Sam attacked the desk with the desperation of a starving animal. Pages and pens and battered old books littered every inch of the stained wood. She sat hunched over a set of Emil’s journals, their spines cracked, their margins filled with desperate addenda in three different hands—she’d come to recognize Emil’s angular script, the neat slant of Lilly Ravencrest, and another, messier scrawl she couldn’t yet place. Light came from stubby candles jammed in bottles and coffee mugs, their flames flickering in the updraft from the ancient bookstore’s vents. The only other illumination was the steady, sickly glow of the protective runes set into the walls, which pulsed in synchrony with her heartbeat. Sam didn’t need the clock to know it was nearly three a.m.; the time pressed down on her, a physical presence, heavy as a migraine.
Her eyes burned from hours of translation, cross-referencing Latin, German, Polish, and the slurred, incoherent tongue of the tome itself. She had a splitting headache and a pit forming in her stomach, but she forced herself to keep going, pushing through the nausea that rose every time she caught the reflection of those runes in the shop’s dusty windows. Her own notes—a forest of dog-eared paper and post-its—were starting to blur and overlap. The whole world had become a single, sticky web of references, diagrams, and half-mad hypotheses. The air smelled of candle wax, sweat, and the faintly metallic tang of the blood she’d used earlier to activate the book’s lock.
The only other sound was the muffled madness of Peachtree Hollow echoing through the shop’s thin walls. Once or twice, she’d caught the flash of torchlight or heard the banshee wail of someone tearing through the night. Occasionally, the runes would spike in brightness, coinciding with an especially sharp scream from outside. It was like being on the edge of a battlefield, waiting for the enemy to breach the line. Sam kept her back to the windows. She was not about to give Nyxalloth the satisfaction of watching her flinch.
She flipped through Emil’s volume, eyes darting across the scrawled lines: “The containment failed. It feeds on chaos. The only chance is to reverse the blood channel. Ravencrest line only. Sacrifice?” The next page was a diagram of the manor, every room labeled with overlapping sigils and arrows, some leading inward, others out. She traced the lines with a bitten-down pencil, then slammed her fist on the table when she found herself looping back to the same damned dead end. The only way to rebind the entity—Nyxalloth, the Harbinger, whatever you wanted to call it—was a “consecrated blood rite.” One that required “the offering of flesh and will” from the bloodline that summoned it.
A Ravencrest.
Her heart dropped to somewhere around her feet. “No, no, fuck you,” she muttered, tossing the journal aside. The book landed on a stack of notes, sending the pile tumbling to the floor. Sam stood up, the movement sharp enough to rattle the glass of the candle jar and nearly knock over the inkwell at her elbow. The ink bled out anyway, a black tongue unfurling across her carefully annotated pages. For a second, she watched the spill with a kind of perverse detachment; it looked almost exactly like the blood pooling in the old photographs of cult rites she’d pored over in her research.
Sam clamped a hand over her mouth, bile rising. She paced the room in short, agitated circles, breathing hard, the soles of her Doc Martens slapping the warped floorboards. “There’s got to be another way. There’s always another way.” She didn’t believe it, not for a second, but she said it anyway, the words a ward against the unthinkable. She was not going to drag Lilly into this. Not after everything. Not after the past week, the last twenty-four hours, the way her little sister had clung to her in the kitchen after the nightmares. As if on queue, Lilly moved past her and headed towards the back where Hank and Tyrone were.
Sam grabbed the stained towel she’d been using as a rag and started blotting up the ink, hands shaking so hard she nearly ripped the page. Her eyes darted to the Ravencrest tome, which sat on its own pedestal, bound with the same brass-and-leather contraption that had bloodied her palm four days before. She’d come to hate the sight of it, but she also felt an irrational sense of kinship. The book knew what it was: a monster, a trap, a weapon. She envied that kind of certainty.
