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“H arrow?” I gave him a moment to come back to himself. “Are you with me?”

“God, I wish I wasn’t,” he rasped, his voice raw from puking.

“I need Anunit’s help, and she claims it will go easier if she can borrow you for a while longer.”

“I haven’t felt this bad since I got strep back to back in the eighth grade.” He slumped on his bones. “I could hear your conversation. I’m good with the plan. Just maybe let this be the last time?”

Apparently, he had finally reached the end of his rope. I couldn’t say I blamed him. Anunit was running him ragged. Once we got home, I had to figure out how to block her from possessing him, or else he would never know peace.

“Thank you for doing this. Seriously. You’re going above and beyond.”

“I owed you.” His gaze fell to the floor. “I owed him.”

“Not after this.” I ducked down to catch his eye. “After this, we’re square. No debts. No grudges. No nothing. I mean it.”

Sticking out his hand like an olive branch, he asked, “Friends?”

Smiling until my cheeks hurt, I shook it hard. “Friends.”

“I’ve always wanted to see the East Coast.”

Between one breath and the next, his posture shifted, and he got to his feet. “We should go.”

“Right now?” Things were starting to snowball, and I was being swept along. “Of course right now. That was the plan.” It was happening too fast but not fast enough. “It’s just…” I wet my lips. “What if I can’t do it?”

Butting Harrow’s cheek against mine, which wasn’t awkward at all, Anunit promised, “I will not let you fail, Frankie Talbot.”

“Okay.” I shook out my hands. “What do I?—?”

Anunit grabbed me in a bear hug, and the room dropped out from under my feet.

We touched down in a bathroom the size of a shoebox, and my heart thundered in my ears.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I pitched my voice low. “I’ve never seen the bathrooms.”

“This god has a disturbing fixation on cats.” She indicated a mural in the corner I hadn’t noticed yet that looked like Buttons was peeking around the side of the toilet. “I would expect such from Egyptian gods, but there is no reason for Dis Pater to make a cat his entire personality.”

The slightly modern cant of her words left me wondering how much of Harrow she was absorbing while she was inside him, but I didn’t have time to let my thoughts wander. I had a mission. And the first step, now that we had confirmed we were in the right place, was finding the saint’s finger bone and then making our exit. I would prefer to destroy it elsewhere, when I had time to be more cautious, but I was willing to keep my options open.

Shoving me into a corner, she got down on hands and knees and pressed her nose to the crack under the door. She drew in a few breaths, tilted her head, then glanced back at me. “The house is empty.”

Palms sweating, I wiped them dry on my pants. “You’re sure it’s safe?”

“I cannot promise you safety, but the god is not here.”

“Good enough, I guess.” I helped her up then leaned around her to open the door. “Let’s get searching.”

“Do you recall how you found the bones of my kin?”

“I touched them while they were in the ground. That taught me their resonance. Once I knew that, I was able to track the stolen ones to where they had been taken.”

“The same theory applies here.” She aimed, without fail, for the kitchen. “You touched spirits trapped in the enchantment. You have only to close your eyes and let your senses guide you to that source.”

“I…hadn’t thought of it like that.” I might have been too hard on her. This advice was helpful. “Here goes nothing.”

Focus. I could focus. I was great at focusing. Not like I was standing in a god’s bathroom. Or like that god would murder me for real if he caught me breaking and entering. Nope. No worries here. Just focus .

Matty’s absence hurt the most, so I zeroed in on that. The joy at finding his soul, the grief at leaving him behind. I couldn’t touch him, but I recalled the brief sensation as I swiped my hand through him.

Then came Vi. I had picked up more from her, especially this last time, but there wasn’t a strong enough connection there to guide me. The contact had been too brief. But Rollo, our only successful extraction, had left an impression.

The stickiness of the magic. His determination to get free. The resistance as I fought the enchantment.

I would never forget how terrified I had been to hold his soul in my hands, how afraid I couldn’t meld the two, or how I used extreme measures to save him.

A faint throb drew my attention, and I put my hands out in front of me, allowing the sensation to guide me. I bumped into a couple of walls then smacked into a table. I caught a vase full of flowers seconds before it toppled and decided I would keep my eyes cracked before I lost all hope of a stealth mission.

