Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Phoenix
The scent of sweat, stale beer, and fried dough clings to the air like desperation.
Music pounds from all directions. Brass bands on balconies, drums in the street, some DJ mixing rap into jazz like it’s some kind of voodoo ritual.
Laughter bubbles up, but it’s too high-pitched, too rehearsed.
Even the chaos feels curated. I don’t trust it.
Ghost walks beside me, masked in black leather with a silver skull etched across his face. My own mask is bone-white and cracked, paired with a hood and a blade tucked down my spine. We’re just two more shadows in a city that lives in them.
Cheap plastic beads rain from balconies above, thrown by hands we’ll never see. People scramble for them like they’re gold. Flashing lights slice across their faces, giving them the illusion of joy. But the smiles don’t reach their eyes. Too many mirrored masks. Too many grins that don’t move.
I clock every movement. My boots hit the pavement in sync with the bassline, but I’m listening for the off beat, the rustle of steel, the click of a weapon, the footstep that doesn’t match the music. The kind that means I’ll have to draw blood to stay breathing.
Ghost keeps scanning the crowd, eyes darting under the mask. His fingers twitch near his waistband. He’s not armed like I am, but he’s coiled tight. Like he’s waiting for someone to step out of the past and gut him in the middle of Bourbon Street.
“You see something?” I murmur.
He shakes his head once, sharp and fast. “No. Maybe. Faces keep shifting.” His voice is low, barely audible beneath the noise. “I swear I saw Vale a minute ago. Just… standing there.”
My spine goes rigid. “You sure it wasn’t a reflection?”
He doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t have to. I know that look. He’s haunted and hungry. It’s how I used to look at graves.
Then I see it just over Ghost’s shoulder. A mask half-lit by neon. Black feathers curling off the edges, silver painted lips curved into a smirk I’ve memorized too well.
Raven.
My breath snags. A jolt of heat rushes through my chest, rage flaring fast and sharp. I push past a couple in body paint, eyes fixed on the figure, but when I reach the spot, she’s gone. Just air and footsteps and that smile burned behind my eyelids like a ghost brand.
“She was here,” I whisper. Not to Ghost, but to myself.
He turns toward me, all tension and edge. “Who?”
I scan the crowd, heart hammering. “Raven.”
For a second, neither of us moves. Then Ghost shifts his stance, and just like that, we’re back in sync. Whatever this carnival is pretending to be, it’s not joy. It’s a hunting ground dressed in sequins. And someone’s laid out bait with our names on it.
The air thickens the deeper we go, like the heat and bodies are conspiring to drown us. Voices overlap, a cacophony of pleasure and pretense. Stilt walkers in porcelain masks hover above us like wraiths. A brass band parades past with hollow eyes beneath gold-painted faces.
Ghost halts. He doesn’t slow, he stops dead in the middle of the crowd. His body is turned to stone. I nearly collide with him. Then I hear it too, a man’s laugh, high and sharp, just a little too close to Vale’s.
Ghost’s hand tightens around the burner phone in his palm, and I catch the flash of bone-white knuckles. His jaw is clenched so tight I can hear his teeth grinding.
I step closer, my shoulder brushing his. “What is it?”
He doesn’t answer at first. Just scans the street like he’s looking through it, not at it. “It was him. I saw Vale.” Ghost's voice cracks.
My stomach drops. I grab his wrist, not gently. “Where?”
He points to a narrow alleyway between two brick buildings. One of them pulsing with light from an underground club. The other is dark and quiet. Unwatched.
I draw the blade from beneath my jacket and start forward, but he stops me this time. “He was just there. Black mask, red scar across the side. He looked right at me.”
I peer into the alley. It’s empty. No footsteps. No shadow. Just a pile of rotting beads and a lingering smell of sulfur.
Gone. Like smoke.
I bite down on my instinct to call it what it is, impossible.
Because Ghost doesn’t lie to me, but something’s not right.
His skin’s too pale and clammy. There’s a twitch in his jaw, a far-off glassiness in his eyes I don’t like.
Like his mind is glitching, stuttering between now and some nightmare memory that won’t let go.
“We need to move,” I mutter.
Ghost nods but doesn’t move.
I lean in close, lips near his ear. “Don’t let him in your head, Ghost. Vale lives for cracks. He’ll dig his fingers in and rip you out.” That gets him walking again.
We press through the bodies, cutting diagonally through a group of dancers painted in neon bones. Ghost’s eyes keep glancing around, checking rooftops, doorways, and the faces beneath every mask. I match his pace, heart ticking faster with every step.
MV’s breadcrumbs are getting bolder. Timed sightings. It’s like someone’s leading us through a scavenger hunt from hell. Or baiting us.
I wouldn’t put it past Vale to use MV’s network against us. To twist even our ghost in the machine into a weapon.
I keep my hand on my knife and my eyes on Ghost because right now, I’m not sure what’s hunting him more, Vale or whatever the Hollow Sons left inside him.
We reach the warehouse on Burgundy Street just as the fireworks start. Blue sparks scream overhead, drawing the crowd’s attention skyward, covering our approach.
MV’s last ping led us here. Burned-out signage and graffiti scrawled over rusting sheet metal. The side door’s been left slightly open, like someone wanted us to notice.
