XLIX #2
Heaton drove his shoulder into Callum’s ribs. The momentum sent them both sideways, crashing through a banquet table in a storm of crystal and splintered wood.
They hit the ground in a tangle of limbs and fury.
Heaton was on top first, fists raining down, but Cal bucked him off with a supernatural surge and sent him skidding across the ballroom floor. Heaton hit the far wall and slumped against it, blue fire guttering weakly at his hands.
“It’s better than rotting here,” Heaton rasped, shoving himself back up onto one knee. “Or being stuck under your roof.”
“Ah, there it is,” Victor called from behind the column. “That property talk again . . . ”
“Shut it, Victor,” Cal snapped.
He rose slowly and brushed dust from his suit.
Then he strolled toward Heaton with lazy confidence.
“And I see you’ve upgraded to more . . . questionable company.”
His eyes found me behind Ruby’s shield.
He stopped in front of Heaton, looming over him.
“Tell me,” Cal said, voice smooth and terrifying. “Has he told you what happened to the last bright thing he found? The last human he claimed to protect?”
“Don’t,” Heaton gasped.
A wet, rattling plea.
Cal ignored him.
He crouched low, his movements fluid and menacing.
“And do you know what comes next, October?”
He caught Heaton by his hair and forced his eyes to mine.
“Poltergei.”
The old word seemed to blacken the air around it.
“A starving ghost who keeps spending power he doesn’t have doesn’t just fade,” Cal said. “He slips. First the mind frays. Then the self goes.”
His head tipped.
“And what’s left?”
He smiled.
“Violence. Appetite. Teeth.”
His grip tightened.
“And he’s so very close.”
The threat had barely left Cal’s mouth when Vera moved like a storm cell deciding to finally break.
Blue-white static tore out of her, splitting the space between the brothers with a crack that felt more physical than sound.
The blast hit Heaton and Callum at once and hurled them apart—Heaton sideways into the ruined remains of a pillar, Callum backward through a spray of sparks and collapsing glamour.
Ruby’s shield buckled.
The force shoved us all back. My spine slammed into exposed brick, the breath punching out of me as heat and cold collided in the air. Theo caught Ruby around the waist before her own barrier gave out completely.
“Vera!” Victor shouted. “What the hell!”
She stood in the middle of the wrecked ballroom, chest heaving, red curls wild around her face, electricity crawling over her skin in bright, furious veins.
Every candle in the room flared blue. The last scraps of glamour twitched and peeled away, gold sloughing from the walls to expose rot and ruin underneath.
“I won’t let you do it again!” Her eyes were fixed on Heaton, bright and furious.
Callum reformed across the ballroom, slower this time, shoulders rolling once as if Vera’s blast had actually inconvenienced him. But his eyes were already on her.
“She’s a hunter’s cub,” Vera snapped, voice shaking with more than rage. She pointed at me without looking away from Heaton. “October blood. October instincts. You think she’s different because she looks hurt?”
Heaton pushed himself out of the rubble in a stagger of blue sparks and smoke.
Then he was beside me, slamming back into reality, boots skidding across the floorboards as if he had been thrown from a moving train. One hand braced against the wall. The other burned weakly at his side.
He was breathing hard.
Or whatever passed for breathing in the dead when pain got involved.
“We should zap that little current in her chest right now, Cal,” Vera screamed over the roar of her own static. “Save us the trouble!”
Blue light snapped from her fingertips and struck the floorboards at my feet.
Heaton stepped fully in front of me, his hand igniting with a spark that looked pale compared to Vera’s inferno.
“Touch her with that static, Vera, and I swear I’ll drag you into the dark with me. Fading or not, we can still make it permanent, princess.”
The glamour gave a final, violent shudder.
Gold leached from the walls in real time, ruin surfacing like bruises under skin.
Vera spun, eyes wide and glassy.
“Really? You chained your afterlife to the one thing trained to end us all!” Her voice broke. “If you’re so desperate to move on, Heaton, then go! But don’t drag us into the void with you!”
The bond flared in the hollow behind my heart—fire and frost colliding.
His shame slammed into me. His debt.
The words still rattled in my head like loose teeth:
The last bright thing he found.
Cal’s smug expression cracked, replaced by a flicker of genuine alarm. He crossed the room in a few easy strides and stepped into Vera’s storm without hesitation.
Static snapped across his coat. Crawled over his throat. Sparked in his hair.
He didn’t blink.
“Enough.”
Cal caught Vera by the waist just as she swayed. He anchored her to his side, shadows expanding, swallowing the sparks until her fire didn’t just stop—a darkness so absolute snuffed it out.
“We’re finished here,” Cal said, his voice carrying over the dying storm. “This house is done entertaining you.”
He shot Heaton one last look—a warning, a dismissal.
“And if you’re going to go full Poltergei, little brother, have the decency to do it somewhere less sentimental.”
Smoke rose, thick and suffocating, swallowing them both. Vera’s red curls and the embers at Cal’s feet dissolved into shadow.
Then they were gone.
Silence crashed into the space they had left behind. Harsh and ringing and full of the things no one wanted to say.
The glamour failed all at once.
Velvet rotted. Chandeliers returned as black iron skeletons swaying over a gutted room. Victor stared at the ruin and dragged a hand down his face, sleeves tattered.
“Well,” he said weakly, “if tonight taught me anything, it’s that I really need to find that damn deed.”
Tethered to a murderer. Bound to a dead town.
Chained to a man who hadn’t told me the truth.
That was the only thing that felt real.
My brain retreated, pulling back into the white noise of survival, just as Heaton’s hand settled at my waist—cold and unfamiliar.
For the first time since I’d stepped into the Covington Hotel, I didn’t want his protection.
I wanted to tear myself free.