When I checked behind me for Anunit, I discovered she had abandoned me for her own pursuits.

I hadn’t intended for us to split up, but she ought to be safe enough on her own.

No one could get past Dis Pater’s wards. Except, for some reason, me. He would expect his home to be otherwise secure. But, given how fast he showed up after I began prying Vi out of the parade, I knew he would sense the moment I destroyed the bone. He would not be happy with me, but I would figure that part out later.

Hopefully before he killed me.

Again.

That same icky-sticky sensation lured me to the rear of the house, to a closed door I pegged as the master bedroom. As much as I didn’t want to know about anything that might happen behind said closed door, I shoved it open and invited myself in anyway.

The décor belonged in any upscale beachside hotel. Lots of blues, whites, and tans. Bland but nice. I could tell money had been spent to achieve the aesthetic. I followed the sensation into what I assumed was the closet, but as soon as I stepped inside, I knew I had made a mistake.

“Hello, mouthy girl.”

Pulse clanging in my ears, I spun around, ready to run, but Dis Pater blocked the doorway.

Swallowing my panic, I searched for indicators I had tripped a silent alarm or bumped a ward, but I couldn’t sense a thing that would have prompted him to teleport in almost on top of me.

“Looking for this?” He held up a cloche with a finger bone mounted on a stand under the glass dome. “I knew you would come running as soon as you pieced it together.” He curled his lip at me. “I don’t know where your savior complex came from. Must be the Alcheyvāhā in you.”

Gods really loved speaking in riddles. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not Alcheyvāhā, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“How can I have Alcheyvāhā in me but not be one of them?”

Anunit had imbued me with a portion of her power in order to protect them. Maybe that was what he meant, but I doubted it would be that straightforward based on the conversation I overheard between him and the smoky-voiced man. Not that I was about to confess to eavesdropping on them.

“You cost me a source of power when Anunit handed you the mantle and you stole the Alcheyvāhā.” He tapped his thumbnail against the glass. “That means you owe me a new one.”

Trawling my memories, I pinpointed what Dis Pater told me while I was helping Kierce locate the missing Alcheyvāhā bones after I questioned his intentions toward them.

“Some things are sacred even to gods.”

Apparently that was a big, ol’ honking lie. “You were feeding off the Alcheyvāhā.”

There had been no reason for him to remove the bones and risk Anunit’s wrath. Their power had leeched into the soil over the centuries, creating magically infused earth. I had fed from it myself. So had Josie. It had potency like a drug, which, hmm.

I should have considered that soil, not the cemetery, was the problem. Good thing Josie was so dead set on me kicking my grave-dirt-upper habit. If this was any indication, I could become addicted to the unlimited power of the Alcheyvāhā. And fast.

Just as I had told Kierce, I didn’t have to sweat getting too big for my britches. I had siblings ready and willing to cut me down to size whenever I needed it. And sometimes even when I didn’t.

“Everyone does it, and as long as no one gets caught, we all look the other way.”

How had I been so na?ve as to believe the gods would leave a power source alone out of respect for the dead? Other gods had killed the Alcheyvāhā. Of course those same gods had violated the burial grounds.

No wonder Dis Pater had been so strung out when the site near Savannah was discovered. As a vocal advocate for protecting their resting places, he knew it would place him under close scrutiny from his peers who would expect him to fix the problem.

His desire to kill everyone who learned of the burial grounds was starting to make more sense.

He wasn’t protecting the dead. He was cleaning up after himself and the other death gods.

“And because that was taken from you, you decided to take my family from me?”

“Live long enough, and you’ll discover how far you’ll go to keep living. The rations we split aren’t enough for anyone to live on. Do you realize how many death gods there are in the world? Every culture has at least one. Most have three or four. Ninety percent of them have been forgotten. Erased from history along with the religions that spawned them. But they cling to life by their grubby fingernails thanks to what amounts to digging through trash for leftovers.”

“That’s what you call a preexisting condition and not my fault.”

Deflecting blame rather than embracing it? Go me! That might be a first.

“The transfer of power into a living guardian has reinforced the ancient wards protecting the burial grounds set by the last living guardian. No one can access the Alcheyvāhā now. No one but you . The workaround that’s kept the peace between death gods for millennia just quit working.”

