LIII
Heaton could have dissolved into cinders and smoke and crossed half the state in a single breath.
A ghost riding the dark medium with nothing human left but the destination.
But I was still bound to roads and doors and the weight of a living body.
So, Heaton suggested the human route, and we took the Nova instead.
The drive south had become its own kind of ritual.
Headlights carving narrow tunnels through the pines. The heater running harder than it should. His hand steady at the wheel while the bond revved between us like a second engine.
He never said much on those nights. The closer we got to Winter Quarters, the more the tether tightened, as if some part of us already knew what was coming.
By the time the Nova rolled to a stop outside the cabins, smoke was curling thinly from the chimney. Heaton killed the engine and got out first. I followed him, frost cracking beneath our boots as we crossed the narrow path to the porch.
Before he could reach for the handle, the cabin door swung inward, spilling a trapezoid of warm amber light across the frost-covered wood.
Ruby stood barefoot in the doorway, one hand braced on the frame, dark spirals spilling over one shoulder beneath the red ribbon tied through them. Firelight burned around her, turning the white of her dress almost ghostly against the dark wood.
“You’re late.”
“Had to take the long way out of town.”
Ruby’s eyes flicked past him to me, then back again. Whatever she saw in his face was enough to make her step aside without another word.
We brushed past her into the warmth.
Theo was already inside, feeding another split log to the fire. A neat stack of wood sat by the hearth, freshly brought in, and he crouched in the glow, broad shoulders bent to the work.
The cabin glowed softly.
Quilts were piled at the foot of the bed. A pair of boots dried by the fire. My favorite cardigan hung over the chair. My open notebook lay on the table, beside the thermos I had forgotten two nights ago and still hadn’t taken home.
Proof that the dead were not the only ones haunting this place anymore.
Heaton caught me taking it in. He had been saying something low to Ruby but stopped halfway through and looked at me instead.
“Don’t get sentimental, October,” he said flatly. “It’s still a ruin. Just with better blankets.”
The warmth in my chest cooled instantly.
He crossed the cabin in three long strides, checked the back window, tested the latch, glanced once at the bed, then once more at the fire, cataloging every variable in the room before he allowed himself to leave.
He usually siphoned in slower increments now.
Ambient heat. Borrowed static.
Thin, careful charges from the town itself.
Enough to stay solid. Enough to keep the tether from wrenching too hard.
But as the festival crept closer, enough had stopped being enough.
He needed the lower veins.
He needed the place that had killed him.
And real power, I was learning, always hurt.
Heaton looked at Ruby first.
Then Theo.
“This is a full charge.”
Ruby, perched barefoot on the edge of the heavy oak table, didn’t look up from the ball of static rolling between her palms. It was a tiny, writhing knot of gray light. Her white dress spilled around her ankles in pale folds that did nothing to soften her.
Theo stood by the stove with another armful of wood, broad shoulders filling the corner like a second wall.
“If it spikes hard,” Heaton said, looking at Ruby, “hold her down until it passes.”
My head snapped up. “Excuse me?”
Ruby’s mouth twitched. The thread of static curled once around her knuckles and vanished.
“You say that like we’ve never had to do this before.”
“I’m saying it because this one will be worse.”
That wiped the humor from her face.
Theo set the wood down in a neat stack and finally looked at Heaton. He didn’t speak. He gave only one curt nod, like a soldier receiving orders he had no intention of failing.
Heaton looked at me.
“If it gets bad, let them ground you.”
I folded my arms, pulse kicking at the base of my throat. “You say that as if I have a choice.”
“You don’t.”
I held his stare.
“Then don’t shut me out.”
He dragged a hand over the back of his neck, silver eyes fixed on mine.
“Then don’t come looking for me in it.”
He opened the door, and the cold rushed in around him.
I crossed to the window before the latch had time to settle. Outside, his shadow moved down the path toward the No. 4 mine, long and dark against the frost-whitened ground.
He didn’t look back. He never did.
He just kept going until the trees swallowed him whole, and the mountain took him.
Behind me, Ruby’s voice cut through the silence.
“Bed, October.”
I turned.
She was already dragging the blankets back with one hand, efficient as a field medic and about as warm. Theo had moved to the hearth again, though now he stood angled toward me instead of the fire, dark eyes watchful.
“I’m not a horse, Ruby.”
“No,” she said. “A horse would have the sense to lie down before it broke a leg. Bed. Now.”
Theo’s mouth twitched.
“I feel fine,” I lied, as a sticky, unnatural fever broke across my skin.