She forced herself back to the desk. She started over with Emil’s ritual description, translating it line by line, refusing to let the sense of doom close in on her. The more she read, the clearer it became: the rite didn’t just require blood, it required intent. “Must be of the line. Must offer, must name. The book will devour what is given. The entity is hungry; the greater the fear, the greater the power.” She felt sick again. Was that why it was happening now, why the town was going full Children of the Corn out there? Did Nyxalloth know that the only thing it needed was for Sam to panic, to break, and to offer up her sister (or herself, or anyone) on a silver platter?
She flipped to the next page, which was written in a more hurried, frantic hand. “It took Lilly’s blood,” Emil had written, the ink shaky and smeared. “She survived, but is not the same. The house protects, but only if the circle is complete.” There was a family tree, drawn in the margin, with names crossed out or circled. Emil. Lilly (the ancestor, not Sam’s sister). Two children, Benjamin and Amellia, both unmarked. Then, at the very bottom, an empty space, labeled “Successor?”
Sam’s hands began to tremble in a different way. She understood what Emil had done. He’d used his own children as a failsafe, a human battery to power the binding. That was the line he’d drawn: his own flesh for the town’s safety, his own family for the world. And if the line failed—if there were no more Ravencrests—the prison would break and the entity would run riot.
“Jesus,” Sam whispered. She thought of her mother, of the years of silence, the way she’d always seemed to watch Sam with both pride and bottomless regret. Had she known? Had she run away on purpose, to break the line and stop this from ever happening again? Or had she just been buying time, waiting for Sam to be strong enough to do what needed to be done?
Sam stared at her hands, the scars and ink stains and the thin scab where the tome had bitten her. Then she looked at the wall, where the runes pulsed softly, and beyond that, where the world was falling to pieces. She wondered what kind of person she would have to be, to make that kind of choice. To offer blood—her own, or worse, her sister’s—so that the town could go back to pretending nothing had ever happened.
The inkwell rolled off the table, hit the floor, and splattered her ankle with oily black. She didn’t move to clean it up this time. She just watched it spread.
From the back room came the muffled sound of Lilly reading aloud to Hank. Sam couldn’t make out the words, but the cadence was soothing, a bedtime story for the nearly dead. It made her want to scream. She wanted to call out to her sister, to say, “I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, but you need to go, you need to run, because I don’t think I can save you.” She wanted to say, “Don’t forgive me, don’t ever forgive me,” but all that came out was a raw, shuddering breath.
She walked to the Ravencrest tome. Its cover was still warm, almost alive, like a sleeping animal that would bite if provoked. She ran her fingers along the spine, tracing the embossed crest, the slick places where dried blood had sealed in the power. The book hummed under her touch, a low, inviting vibration that ran up her arm and into her chest. She wondered, for the first time, if it would matter whose blood was spilled. If the book would care, or if it would simply accept whatever sacrifice was offered, so long as the name was spoken and the will was strong enough.
She looked at her reflection in the glass—wild hair, eyes red from lack of sleep, lips bitten raw. She looked, she realized, like the women in the old daguerreotypes. Like the kind of ancestor who would murder her own kin if the occasion demanded it.
She picked up a pen, hesitated, and started writing possible solutions on a fresh page. She drew diagrams, wrote equations, copied runes, filled the margins with desperate, spiraling alternatives. She crossed out every one. None of them worked unless someone bled and died. It was Sanguinaria Ars, blood magic. Emil not only knew and practiced Sanguinaria Ars, but his whole family line did.
“What if it has to be me?” she whispered, not sure if she meant it or if she was just testing the sound of the words. The runes on the wall pulsed in response, brighter and hungrier than before.
She pressed her palm to the cover of the tome, and waited for it to answer.
In the cramped storage room at the back of the shop, the world shrank to three things: a battered recliner, an army cot, and the slow, shallow breathing of Hank Shaw. The little space was cluttered with overstock—old library discards, broken boxes, a stack of church hymnals used as a side table—but Tyrone hardly noticed any of it. His entire being had contracted around his father’s limp form. Every few minutes, he’d check for a pulse, or reach out to move a stray lock of hair from Hank’s brow, as if the smallest act of care might bring the man back from wherever the darkness had sent him.