Put like that, I was even more confused as to why Ankou had dropped in to save the day. You would think his god would also be eager for my downfall. Though, I suppose, the payoff might be worth it in terms of the chaos this power shortage would create among those who lacked a secondary food source.

Dis Pater was admitting I had an entire pantheon of deities gunning for me.

“You control the tap, so to speak.” He continued his tirade. “As long as your heart beats, your very existence reinforces the protections. You are starving beings who are already ravenous.”

Well, that explained why Anunit had defaulted to the guardian position. I was willing to bet any living guardian was un living the second they stood up to gods who wanted to feed on the burial grounds.

Would it have killed her to spell out the fine print before having me sign on the bottom line?

Or maybe it was the possibility it might kill me that had kept her twisting my arm that day until I agreed to her terms without full disclosure of how they might affect me.

Time. I needed to buy time. I had to keep him distracted. “How did you get to my brother?”

“All I had to do was put a drink in the hand of a pretty girl, and he was mine.”

And all Dis Pater had to do was dunk the bone in a liquid to create the enchantment potion, meaning he could do it on the fly. To anyone. Anywhere.

Even Rollo, who couldn’t have been dosed in the house, was an easy target while he was searching for answers in the city. Those nights he ate while he was out, which made tampering with his drinks simple.

The glass he remembered in his hand when I quizzed him in the parade hadn’t been in his office. I knew. I looked. Maybe his memories got jumbled and what he meant was there had been something off with a drink he was served but hadn’t realized until it was too late.

“Leyna helped you.”

“No idea if that was her name, but I like it. It’s got love interest vibes. I’ll write it down to use later.” He basked in my confusion, and I let him, knowing he couldn’t resist an opening to hear his own voice. “He went on a date with a girl in a band. A sylph. She bought him a drink at the bar where they were playing to thank him for his help loading and unloading their equipment.”

I could picture it with ease. Matty was precisely the knight in shining armor type who would help a damsel in distress. Though usually it was just in and out of her pants…

“What do you expect me to do? I can’t break my word to Anunit.” She wasn’t the forgiving type. “I don’t know how to raise or lower the wards on the burial grounds.” I spread my hands. “I haven’t exactly been trained up yet.”

“You want me to hand over your brother on the hope that one day, eventually, maybe, you’ll grant me access? With your brother in hand, you have no reason not to offer the same deal to one of my rivals in exchange for their protection.” He laughed darkly. “You’ve got twenty-four hours, mouthy girl.”

To boost his power? To allow him to ascend to the top of the death god food chain? Both options sounded like all-around terrible ideas. “That’s not enough time?—”

“That’s all your brother has left.”

Panic stabbed me through the heart, and I couldn’t breathe through the soul crushing force of it.

“Deadlines suck, right? I hate them.” He clucked his tongue. “But they’re a part of life.”

“If he dies, even if it takes me the rest of my life, I will find a way to kill you.”

“I love drama. In novels. In real life, threats come across as pathetic.” He lifted the cloche once more. “Help me, and I won’t need this. I can set everyone free, and then you can pat yourself on the back for saving your brother and your friend and the rest of them from a fate worse than death.”

As he lowered his arm, a blur of motion smashed into his side and knocked him to the floor.

Finally.

Anunit slashed Harrow’s blunt nails down Dis Pater’s face, drawing blood, and bent down to hiss.

“You will pay for your sins with your life.” She knocked the cloche from his hand. “How dare you?—”

Glass shattered, shaking me out of my stupor, and I lunged for the rolling finger bone.

“Get off.” Dis Pater struck Anunit with bolts of electricity that sizzled across her skin, his strikes ten times more potent than Kierce’s. “Who even are you?”

Anunit shouted in pain, the cry morphing into a vicious growl of determination, and Dis Pater’s eyes shot wide in surprise that he wasn’t slowing her down. Too bad it was Harrow’s body paying the price.

On my hands and knees, I reached the small metal stand and pried the bone from its fastener.

“Kierce,” Dis Pater yelled when he noticed what I was doing. “Kierce.”

For a few precious seconds, I thought Anunit somehow prevented him from completing his summoning.

But when the front door smacked into a far wall, and distant footsteps pounded closer, I remembered Kierce always appeared on the beach. He had to physically cross the wards. Only that had slowed him.

