutal second, she is there.
Fully there.
Clear.
Present.
Herself.
Trust breaks through the madness in her eyes, and it guts me so completely I feel it split something open inside my chest.
You hesitated. The hollow doesn’t whisper it. It presses it into me, forces it into the space where doubt already lives.
You didn’t want to do it. My throat tightens, something raw catching there, because for half a second…
I didn’t.
And that half second stretches under the hollow’s influence, pulled thin and endless, made heavier than it ever was, until it feels like a failure instead of a moment.
You made her suffer.
No!
Not here.
Not now.
The refusal settles into me like iron driven deep. This is what five centuries teach you. Not speed or strength, it teaches you how to stand in the dark with something that knows exactly how to break you and not give it the satisfaction of watching you fall apart.
I drag it all back, every piece of it. The grief. The guilt. The memory of her blood on my hands. Still warm, still real. I take what the hollow is trying to twist, and I lock it down where it belongs.
I know what happened.
I know why.
And I will not let this thing rewrite it.
Using everything I have, I force my body to move. Step by step, I push back through the hold, the hollow raging now, denied what it wants, clawing at everything it has uncovered, trying to tear it open again.
The world outside my head comes back in fragments, Rhett shouting something I can’t quite make out, Bennett holding his line with a strain I can feel even from here, the dock lights overhead cutting through the dark in harsh strips of yellow.
But it keeps pressing.
Her blood on my hands.
Her body going still.
That last look burned into me in a way that will never fade.
You could have saved her.
My steps falter, the weight of it threatening to drag me under, but I force myself forward, refusing to give it even that.
The scar burns, not pain, but something chosen, something earned—a reminder I have never allowed to fade.
I carry it.
I own it.
And I keep moving.
Because if I stop, if I let even a fraction of this take hold…
I will not come back from it.
And I do not break.
The cold bite of steel meets my hands, real in a way nothing inside my head is.
For half a second, everything holds.
Then the hollow reacts.
It doesn’t release me willingly. The force of it rips through me like something being dragged out through bone, a violent suction that wrenches at everything it had sunk into, clawing its way free of my mind, nerves, and spine.
It takes with it heat, pressure, and something deeper that leaves me hollowed out in its wake.