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??A Hallow Warning

Ember

A week after the honeymoon, Dorian was already back to work.

Dorian took the case without hesitation, and in just twelve days, he dismantled every charge, manipulating the legal system so flawlessly it was almost art.

They said it was just a child. Eight years old. Wide eyed. Fragile. Asa. That was the name the courts gave him.

But names were just masks.

He screamed at shadows, clawed at orderlies, spoke in a dialect dead for centuries. They labeled it trauma. Psychosis. Imagination.

But when he looked at me, when his ink-slick eyes met mine, it wasn’t fear I saw. It was recognition. Like he knew exactly what I was. Like we’d met before, long before I was born.

This wasn’t a boy.

It was a beast sewn into soft flesh. Three heads. One body.

Thirty-seven witches and warlocks left in his wake, ripped apart for the magic pulsing in their veins. He fed on power. Devoured it. Drank it down like divine nectar and came back thirstier each time.

Now the courts, so proud in their blind mercy, had assigned him to a private facility, a “paranormal psychiatric institution for gifted youth.” A cage with satin bars.

Pathetic.

Dorian read the sentencing once. Then he closed the file and smiled, slow and lethal.

“Justice doesn’t negotiate,” he said. “It eradicates.”

And we would. Together.

We wouldn’t wait for him to kill again.

We’d intercept the transport.

And bury what should’ve never been born.

We knew the route. Knew the time. Knew the weak points in the schedule the court’s transport system tried to mask beneath fake protocols and outdated surveillance. Dorian bribed a route clerk. I hexed a map.

We spent four days tracking magical traces until we knew the exact stretch of road where the van would be most vulnerable, Route 66, just past the ruins of a condemned gas station.

A suppression ward went up two hours before they arrived, stitched with ash and old teeth. The radio signals would die there. GPS would loop.

Magic would crawl back into the dirt, silent and blind. We’d masked ourselves beneath a ruined billboard, the shadows thick and writhing with anticipation.

The kill zone was set. And we were ready.

The van was late.

Dorian waited beneath the rotting skeleton of that billboard, his shadows curling beneath his boots like smoke starving for flame. I crouched beside him, breath shallow, eyes glowing faintly with spellfire. I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to. We were past words.

This wasn’t a mission.

It was retribution.

When the van finally appeared, gray, unmarked, crawling over the cracked asphalt like a hearse, it brought the stench of sulfur and something fouler.

Two guards up front. A child in the back. Except it wasn’t a child. It was a goddamn abomination wearing the shape of one.

We struck before the wheels stopped spinning.

Dorian yanked the door off the hinges with magic forged in the Veil, a blade of shadow sliding through the driver’s throat like it was butter. Blood coated the windshield, thick and arterial. I raised a single hand, my fingers curling inward.

The passenger’s heart ruptured inside his chest before he could even draw breath. He twitched, once, then slumped.

The rear doors burst open under Dorian’s will.

And there he was.

Asa. Or whatever his true name had been before he crawled into this skin.

Three heads, stacked like a curse from the old tongues. One smiled. One slept. One bared jagged teeth slick with fresh gore.

His middle face flickered in and out of visibility, white-eyed, stitched mouth leaking blood from between the seams.

The scent of magic rotted on him. Thirty-seven dead witches and warlocks fed his twisted evolution, their stolen power crawling through his veins like serpents.

“Vale,” he hissed through one of his mouths. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Dorian didn’t answer. He grabbed him by the collar, yanking his brittle, too-light body from the van and dragging him into the blue wash of moonlight.

“You’ve been busy.” Dorian hissed.

“I liked their screams,” he whispered, lip curling. “I’d kill them again if I had the chance.”

Wrong answer.

Dorian smiled, slow and cold. “Then scream for me.”

We didn’t just drag him. We dragged what he really was, the writhing, screeching mass that dared to wear a child’s skin, into the broken remains of a chapel that hadn’t heard a prayer in centuries.

The air inside was thick with rot and relics, the altar splintered, the crosses inverted. A place abandoned by God, but worshipped by something far older.

I carved runes into the stone floor with a bone dagger, not etched, carved, my blood soaking into the grooves as I sliced my palm. Each drop unlocked a curse older than language.

Dorian knelt across from me, muttering in the ancient tongue, his shadows crawling along the walls like sentient vines. Magic thickened, choking the light.

My fingers pulsed with fire and ash. His eyes glowed red, seething with the hunger of a justice no court would ever understand.

The child, Asa, the lie he’d worn, screamed. All three mouths opened at once, each wailing a different pitch. He twisted, black ichor oozing from his nose, his eyes rolling white. He tried to shift again, to hide behind some new illusion.

We didn’t let him.

“Ever wonder what happens to monsters when the gods stop watching?” I murmured, pressing my fire slicked palm to his chest. My magic surged, burning through skin and soul.

Dorian’s shadows struck next, horned, spiked, beautiful in their cruelty, piercing each throat at once before yanking the creature into the air. He convulsed, cracked, all three necks snapping like dry wood. Still alive. Still writhing.

I tore open his chest with a flick of my wrist and a whispered command, revealing the mess of bone and void where a heart should’ve been. “This is your punishment,” I whispered. “Not death. Exposure.”

He bled smoke and screams. Reality split at the seams around him. Dorian howled a curse into the night, a vow that froze the air and shattered the stained glass in the rafters.

Then the beast looked at me, only me.

His middle head, the stitched one, forced open its mouth, skin splitting, and with a voice soaked in decay and prophecy, it rasped, “The Hollow King is coming for you… and this world.”

The chapel shook. The candles exploded.

Dorian’s voice cut through the chaos. “What did he say?”

But I couldn’t answer, not right away.

Because in that moment, something ancient in me woke up. A thread of my power snapped loose like a leash breaking from its post. My hands trembled, not with fear, but with recognition.

When I finally spoke, my voice was nothing but truth.

“He wasn’t talking to you.”

After we ended him, we burned the body in Veilfire and buried it beneath salt and silver.

The air hadn’t felt right since.

Something shifted the second those words left his lips, something old, something watching. Like the world exhaled wrong and hasn't quite remembered how to breathe again.

Later that night, I sat curled at the edge of the bed, knees hugged to my chest, watching the fire chew through the last of the wood.

Its glow kissed the walls in flickering waves, but I felt no warmth. Just a weight pressing behind my ribs, coiled like a whisper I couldn’t shake.

“He said the Hollow King is coming,” I murmured, voice low, cracking. “And I believe him. I just… I don’t know who that is. Or why he sounded like he already knew me.”

Dorian came up behind me, his hand sliding into my hair, his thumb tracing the curve of my jaw. “Then we’ll find out,” he said, calm like thunder before a war. “And when we do, we’ll tear down whatever stands in our way.”

I turned toward him, my smile a blade sheathed in soft lips. “We always survive, Dorian. But this feels different. Bigger.”

He didn’t answer right away. He just kissed me, slow, deep, like he was trying to anchor me to now. To him.

And maybe I needed that.

Because whatever the Hollow King was, whatever he wanted…

He’s coming for me.

But he’d have to go through the devil I married first.