“We need to go.” I scrambled to my feet. “Anunit.” I reached for her. “We have to get out of here.”

As often as I told myself Kierce would never hurt me, I didn’t want Dis Pater to prove me wrong.

“Anunit?” Dis Pater recoiled, the color washing from his cheeks. “What are you?—?”

Ozone filled the room when Kierce burst in, his gaze fixing on me. “Frankie?”

“Don’t just stand there,” Dis Pater snapped, kicking his legs harder. “Don’t let her get away.”

“No.” Kierce stumbled back, his nails digging into the doorframe to either side of him. “Master, please.”

“Don’t argue with me.” Dis Pater wrestled with Anunit. “Your girlfriend has my relic, and I want it back.”

Glancing from Dis Pater to me to the bone must have clicked the pieces together in Kierce’s mind.

“Frankie.” He planted his feet. “Go.” His nails lengthened into talons. “Now.”

“How dare you disobey me.” Dis Pater thrashed under Anunit. “Restrain her.”

“No,” Kierce rasped even as his claws slid off the wood, his feet dragging him closer to me.

“Anunit.” I fisted the back of her shirt. “We got what we came for.”

Harrow might be a witch, but he wasn’t strong enough to tussle with a god and win.

“He’s been feeding on our people.” Her eyes blazed up at me. “How can you suffer him to live?”

So, her omission during my recruitment hadn’t been a tactic. She hadn’t known the other gods were feasting on her kin. Which meant Dis Pater was in for a world of hurt now that he had let it slip.

We couldn’t kill him on the spot. We didn’t have the equipment. I wasn’t even sure how you killed a god, but the Alcheyvāhā were dead. Other gods killed them. That meant it was possible. But not here. Not with Kierce fighting to protect me at what I was certain would prove to be a great cost to himself.

“Anunit.” I willed her to hear my resolve that he wouldn’t get away with it. “This isn’t the time.”

With a disgusted noise in the back of her throat, she spat on Dis Pater’s face then took my hand.

And if fish-shaped bits of dry cat food spattered his cheeks too, well, I pretended not to notice.

Seconds later, we stood in the guest bedroom at Vi’s, and I had to block out how I left Kierce behind. I had to focus on destroying the bone, freeing the souls, and then…

Then I could figure out what to do about Kierce. About Dis Pater’s hold over him.

“How do I do this?” I had to engage Anunit, keep her from jumping back into the fray and killing Harrow the next time a lightning bolt struck true. “Can I break it in half and call it a day? Do I grind it into powder? Does it need to be dissolved in acid?” Methods for destroying magical artifacts weren’t pretty, but they were effective. “Anunit. Please. I’m not going to let Dis Pater get away with what he did to the Alcheyvāhā, but your people are dead. Mine are still alive. Help me save them. Please. ”

“Grind the bone to dust, mix the powder in water, and drink it.”

Dumbstruck, I stared at the bone pinched between my fingers. “Do what now?”

“You must assert your dominance over the enchantment. To do that, you must devour the caster.”

That sounded like cat logic. Tremé hadn’t cast the enchantment. He was, at most, the anchor for it.

But maybe that was just me, splitting hairs because ohmygod were things about to get disgusting.

“Okay.” I shoved out the door and bounced off Jean-Claude. “Don’t let Kierce in the house.”

“Did y’all have a fight?” He chased after me with a dripping paintbrush. “He disappeared in the middle of helping me roll on a new layer of that epoxy with the color chips. Vi will have a coronary if I don’t have it done when she wakes up after I promised it to her as a birthday present.”

“Her birthday was four months ago.”

“Hence the coronary.”

“Tell whichever Suarez is with Matty that I need him.” The closest mortar and pestle were in Vi’s room, so that was where I headed, and Jean-Claude stuck to me when he realized I had a bee in my bonnet. “Harrow got banged up, so he could use a once-over when you get a second.”

“What’s got you so worked up, cher ?”

Lifting the finger bone for him to see, I let it do the talking for me.

I mean, not literally. It was a finger. Fingers don’t have mouths. And…yeah.

Twenty-four hours. Matty only had twenty-four hours. Twenty-four tiny little hours.

As much as I hated to bump Vi down the priority list, Matty had surged right back to the top.

