Chapter 9
absent
Smoke curled in the air, thick and low, hugging the shattered stone like grief that didn’t know where else to settle, and Callie—wherever she was, wherever this was—felt it as more than atmosphere, more than scenery, because it wasn’t only visible. It had weight. It had taste.
Old stone and candle wax, a thread of church incense that tugged at memory without giving her the decency of context.
And under it—quietly, insistently—a second burn: bitter, medicinal, wrong, the kind of smoke that didn’t comfort so much as flatten, smoothing the sharp edges of fear into something obedient and numb.
The front of the monastery’s roof was gone. Dulled moonlight pierced the ruins in pale, deliberate shafts, catching drifts of ash and dust still falling from what remained overhead, as if the building itself were still trying to decide whether it was finished collapsing or merely pausing. The great doors had been reduced to a hail of splinters by force, the arches over the entrance now rubble at the bottom of the steps, and even that looked less like a break-in and more like a verdict.
The scent should have dispersed. The ceiling was gone, the night wide open above them—
and yet it lingered anyway, collecting in thin, stubborn pockets that clung to broken arches and pooled in corners as if the spell didn’t realize it had been injured.
Footsteps hurried through the threshold and into the sanctuary, careful and fast, the crunch of boots on broken tile announcing the arrival—except the sound didn’t behave like distance should. It landed too close. Not imagined, not muffled by space, but sharp and intimate, as if the shattered tile were under her own skull instead of across a ruined floor.
No names, no voices, no face to recognize—just urgency, tinged with the kind of panic that comes from something almost lost, or something already gone and not yet admitted.
Then metal rang out.
A sharp clang cut through the ruin, clean and deliberate, and for a split second it made the ridiculous, sacrilegious shape of a church bell in her mind—except it was struck wrong, off-key, angry, the sound of a hymn being interrupted mid-note.
The blue mist shuddered in response, thinning in one corner as something rolled and cracked, and Callie understood without understanding: not collapse. Interruption.
Another clang followed—boots, motion, impatience—someone kicking the damn thing over, trying to let the open night air finish what their magic had started.
Ahead, near the altar, a woman shrouded in black knelt.
Alone, bloody, and stone-faced. Her shoulders trembled, though her spine did not bend, and the posture was wrong for prayer—too rigid, too furious, too held—like the body was performing restraint because nothing else would work. One hand hovered over her knee, the other gripped a red orb that pulsed, still feeding off the last scream in the room.
Jess.
Callie watched from somewhere that didn’t exist, with no body and no breath—only the knowing—and it struck her with a nauseating clarity that she wasn’t standing in the ruin like a witness. She was caught in it. She was the lens and the wound.
She wasn’t in the vision.
She was the vision.
Jess’s face wasn’t stricken. It was stripped, laid bare with grief, rage, and regret so pure they had fused into a single expression, the kind you only see when a person has passed the point of bargaining and is deciding what to burn down next. Her jaw worked once, as if she were trying not to speak, as if speaking would finish her off.
The figures that approached didn’t speak; they just moved closer, backlit by the light, and Jess still hadn’t seen them, not yet. They came past fallen beams and destroyed pews and rubble that used to be beautiful, past something—someone—on the ground behind the broken stone, and Callie caught only a glimpse of pale, soft grey, flecked with torn silk glimmer, dusk bleeding into twilight.
Unacknowledged.
The bitter scent stirred again, weak and wavering now—too thin to hide the room the way it wanted to, but still present enough to smooth the air, to dull the moment, to make horror easier to look at than it should have been.
The ruby orb flared in Jess’s hand, churning like stormwater, and the air snapped with ozone, sharp and metallic, that familiar wrongness that belonged to raw power and aftermath. Jess’s jaw clenched, her breath hitched, and she was preparing to exact retribution—not justice, not balance. Retribution.
And then something changed.
A hand took her wrist.
Steady. Warm.
Not to stop her, but to ground her.
Small. Certain. Familiar in a way the ruin didn’t deserve.
And Callie, watching from nowhere, looked down as if looking down would make sense of it, as if her eyes could catch up to what her mind already knew.
She could see Jess. She could see the hand and the orb.
But she couldn’t see herself—no warmth, no trace of her body, no breath against the cold cathedral air.
Only absence.
And the absence had weight.
Like it had already happened. Like the world had already made room for it.
Tonight, she woke up sharp and breathless, not sobbing, not screaming, but startled in the quiet way that’s almost worse—as if someone had said her name in the dark and then walked away before she could answer.
The room was still. The heat clicked on. Pipes sighed. The house made its ordinary settling noises, and for a moment, she clung to them like they were proof of sanity.
But for one ugly second, the room smelled wrong—smoke and old incense, that bitter medicinal edge still clinging to the back of her tongue like residue she hadn’t earned—and then it was gone, swallowed by drywall and laundry detergent and the small mercies of a typical night.
Callie lay there staring at the ceiling, heart beating too hard, too fast—not panic, not yet, but agitation that wouldn’t find a place to land. Jess. The orb. The ruin. That grey softness behind the rubble that no one had acknowledged, as if grief had triaged what mattered and she hadn’t made the list.
For all the devastation and chaos revealed in that moment, one truth settled with slow, brutal certainty.
She survives. My Jessemay lives.
Even without her. Even with the pain.
Callie sat up, muscles tight, skin prickling, awake in a way sleep couldn’t fix. Disturbed, yes—but also sharpened, like the vision had filed her down to something simpler and more complicated.
“This is what love looks like,” she whispered, not sure who she was saying it to.
“When you don’t ask for anything back.”
A beat.
Then a flash—not prophecy exactly, not fear, but recognition that landed like a cold coin in her gut.
Oh. Yeah.
I picked this one.
She swung her legs out of bed, the unease still humming under her skin, and whatever came next—questions, answers, Solrien’s scolding, Isabel’s grim honesty—could wait until morning.
“So I’d better start acting like it.”
Callie clutched the blanket to her chest, gasping. The image still seared behind her eyes. Jess, boiling with magic and grief, kneeling before something lost.
She fell back to the mattress to stare up at the ceiling, her heart throbbed once, then again.
For all the devastation and chaos revealed in this moment, one truth was clear.
She survives. My Jessemay lives.
Even without her. Even with the pain.
And Callie knew, with the beginning of a cold, bone-chilling clarity.
This is what love looks like when you don’t ask for anything back.
“I’m going to save Jess.”
A beat. Then a truth.
“And I’m going to die.”