Page 19 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter Nineteen

brOOKLYN

The circle felt alive.

Not metaphorically, but truly alive. As though it had lungs and breath and blood pumping through arteries sewn into the soil.

The very air within it trembled with a presence I couldn’t name, but felt in my marrow.

Gooseflesh bloomed across my arms as Laughing Crow completed the last invocation and stepped into the center of her ancestral magic.

Something shifted the instant she crossed that invisible threshold. It was like stepping into the eye of a storm. No chaos, no sound, just stillness so profound it bordered on violent.

The flames around the bowls did not sway in the breeze. They held perfectly still, glowing bright as stars but casting no shadows. The air was damp and warm and ancient. Like memory had seeped into the very bones of the earth and gathered now to watch me.

Terrified of what it may see… A monster?

Someone unworthy maybe? I tried hard not to dwell on that thought.

I didn’t know what I expected. Pain, maybe.

Judgment. A voice booming from the sky to call me what I was a cursed thing, a half breed monster who dared beg mercy from forces far older than she understood.

But nothing came. Nothing except the pulse of power stretching outward in every direction.

Laughing Crow stood a few paces from me, her black eyes sharp, unreadable, rimmed with the reflection of the flames. She was silent, but her expression was no longer purely wary. There was something else beneath the lines of her face now. Something like curiosity. Or perhaps grief.

“Do not lie in this place,” she said softly, voice barely louder than a whisper. A thick silver strand fell over one side of her face making her expression mysterious and chilling. “It will unravel you faster than any blade.”

I nodded once. “I won’t.”

Her gaze lingered on me a moment longer before she knelt, laying her palms gently to the dirt at her feet. Her eyes closed. She didn’t speak in words at first. Only in breath.

One inhale. One exhale.

Then she whispered, not in English, but in something older. Something raw. Her tongue shaped syllables that pulled at the lining of my skull, vibrating in the hollows of my chest. I couldn’t understand the words, but my body did. My blood did.

The language of spirits. Of bones.

Smoke coiled from the firebowls as if summoned, curling into shapes that didn’t make sense.

Feathers, teeth, rivers, wounds. My mouth was dry as dust. I could feel Dominic just beyond the circle’s edge, his presence taut with the kind of tension that preceded bloodshed.

He would never interfere, but I knew what it cost him to stay still.

The chant rose, a crescendo of elements spun into harmony, and the temperature dropped again.

Laughing Crow opened her eyes.

And looked at me.

“The Great Spirit hears your plea,” she said, her voice no longer fully hers. Something deeper rode beneath it, something that was chewing on the words like it didn’t know what to do with them. Like they were foreign. “You offer your life in exchange for your sister’s.”

I nodded, heart stuttering. “Without hesitation.” For whatever was lurking underneath the shaman’s skin spoke the truth. Alice was my sister in all things but blood.

The wind shifted.

Louder now. Not angry. Not hostile. But attentive.

Listening.

“Why?” she asked, her tone laced with suspicion just as before. But this time the question did not come from her alone. It echoed, dissonant, layered. As if a chorus of voices from beneath the soil and above the stars demanded an answer.

“Because she saved me,” I whispered, throat tight. “Not just from death. But from myself. Because she never looked at me like I was a weapon. A monster. Or a tragedy. She saw me as something worth seeing. Something good.”

I took a step forward, toward the center.

“She chose me when she didn’t have to. And I would burn down every version of myself before I let her die because of it.”

The flames blazed brighter. The circle of energy surrounding us shimmered, pulses of light running through the ground like veins in stone.

Laughing Crow’s breath caught and it was the first time I’d seen her startled.

“You would offer your life,” she murmured, “to the earth. To the old powers. Knowing they could and would take it?”

“I don’t care what they take,” I said. “Only that they let her live.” I locked my desperate eyes on hers. “Alice has to live.”

A silence followed. The deepest yet. Not even the fire cracked.

Laughing Crow lowered her head. And when she spoke again, it was softer, almost reverent. “You are not what I expected, Jumilin.”