Pulse racing in my ears, I shoved those worries out of my mind. I skidded into Vi’s room, aiming for her apothecary table where she tinkered when inspiration struck but she didn’t want to change out of her pajamas to test a theory.

Her mortar was carved from the remains of a relative’s tombstone. I didn’t hesitate as I dropped the finger bone in and removed her matching pestle from its drawer. I wasn’t as careful as I normally would have been as I smashed it to bits, working out my frustration. I didn’t get every lump out before stealing the glass on Vi’s bedside table, tipping her pitcher to fill it, then dumping every speck of the mix into the water.

The grains hadn’t hit bottom before I turned it up and gulped it down.

“You did not just do what I think you did.” Josie stumbled into the room. “That’s disgusting.”

As the gritty mixture slid down my throat, I had to agree with her, but I didn’t have time to argue.

“What happened to we listen and we don’t judge ,” Pascal asked, his voice blurry with exhaustion from clinging to Matty for longer than his usual shift. “You literally just lectured me on what my face says when my mouth isn’t moving.”

“I never said we watch and we don’t judge .” She gagged. “She swallowed a man’s crushed finger bone.”

“I thought that was headache powder.” He coughed into his fist. “That’s very, uh, necromancer-y of you.”

“Anunit,” I yelled, blocking out their bickering and how much it reminded me Matty ought to be here to rag on me instead of Pascal. “Nothing’s happening.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth than magic flooded my limbs, dripping from my fingertips.

“You okay over there?” Josie drifted closer. “You look weird.”

“Your hair is floating.” Pascal made a circular gesture with his finger. “Should it be doing that?”

Energy fizzled along my skin, crackling and popping. Pressure built behind my breastbone, shoving outward, and my feet lifted off the floor. I hovered between Vi on her bed and where Pascal, in Matty, stood. The moment I stepped between them, I felt it. A warm thread tying them to me, a slow trickle of heat that pooled in my stomach like a hot meal.

I was devouring souls. I was consuming victims’ life forces. I wanted to vomit.

This bond made me no different from Lyle, after he became a dybbuk. It made me a monster.

These people weren’t dead. They wouldn’t be dying if not for Dis Pater. A death god shouldn’t be killing to feed himself. That wasn’t his role. His domain was the afterlife. He had no right to impose his will on the living.

“You must focus on the individual souls within your grasp.” Anunit cupped my jaw with Harrow’s fingers. “You can feel them.”

“I can.” I tasted bile in the back of my throat. “There are so many of them.”

“Do you remember how you used the skulls of my kin to locate each skeleton’s missing bones?”

A memory of Kierce teaching me to do just that surfaced, and the queasiness intensified until the backs of my eyes prickled with the threat of tears. “Yes.”

“Apply the same method to identifying your brother’s soul among the threads.”

Anxiety forced my head to shake in a denial that I could hope to isolate one person among so many.

“You fondle his soul twice a day, five days a week.” Josie punched an arm in the air. “You got this.”

“I don’t fondle anyone,” I played along with her, allowing her jibe to ease the dread balling in my gut.

She was right. I didn’t handle his soul the same as I did the Suarez brothers’, but that was because he slept while they animated his body. He was always in there. He never left. But I had that contact daily. Twice daily. And I had for years.

Allowing the familiarity of Matty to wash through me, I skimmed the bonds humming between me and the victims trapped in the enchantment. I focused on the whole of him. His laugh. His eyes crinkling at their corners when he smiled. His sense of humor. His deep love for his family.

As if a divine finger had plucked a string within my chest, an answering twang reverberated through me.

“I’ve got him.” I could have kissed Anunit for her guidance. “I can feel him.”

“Imagine the cord binding him to you as a knot coming undone. Then, and only then, allow the cord to slip through your fingers.”

“Okay.” I pushed through the visualization, and a sharp prick stung me. No wonder Dis Pater had felt it when I tugged Rollo free. “I don’t…” I shoved down my rising panic. “I don’t feel him anymore.”

A thud snapped my eyes open to find Pascal lying on the floor in a crumpled heap.

As I watched, blue light drifted from his still form, coalescing in the air above Matty’s body.

Pascal.

“What happened?” I lost my buoyancy and hit the floor, rolling my ankle from the unexpected force and ending up on my knees. “Pascal?”

“Pascal?” Josie dropped beside our brother’s body. “Matty?”