Hank lay motionless beneath a checkered blanket, his face a study in gray and purple, lips flecked with dried blood. His hands, which once seemed too big for any book they held, now looked shrunken and weak. Tyrone sat beside him, elbows on knees, hands knotted together so tight the knuckles whitened and the wounds of his own recent fights stood out in harsh relief.
He didn’t cry. He’d promised himself that much, and so far, he’d held the line. But exhaustion carved him hollow. Every so often, a tremor would start at the base of his spine and work its way up to his jaw, making his teeth click, but he’d grit them together and force it down. He’d taken the job to keep his family safe, to keep everyone safe, and look at him now—sitting powerless while a demon or whatever-the-hell-else took his father and the entire town for a ride. He hated himself for not being enough. For not seeing the signs earlier. For not being able to protect even the people closest to him.
A soft creak of hinges and a shaft of candlelight announced Lilly’s arrival. She hesitated on the threshold, backlit and spectral, one hand wrapped around a tattered paperback. Tyrone recognized the cover immediately: The Moonstone Detective, one of his dad’s favorites. Hank had read it to him when he was ten, doling out the chapters as rewards for good grades or finished chores. Tyrone felt the ache sharpen behind his ribs.
“Hey,” Lilly whispered, tiptoeing over a pile of unshelved encyclopedias. She set the book on the hymnals, then perched on the edge of the cot. “How is he?”
Tyrone shook his head. “No change. Sometimes I think I see something, but…” He let the rest of the sentence dry up and blow away. “I don’t know.”
Lilly nodded, her face unreadable in the shifting candlelight. She tucked her knees to her chest and hugged them close, the book balanced on her lap like a secret. For a minute, neither of them spoke. They just sat there, united in their inability to fix what had been broken.
Finally, Lilly broke the silence. “I saw this on the counter, just after we carried him back in. Thought he might want to hear it.” She ran her hand along the battered spine, her touch reverent. “He used to read out loud to me, sometimes. After school, if Mom was working late.” She glanced at Hank’s still form, as if expecting the memory alone to be enough.
Tyrone nodded. “He liked voices,” he said. “Would try to act out the characters.”
Lilly smiled, a real one, thin but alive. “He did a terrible British accent,” she agreed. She scooted a little closer, cracking open the book to a well-worn spot in the middle. “I’ll try not to butcher it.”
She cleared her throat and began to read. “The detective knew, deep in his bones, that the answer was hidden in plain sight. But he also knew the killer would do anything—anything—to keep it buried.” Her voice, while quiet, was steady and sure, the cadence of a born storyteller.
Tyrone closed his eyes and let the words settle over him, a rare balm against the jagged edges of the day. He listened to the story as if it might stitch something back together, might pull Hank from the brink or lull him into coming home. Lilly read on, her words weaving through the cracks in the bunker’s plaster, a shield against the madness howling outside.
She paused between chapters, sometimes glancing up at Tyrone for a sign to stop, a permission he never granted. Occasionally, she’d watch Hank’s face, searching for a twitch or a sign of recognition. Once, when the story turned particularly grim—a child missing, a mother gone mad—she faltered. Tyrone reached across the narrow gap and gave her hand a squeeze. She squeezed back, grateful for the contact.
“This is what he’d want,” she said, voice a little rough. “Not sitting in silence. He hated quiet. Used to say silence just gives the bad stuff a place to hide.”
Tyrone managed a half-smile, the memory turning up the corners of his mouth. “He’s stubborn. Always was. If anyone can fight their way back from this, it’s him.”
Lilly went back to reading, the story’s mysteries unfolding alongside their own. Tyrone lost track of time. Sometimes the words of the story blurred into memories: Hank pulling him out of the ditch the first time he crashed a bike, Hank in the library reading aloud with that goofy accent, Hank warning him never to underestimate the secrets people kept from each other. Now, with his father motionless and his own failures gnawing at him, those secrets felt more important than ever.
Between chapters, Lilly looked up, her eyes searching Tyrone’s. “You did the right thing,” she said, so quietly it was almost lost in the whirr of the vent and the slow tick of the clock on the wall. “Outside. In the alley. It wasn’t him. Not really.”
