Page 21

Kieran

Son of a bitch. That vile son of a bitch.

Silas.

Time had shaped him—broadened his shoulders, silvered the gold at his temples—but I’d have known him in a crowd of ghosts. My brother. My betrayer.

For one impossible second, my heart clenched with a stupid, staggering kind of relief. He was alive. He’d made it out.

But that second passed.

And the storm came rushing in behind it.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” I growled, stepping forward.

His eyes—so much like mine—flicked between me and Henry, then settled on Dahlia. He didn’t smile. Didn’t threaten. Just looked. Calm. Measured. Controlled.

That alone made my skin crawl.

“I could ask the same,” he said coolly. “But I imagine the answer is more complicated for you.”

I moved faster than thought. In an instant, shadows surged from beneath my boots, twisting up in an instinctive wall between Dahlia and him. Thick and dark as smoke. My body followed, blocking her with mine, shielding without question.

She startled behind me, but didn’t step away. Brave as always.

Silas’s expression barely flickered. “Still using fear to speak, little brother?”

“Don’t call me that.” My voice was low and vicious, my hands curled into fists that ached with restraint. “You don’t get that anymore.”

His gaze lingered on the shadows coiling at my back. “You’ve grown stronger.”

“Don’t pretend you’re proud.”

“I’m not,” he said softly. “I’m surprised. I didn’t think the locket would leave enough of you behind.”

“You chained me to it,” I snapped. “Left me to rot in that artifact while you walked free. Don’t act like you mourned.”

“I did what I had to—”

“Spare me,” I cut in, stepping forward again. The shadows moved with me, thickening like a second skin. “You sent that thing after her. That hellbeast. You knew I’d follow if she was hurt. You used her.”

Silas blinked, then shook his head. “I didn’t send anything.”

“Bullshit.”

“I couldn’t have, even if I wanted to,” he said, voice quiet but steady.

“Why not?” My tone turned razor-sharp. “Too busy burning down another family?”

He didn’t rise to it. Didn’t flinch. Just stared at me with a tiredness I didn’t remember from before. Something old and brittle behind his eyes.

“Because I have no magic left,” he said. “Not a flicker.”

I stared. “What?”

“When I tampered with the Rite... when it extended my life—whatever pieces of our power I had left, they burned away. It was part of the price.” He looked down at his hands like they still shocked him.

“I’m alive. But I’m empty. No runes. No spells.

No shadows. I haven’t conjured a spark in over two centuries. ”

I didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to believe him.

“You expect me to swallow that?” I asked. “That you sacrificed everything, not for power, not to save anyone, but just to exist ?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t my intent. Maybe my cowardice. But I swear to you, I didn’t send the creature.”

The words hung there, brittle as glass.

I looked over my shoulder, just briefly, to make sure Dahlia was still behind me. She was. Her hand hovered near my back, not quite touching—respecting the barrier I’d built—but there . Always there.

I turned back to Silas.

“Then who did?” I asked.

His jaw flexed. “That’s why I’m here. To warn you of what is coming. Some skeletons don’t stay in their closets, and some people don’t stay dead.”

I didn’t lower the shadows. Not yet. I couldn’t. I needed them like armor.

“I don’t trust you,” I said. “I don’t forgive you. And if you so much as breathe the wrong way near her—”

“I know,” he said. “And for what it’s worth… I don’t blame you.”

A gust of wind rattled the porch rail. Somewhere inside the house, a floorboard creaked.

Before I could ask what the hell Silas meant by some people don’t stay dead , the porch shifted again.

But this time it wasn’t the wind.

Silas’s eyes darted to the side a half-second too late—just as Thea stepped from the shadows behind him and drove a stun gun into the side of his neck.

The crackle of electricity split the air. Silas seized once, his body rigid, then dropped like a felled tree with a grunt.

Dahlia gasped. Henry swore.

Thea didn’t even blink.

“Took you long enough,” she muttered, crouching beside his crumpled form. She yanked a pair of zip ties from her coat pocket, bound his wrists in two sharp tugs, then pulled off the red scarf around her neck and shoved it firmly into his mouth.

Silas groaned as she knotted it behind his head. “That’s for showing up uninvited,” she hissed. “You get bonus points for trauma-dumping, though. Really classic villain shit.”

“I was questioning him,” I growled, still breathless from the whiplash of fury and confusion in my blood. “We could’ve—”

“He’s not dead,” Thea said flatly. “Which means we can question him later. Somewhere he’s not standing in a doorway like the fucking Crypt Keeper.”

Henry stared down at the now-gagged man. “I, uh… have questions.”

“Get in line,” Thea replied, already hauling Silas toward the porch rail. “Someone open the back of the SUV. We’re taking him home.”

I couldn’t argue. Not really. My mind was still spiraling.

He was alive. Magicless. And not the one who sent the beast.

Which meant someone else had. Someone worse.

“We still need the journals,” I muttered.

Dahlia nodded, swallowing hard. Her hand was on my arm now, warm and steady. “I’ll help Henry gather them. Thea can keep your shadow-cloaked psycho calm.”

I snorted. “That could apply to either of us.”

She smiled—barely—but it grounded me all the same.

Henry led her inside with a weary glance back toward the porch. “We’ll need at least two boxes, maybe three. I’ll grab Jane’s old trunk. And the cookie tin.”

“You really keep cookies in that thing?” Thea asked from the driveway, where she was wedging Silas into the backseat like awkward luggage.

“Cookies and some things that go better with whiskey,” Henry called over his shoulder.

I watched them disappear into the house—watched Dahlia touch the doorframe Jane once warded, as if feeling the echoes of what still lingered.

Then I turned back to my brother, trussed up like a lamb for questioning, blood humming with shadow and doubt.

We’d come for the books with answers to our questions, but just ended up with more.