“H-he’s in there.” Pascal hovered above his host, rubbing his arms. “But he’s not right.”

I crawled to him and placed my palm on his forehead, searching for his soul and coming up against an oily sensation writhing under his skin. Maybe oily wasn’t the right word. Goopy? Syrupy? Then it hit me.

Rollo had kind of, well, melted, the more I handled him, but he had started out as solid as a soul got. But Matty had been gone so long, he was already liquid. Almost like the enchantment was a web and Dis Pater was the spider.

That chain of logic meant whatever got caught in the web was hit with a paralyzing agent, explaining why no one except the newbies in the parade fought to leave. But, over time, as Dis Pater fed, the souls liquified. And, eventually, he sucked up every last drop.

“He was gone too long.” I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans. “I’m going to have to do this manually.”

“Manually?” Josie squeaked as she clutched his hand. “What does that mean?”

“Rollo had trouble reentering his body, and he was gone no time compared to Matty. Matty’s soul is in there. I can feel it. But it’s like when the last piece of a puzzle has a broken tab. You can put it in the right place, but it still won’t fit.”

Maybe Matty’s soul sank in fast because his body was used to cohabitating with spirits. The act was a familiar one for him. But his own soul, unused to leaving his body, was either too weak or too confused to lock in place.

That, or Dis Pater had consumed so much of him that, as I explained to Josie, his soul wasn’t the correct shape anymore. Altered beyond recognition. Not that souls had a form, exactly. But still.

“Can you fix it?” Josie laced her fingers through his. “Will he be okay?”

“We won’t give him a choice.” I exhaled through my teeth. “Give me some room.”

After Josie scrambled back, I sank into the core of my power. I entered that peculiar state of being in my body and out of my body, allowing my spectral hand to reach for Matty. I sank to the wrist in his chest, a tremor in my hand, but I coddled his frantic spirit and held it steady.

The edges of my memory glowed and wavered as I tried to recall what, exactly, I had done to Rollo.

What remained of Matty’s soul was weak, too fragile for me to fumble. I had to be careful. I had to get this right. Unlike with Rollo, I could tell there would be no second chances.

“Breathe,” Anunit soothed. “You can do this, Frankie Talbot.”

“You’ve got this, Mary.” Josie sounded close to tears. “Bring our brother back.”

Power flooded my palms, fusing his soul in place with the same ease as I had crushed others. Before I could retract my hands, his gasp filled the room, and his eyes flew open.

“Mary…?” His gaze spun a full circle before his lids snapped shut again. “I…”

Palm to his forehead, I could sense him now. His soul felt settled. Weak. So weak. But secure.

“Jean-Claude.” I screamed for him, even though he stood against the wall. “Physically, is he…?”

“We won’t know for sure until he wakes,” he said after a quick examination. “I’ll carry him to his room and check him over again there.” He cut his eyes to Vi. “Will you go after her next?”

“Yes.” I didn’t hesitate. “I don’t know how long I’ve got before…” Dis Pater sent Kierce. “I’ll start now.”

“What about me?” Pascal glowed on the edge of my vision. “How can I help?”

“Go with Matty.” I would feel better if he had an extra set of eyes on him. Especially when, with any luck, the doctor was about to have his attention divided. “Tell Jean-Claude if there’s any change to his condition.”

“You know the steps,” Anunit reassured me as I struggled to sink into the right headspace.

The process with Vi wasn’t exactly the same. I had touched her soul, many times, while she was astral projecting to visit me or when she came to help with the Alcheyvāhā. Her bold spirit and big heart were easy to find once I understood what I was looking for, and I held my breath as I allowed her knot to unravel from the rest and glide through my fingers like a silk ribbon.

Pressure behind my eyes caused me to wince as I traced the path her soul had gone.

Pinpricks of agony swept through me, tingling in my limbs, convincing me it had been a success.

A whistling inhale snapped my attention to the bed where Vi’s eyelids fluttered before cracking open.

“Frankie,” she rasped, her voice a dry whisper. “I knew…you…”

“Shhh.” I poured her a cup of water before remembering what I had used her glass for, but Josie was ahead of me. She ran into the kitchen, grabbed a fresh glass, and skidded to a stop beside me. “Jean-Claude is with Matty, but he’ll examine you next.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Don’t move a muscle.”