Tyrone didn’t answer. Instead, he brushed a stray tear from Hank’s cheek with the side of his thumb, as gentle as if handling a newborn. “Don’t feel like it,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
They lapsed into silence again, this time a little less sharp-edged, a little more companionable. Outside, the world might have been ending, but in the little back room, the flickering shadows and the sound of a favorite story made the nightmare seem almost manageable.
Tyrone glanced at the cracked door, saw a sliver of candlelight and the hunched shadow of Sam at her desk, pacing like a restless ghost. He wondered what horrors she was finding, what burdens she was refusing to share. For a moment, he felt the same old anger at being kept out of the loop, but it fizzled fast. Everyone was carrying something.
Lilly kept reading, the sentences spilling into each other, voice unwavering. Tyrone sat back in the creaking chair, hands folded on his knees, and let the words do their work. For as long as the story lasted, it was enough just to keep watch. To be there. To wait for the next miracle, or the next disaster, whichever came first.
The candles burned lower as Sam forced herself back to work. Every shadow in the main room stretched and twisted, as if the walls themselves were conspiring to pull her under. She shut out the soft sound of Lilly reading to Hank in the back, the muffled comfort of it a sharp rebuke to her own obsession. She’d always found solace in words, in research, but now every page she turned felt like digging her own grave.
The table was a disaster zone. A half-dozen dictionaries, ritual treatises, and three different histories of the Ravencrest family ringed her like a barricade. She’d already memorized the genealogy—Emil, his wife Lilly, the children, the slow collapse of the bloodline until it arrived, shivering and furious, at her and her sister. The more she read, the more she saw the same patterns: children used as shields, ancestors sacrificed to save the rest, a legacy of violence and desperation masked by polite euphemisms.
She tried every angle she could imagine. She mapped out the architecture of the house again, compared it to other “binding” structures in old Europe, checked the math on lunar phases and ley lines. None of it changed the core requirement: “blood willingly given by the inheritor of the curse.” She scrawled out alternatives—donor blood, animal blood, transfusions, a Rube Goldberg plan involving a blood bank and a Bunsen burner. All dead ends. Each one she crossed out with more force, until the pen ripped the paper and left angry scars on the desk beneath.
Sam lost track of time, her hands stained with ink and blood and something sticky from an exploded highlighter. The runes on the walls started to pulse irregularly, almost like they were mocking her for trying to outsmart a system older than her country.
The room started to spin a little. Sam realized she hadn’t eaten since yesterday, hadn’t really slept in two days. She pressed her hands to her temples, squeezing until spots danced in her vision. Through the buzzing in her skull, she heard Lilly’s voice float in from the back room, reading to Hank about a detective who “knew the answer was hidden in plain sight.” Sam wondered what it would be like to have a life that made sense, where the worst thing you had to worry about was a book thief or a cheating spouse.
She looked at the Ravencrest tome. It sat on the desk like a stone, its binding twitching occasionally as if to remind her it was still awake, still hungry. She flipped it open to the first page, the one with the most recent blood signature—her mother’s, she realized with a jolt. There was a little note in the margin, a message that hadn’t shown up before: “Do not fear. It’s your choice.”
Sam’s hand hovered over the page. For a moment she considered calling Lilly in, showing her the entry, sharing the burden. She imagined the look in her sister’s eyes—shock, then terror, then that stubborn little set to her jaw. “I’ll do it if you need me to,” Lilly would say, just like she always had.
Sam’s hand curled into a fist. “No,” she whispered. “Not this time.”
She pressed her palm to the cover of the book. The runes on the wall flared, then steadied, pulsing in time with her own frantic pulse. For the first time, Sam felt a sense of grim resolve cut through the fog.
“What if it has to be me?” she said, and the silence that followed felt like a door swinging open in a dark house, cold air rushing in.
The book hummed, eager and waiting. Somewhere in the back, Lilly’s voice kept reading, steady as a lighthouse, as Sam stared down her inheritance and dared it to finish what it had started.