I made it one step.
Then the pull hit.
And it wasn’t just a top-off; it was a tectonic shift.
The toxic fumes hit me first.
I couldn’t breathe. Not because the room lacked air, but because my lungs were suddenly filled with the taste of sulfur and old metal. I stumbled back, trying to get away from a feeling that had nowhere to go.
My knees buckled.
Theo caught me before I hit the floor. He moved with blurred speed, hands catching my waist as he lifted me into his arms.
“Told you,” Ruby said, already climbing onto the mattress. “Heavy pull.”
Theo sat back against the headboard and settled me against him with startling care, my back to his chest, his body a wall of icy stillness behind me.
One arm stayed around my middle, firm enough to hold me in place.
The other supported the back of my neck as my head lolled weakly against his shoulder.
The coolness of him hit my fevered skin like rain on a burn.
Ruby curled up beside me, her chilling presence a balm against the heat crawling under my skin.
“Just breathe,” she whispered, her arm sliding over my waist to rest on Theo’s side. “It only lasts a moment. He’s stitching himself back together.”
Breathe.
Easy for her to say.
Beneath the mountain, Heaton was at his death site, drawing power out of the worst moment of his existence, and the bond was carrying the recoil straight through me.
I felt it all.
The choking collapse of earth and timber. The impossible, animal panic of trying to drag air into lungs already filling with smoke and dirt.
Then came the real horror.
The pressure.
The immense, grinding weight of the earth crushing down so completely my bones should have turned to powder. I tried to gasp, tried to scream, but my mouth filled with the phantom sensation of dirt pouring in, clogging my throat, burying the sound alive.
I gagged.
Theo’s arm tightened around my waist as my body folded. One of his hands slid to the base of my throat—not choking, not restraining, just there, cool and heavy, reminding my body where the airway was supposed to be.
But Heaton was still trying to shut me out.
I could feel that too. The cold-iron wall of him slamming into place, trying to seal off the worst of it before it reached me.
Don’t you dare . . .
My fingers bunched in Ruby’s dress.
I grabbed for the tether with every ragged breath I had left and pulled back, forcing air down into both sets of lungs until the smoke thinned.
Not enough to stop the pain.
Just enough to keep the dark from swallowing us whole.
The No. 4 mine didn’t let go easily.
For one terrible stretch of seconds, the cabin disappeared. There was only the mountain. The heat. The collapse. His hunger, driving steel hooks into the place where he’d taken his last breath and drawing power back out of it.
Slowly, the white-hot spike of agony faded into a dull, throbbing ache.
The fever broke in a wash of cold sweat, leaving me shivering and spent.
The world didn’t rush back.
It seeped in, one detail at a time.
The crackle of the fire. The scratch of Theo’s thumb stroking my temple. The weight of Ruby’s cold hand flattening briefly over my wrist, her fingers pressed to my pulse as if timing a detonation.
“There,” she said. “See? Still alive.”
I tried to push myself up, a foolish show of independence.
Theo’s arm stopped me before I got far.
“Stay,” Ruby said. “You can be stubborn later.”
I let my head fall back against the cool plane of Theo’s shoulder. The fever was gone, but the exhaustion was worse—a bone-deep weariness that felt a century old. I was limp, a puppet with its strings cut, held together only by the two bodies bracketing mine.
Ruby’s eyes drifted over the room, taking in the scattered notebooks, the cardigan over the chair, and the extra blankets.
A small, strange museum of a life being lived.
“Well,” she said, voice barely above a whisper. “Would you look at that?”
I followed her gaze, my own eyes heavy and slow.
“Before you,” she said, her voice softening into something almost reverent, “this place was just a stopgap. Now it looks like somebody might actually come back in the morning.” Her mouth tipped. “Even Heaton can’t deflect his way out of this one.”
I looked down at the blanket twisted in my fists.
“He still won’t let me go near the lower mines.”
“Because he’s not stupid,” Ruby said. “All our death sites hurt.”
Her eyes cut toward the black window.
“His just happens to come with smoke, suffocation, and no mercy.”
I looked at my trembling hands.
“He’s been doing this for a century,” I whispered. “Alone?”
Ruby’s expression shifted, softening into something ancient and weary.
“Listen, October. It hurts him not to be there, too. That’s what you need to understand. The whole damn mountain hurts. But staying away doesn’t spare him.” Her voice lowered. “It just starves him faster.”
I swallowed.
Ruby leaned in a fraction.
“But you?”
Her knee brushed mine beneath the quilt.