“Don’t think…I…can.” She huffed a laugh, accepting the drink Josie poured her. “Go…to your…brother.”

“I have to do this a few more times before then.” I withdrew from her to focus on the remaining victims. “Anunit?” I skimmed the ball of threads, tangled and frayed, unable to tell one person from another, terrified one wrong move would result in mass casualties. “What do I do?”

“There is only one thing you can do.” Anunit’s grim tone curdled my gut. “You must set them free.”

Set them free carried an ominous undertone. “What about the ones like Matty?”

“You know the answer.”

“They’ll die.” I saw plain as day how it would happen. “Without help, they won’t make it.”

“Vi made it without you.” Josie attempted to raise my spirits. “Maybe the others will too.”

“Vi has years of experience with astral projection, and she wasn’t caught as long as Matty. Anyone in there longer than she was, anyone without that talent, won’t have the means to join their spirit to their body.” I heard the edge in my tone and tempered it. “I don’t want to kill these people.”

“ Cher , you don’t…have a choice.” Vi took another sip of water. “Trust…me. Death is…kinder.”

“I need a minute.” I exited the room. Shut the door. Paced up and down the hall. “I can’t do this.”

Sliding my fingers through my hair, I tugged on my scalp until I worsened my stress headache.

I wanted Kierce. To tell me what to do. To explain how to fix this. To hold me when it was done.

I wanted him.

Full stop.

We hadn’t known each other for long, but he was already a critical pillar of support for me. I looked to him for answers on divinity as well as morality. He was a good person. Yes. He had done bad things. No. I couldn’t lay them all at Dis Pater’s feet. But he was so much more than met the eye. So much more than he knew. And if Dis Pater had his way, if Kierce ever figured himself out, I wouldn’t be there to see it unless I freed him.

“He’s asking for you,” Jean-Claude said from Matty’s doorway. “Two minutes. Tops. Hear me?”

With a curt nod, I all but ran to my brother. I sat beside him on his mattress and threw my arms around him as best I could. “I thought you... Damn it, Mary. I can’t lose you. I love you. I love you so much. You have to finish getting better, okay? You can’t leave me alone with Josie. I can’t handle her by myself.”

A rustling exhale that tried to be a laugh wheezed out, and then he moved his lips in silent words.

“I can’t hear you.” I leaned down. “Can you try again?”

“Set…them…free.”

They might die. Some of them will die. You almost died.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to hesitate. I wanted there to be a different answer.

But he had been trapped longer than Vi. He knew better than anyone what the others endured night after night. The enchantment might muddle them until they weren’t certain what was happening, which would be a kindness, or it might leave their minds intact, forcing them to act out a predetermined script.

How much worse would it be, for your body to move through automatic steps while your mind screamed at you to stop, to run, to break out?

“Okay.” I would make peace with my actions later. “I’ll do it.”

For courage, I laced our fingers, allowing me a small reminder that I had done what I set out to do. As convinced as I had been that would be enough, I was no longer certain that was the case. Guilt choked me, tightening around my throat like a noose.

Most were paras, so they were heartier than humans. That worked in their favor. They had accepted the risks of attending an auction too, which meant they had known their safety wasn’t guaranteed. But still.

I had driven Dis Pater to this. Even if I knew—I knew —that if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else using the relic for their gain, I couldn’t erase the knowledge that these people had been selected to suffer as punishment for their degrees of separation from me.

A faint twitch of Matty’s fingers in mine gave me the courage to take the final steps.

Closing my eyes, reaching deep within myself, I chose threads at random. I allowed their knots to unfurl and their souls to glide through my hands and disappear from the edge of my consciousness. I hissed as the connections between us broke, each one a sharp sting that radiated through me.

As I fell into a rhythm, I lost count of the victims. Even though I hadn’t fed off the souls for long, I grew exhausted from the toll of releasing their energy. Each one that left drained me further, as if they were reclaiming a portion of their unwilling donations on their way out.

The hope it might help them survive made it easier to keep going, ignoring the mounting pain.

I wasn’t sure how long I sat with Matty, unraveling the tangled lives Dis Pater had knotted together with his use of the relic. But after setting the last one free, a wave of exhaustion crested within me, washing away the pain. And everything else too.