“I’ve heard that once or twice,” I muttered bitterly, straightening up and dusting off my knees.

She chuckled, the sound dry, but not unkind.

“I have walked this land longer than you can imagine,” the shaman said.

“And I have met many who claimed to love. Claimed to sacrifice. But most of them wanted a bargain that did not leave them bleeding. You…” She shook her head.

“You speak as if you’ve already died. And perhaps that is why the spirits listen. ”

My throat closed. I didn’t know what to say to that.

The truth of her words cemented something inside me that I’d refused to acknowledge for a very long time.

I did speak like someone that had already died.

I lived like it too. I think long before I escaped the cages the first time I knew however this ended it wouldn’t be with me standing.

And strangely I was okay with that. Dominic shifted behind me as if to remind me I had people to think of now. My ribcage tightened painfully.

Laughing Crow turned her palms upward, cutting my train of thought. “Then let us ask not just for life,” she said, “but for mercy.”

She drew a blade from her hip, not silver, not iron, but obsidian. Pure and black as sorrow, a long feather dangling from the hilt.

She cut a line across her palm.

Her blood hit the earth, soaking into it immediately.

“Let her life be spared,” she whispered to the wind. “Let the fire that burns her be cooled. Let the voice of her magic be heard and untwisted.”

The wind answered.

It did not howl.

It sighed.

The smoke rose again but this time, it moved toward me.

Not like before, not like mist rising from wet earth or incense curling skyward in reverence.

No. This smoke had purpose. Sentience. It came like a memory long buried clawing its way back to the surface.

It curled around my chest, my arms, my throat, not strangling, not consuming, but weaving through the spaces between bone and breath.

It touched me like an old grief and a forgotten promise. Comforting. Familiar. Alien.

Marking me.

I tried to inhale, but the oxygen was too thick, too heavy with old names and older debts. My lungs burned with the weight of it. My heart thundered a warning, too fast, too loud, but I didn’t retreat. I couldn’t. The circle held me. The spirits held me. I was theirs now, at least in part.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I felt Dominic trashing against the bindings they must’ve placed on him and my blood curdled in my veins.

And then…

Pain.

Not the blistering kind that tears through flesh or the kind that sears through veins like wildfire.

This pain was deeper. Older. A quiet rending from within.

Like something long knotted around my soul was finally being unwound, fiber by fiber, strand by strand. Gentle, terrible. A sorrowful release.

As if someone had reached inside and untied a thousand invisible knots that had held me together, and in doing so, showed me how tightly I’d been wound all along.

I gasped. A sound more sob than breath, and collapsed to my knees once again.

The world tilted sideways. The firelight fractured. The circle blurred into nothing but echoes of wind and shadow. My fingers dug into the dirt, clawing at something solid, something real, but even the earth beneath me pulsed like a living thing.

And through the din, through the deafening roar of blood in my ears, Laughing Crow’s voice reached me.

Low. Steady. Certain.

“The spirits accept,” she said. “But they will take something. They always do.”

I nodded, or thought I did. My body no longer felt like mine. My awareness was held together by frayed threads. Gravity no longer obeyed. Time no longer moved. But her voice anchored me.

They will take something.

And I would give it. Whatever they asked, whatever they claimed, I would not resist. I had nothing left to barter except this. This one thing I had never dared to give freely.

Surrender.

The last thing I felt before the dark pulled me under was the spark of magic I had carried my entire life, the legacy of my mother’s blood, that quiet ember passed down in silence and shame, beginning to shift.

It didn’t go out.

It didn’t flare into destruction.

It moved.

Changed.

Not stolen. Not extinguished. Not exiled.

But claimed.

Not entirely mine anymore. Not entirely me.

A new shape.

A new bond.

The magic was now part of something larger, older, deeper than even blood.

And just before consciousness dissolved into starlit shadow, I understood:

It wasn’t only my plea the spirits had answered.

It was my belonging they had weighed.

And for now, they had allowed me to stay.