Ghost doesn’t speak, just slides in first, blade already in his hand. He moves like muscle memory, all silent steps and sharp eyes, but I see the tension coiled in his shoulders. He’s too alert. Too still. Like something inside him is bracing for impact.
I follow.
The warehouse is quiet. One strobe bulb overhead flickers like it’s struggling to stay alive. It casts everything in broken light. Creating shadows that twitch when they shouldn't. The air stinks of copper and something wrong. Something sour rotting sweet.
We find him ten steps in. The lieutenant. One of Vale’s lieutenants. At least… what’s left of him.
He’s been arranged like a puppet. His arms spread, slumped against the far wall. His chest’s been torn open, ribs cracked like someone pried them apart with bare hands. A Hollow Sons mask has been shoved onto his face, but blood seeps through the cracks.
Ghost stares but doesn’t move. I scan the walls and freeze. It’s there, scrawled in thick, wet black across the concrete:
She rides with Death. He is already ours.
My pulse kicks hard in my throat. Whoever wrote it knew we were coming. Knew I’d be the one to read it.
“Ghost,” I say carefully. “Don’t look.”
But he’s already moving. His fingers brush the wall near the writing, like he needs to feel it’s real. And then his other hand goes to his chest, like something in him is tightening, squeezing. His breaths come faster, shallower. Not panic, but something else. Recognition.
“Blood for the hollow,” he mutters.
“What?” I step between him and the wall. “Ghost, talk to me.”
His eyes gaze up, and I hate what I see. They’re hunted, glassy, like he’s not fully here anymore. His voice comes low, raw. “I heard that phrase before. When I was still a cop. Some off-the-books ops tied to psych trials. They shut it down after one of ours shot his own partner mid-raid.”
My stomach turns. “Are you telling me…”
“I don’t know,” he cuts me off. “But something’s off. I keep seeing people who aren’t there. Hearing things I haven’t heard in years.”
I take his face in my hands, forcing him to look at me. “You’re here. With me. Right now. Whatever this is, we fight it together.”
His jaw tightens, but he nods. Only then do I let go, but I don’t turn my back. Because that message wasn’t just for me. It was for him, too. A warning. Or a claim.
And I don’t know what scares me more. The monsters we’re hunting, or the idea that they’ve already carved a piece of him out and made it theirs.
We make it back to the safe house just before dawn. No one speaks much.
Poison’s pacing in the kitchen, muttering to Kitty. Gypsy’s pulling up blueprints on MV’s tablet, trying to make sense of the breadcrumb trail we followed to a mutilated corpse and a message that felt more like a curse. Viper’s smoking by the window, her second cigarette since we got back.
And Ghost? Ghost just… disappears into the corner of the living room, staring at nothing.
I watch him from the hallway, arms crossed, heart rattling in my ribs like it’s trying to break free. His silence is worse than shouting. Worse than bleeding. He’s too still. Like he’s holding his breath inside his own skin. Like, he doesn’t trust what’s living there anymore.
When I finally pull him to bed, it’s not softness or comfort. It’s containment.
Ghost mutters something low under his breath. I don’t catch all of it, just the words ‘blood’ and ‘hollow’, but his voice sounds like it’s been scraped raw.
I don’t sleep. I lay there beside him, the sheets tangled between us, Glock within reach, eyes fixed on the slow rise and fall of his chest. Counting each breath like it’s the only thread keeping this moment from splitting open.
I don’t know what’s happening to him. But I do know whatever’s reaching for Ghost, it doesn’t get to have him because he is mine.
It’s the sound of his breathing that changes. It goes from slow and steady to fast and erratic. Like someone panting through clenched teeth.
“Blood for the Hollow,” he whispers.
I sit up, every nerve in my body screaming awake.
He’s upright. Eyes wide open, but there’s no one behind them. “She rides with Death,” he murmurs. And then his hand is on my throat. It’s not rage. It’s not passion. It’s not Ghost.
His grip tightens, slow but deliberate, like he’s following a command echoing in his bones.
I react without thinking and slam my forearm against his wrist. I twist and send my knee into his ribs. Ghost doesn’t even grunt. He just tilts his head, still blank-eyed, reaching again like I’m something that needs to be erased.
I grab the knife from under my pillow and press the tip right into the soft flesh between his ribs. Hard enough to break skin. “Dean,” I hiss. “Come back.”
Nothing.
So I shout it this time. “GHOST!”
His body seizes like someone flipped a switch. He jerks back, blinking rapidly. His hands tremble, then go slack. He stares at me, blood on his chest, my knife still shaking in my grip.
“What the hell?” his voice breaks. “What did I do?”
I don’t answer. I just drop the blade and grab his face, forcing him to see me, feel me. “You’re here,” I whisper, heart pounding. “You’re still here.”
He wraps his arms around me so tightly I can barely breathe, like he’s trying to anchor himself to something solid. “I didn’t mean… God, Phoenix, I didn’t mean to…”
“I know,” I say. But my hands are still shaking. My throat still aches.
And in the silence that follows, I can’t stop hearing those words in his voice. She rides with Death. He is already ours.
No. Not yet. Not on my watch.
Ghost’s hand hovers at his throat like he’s scared of his own skin. I want to tell him it wasn’t his fault. But I’m not sure which of us needs to hear it more.
I lie awake beside him, still. Breathing. Watching. Waiting for the next time the Hollow tries to pull him back.