Sam’s fingers dug bloody crescents into the desk. The ink from her notes had seeped into the grain, leaving the surface tacky and blurred, all meaning dissolved by repetition and error. She pressed her face to the paper and inhaled the chemical sharpness, the tang of burnt-out candles and the softer, almost sweet stink of blood—her own, and whatever else the tome had asked for over the last two days.
A chill licked her neck, but it was nothing compared to the cold inside. The Dusty Gnome was still, except for the scritch of Sam’s pen and the slow, hollow boom of bodies hurling themselves against the front door. She had wedged a bookcase across it, then reinforced the jambs with lengths of broomstick snapped to fit, but she doubted it would help if the wards failed. Already, the runes above the threshold pulsed in fitful, dying cycles, like a child’s glow-in-the-dark stickers left too long in shadow.
The town outside was a broken record: chanting, a rising tide of “Nyxalloth, Nyxalloth, Nyxalloth,” followed by a brief silence, then a synchronized thud of flesh and bone hitting wood. Sometimes it was joined by the dull clatter of stones against the windows, or by a flung bicycle that left a dent in the sheet-metal book drop. The noise had become background, like the distant roar of a highway—Sam noticed it only in the moments when it stopped.
The first time she’d tried the protection ritual, she’d spent almost half an hour drawing the circle on the floor in salt and chalk, triple-checking every line against the notes she’d copied from the Ravencrest tome. The entity had laughed at her, a thick, oily chuckle that resonated from the walls. The circle lasted four minutes. The next time she tried iron filings and vinegar, which only corroded the tile and made her gag. In the last hour or so, she’d layered so many failed symbols on the wood that the air was thick with lime dust, and the floors looked like someone had tried to finger-paint the apocalypse.
The candles—once a comforting oddity, a touch of old-world ambiance in a modern shop—now guttered and died in less than five minutes, snuffed by drafts that seemed to flow from the cracks in the foundation. Sam found herself relighting them every few minutes, hands shaking so hard she sometimes snapped the matches in her fist. When the candles failed, the runes faded faster. When the runes faded, the hallucinations crept closer.
She took inventory: her left hand was black with soot, two nails cracked below the quick, a long slice on her forearm scabbed but not clean. Her eyes stung and watered constantly, and when she checked the bathroom mirror, she saw capillaries burst in both whites, making her look feral and haunted. Her last meal was a granola bar scraped from the bottom of a box, eaten dry and barely chewed.
The Ravencrest tome sat open to the blood rite, a stain already blossoming across the diagram where her cut finger had bled out the previous attempt. She reread the Latin phrases, forcing her mind to translate, but the words swam and doubled, as if the book itself wanted her to fail. “Consecrated by the bloodline, offered by flesh and will…” The rest trailed off, the margin filled with the messy, terrified scrawl of Emil’s final days.
Sam blinked, forcing herself to focus. She needed to check on Hank. She had somehow forgot to check on him when she got back and now as she remembered him, guilt began gnaw at her.
She crept to the storage room, stepping carefully to avoid the broken glass and the worst of the dried blood. The cot was empty. Hank’s blanket, the one with the faded checks and the cigarette burn near one corner, was folded at the end, and his boots—still splattered with black, still reeking of the alley—sat neatly side by side beneath the cot. Sam checked the bathroom, the back office, even the old mop closet where her mother sometimes hid birthday presents.
Nothing.
She stood there, hollowed out by dread, trying to reconstruct the moment she lost him. Had he walked out while she was working? Had he been taken, like the rest? Or was he part of the mob outside, smashing himself to pieces against the locked door, only waiting for the wards to finally fail?
The idea hit her like a punch: If you’re not the solution, you’re the problem. She slumped against the wall, head spinning with exhaustion, then pushed herself upright and staggered back to the front. The chanting had grown louder—so loud it vibrated in her teeth—and the pale blue glow from the runes barely lit the entrance.
She took up her post at the desk, pulled the tome to her chest, and tried again. This time she drew the sigil on her own skin, scraping the chalk into the soft hollow of her collarbone, and then pressed her palm flat to the page.
It burned. Not metaphorically—there was an actual, searing pain, like the time she’d caught her wrist on the side of the pizza oven during college. The chalk hissed and sizzled, then melted into nothing. She watched in horror as the line of the sigil crawled up her neck, leaving a faint, ink-black spiral in its wake. She gasped, bit down on her knuckle to keep from screaming, and tasted blood.
The pain faded, replaced by a cold so deep she could feel it in her teeth. Sam blinked hard, and the world came back into focus—clearer than before, every detail sharp enough to cut. She could see each candle flicker, see the pulse in her own wrist, see the faint blue-green shimmer of the runes as they stuttered and nearly died.
Something moved across the floor, dragging a sound behind it like fingernails on old parchment.
Sam jerked her head up. The shop was empty, but the air rippled, as if the space was being folded from a different direction. She forced herself to breathe, clenching her fists until her nails bit deep enough to draw more blood. “You’re not real,” she said to the empty shop. “You’re not real, you’re not—”
A chorus of voices laughed back at her, the sound wet and gurgling, as though it came from a throat not built for laughter.
Sam hunched over the tome, reading the words aloud now, her voice shaking but getting stronger. “Ex sanguine, ex umbra, ex anima. I call the seal, I name the binding—”
The chant outside the door swelled, matching her rhythm, mocking her. “Nyxalloth, Nyxalloth, Nyxalloth—”
The temperature dropped another ten degrees, and the windows glazed over with an instant, opaque frost. Sam felt the sweat on her back freeze, a thousand little needles of ice pinning her shirt to her skin. She pressed on, louder now: “In the name of the line, I offer—”
The book slammed shut on her hands. She screamed and jerked away, barely able to flex her fingers. The pain was so sharp she saw stars. The voices doubled, then tripled, twisting into a chorus that filled the shop.
A shadow slipped across the far wall. Not a trick of light, not a hallucination. A real, three-dimensional thing, moving without substance but throwing every other shadow into wild relief. It crawled up the bookshelf, paused at the highest shelf, and then peeled away from the wall to hover, barely visible, at the edge of the circle Sam had drawn on the floor.
It waited. Sam could feel it waiting, just out of reach, savoring her terror like wine. The sweat froze on her forehead, dripped down, and pooled in her eyebrows.
She tore her eyes away and checked the runes again. Three of the six were out, no more than dead chalk lines on the paneling. Only the one over the door still glowed, pulsing faintly.
She tried to stand, but her legs folded. She landed hard, chalk and candle wax puffing up around her in a dirty, ashen cloud. She wanted to give up, wanted to crawl into the back room and just let whatever was coming finish the job. Instead, she curled around the tome and forced her eyes open, hoping the nightmare would end if she just kept reading, just kept trying.
That’s when the hallucinations really started.
At first, it was just a flicker—Lilly’s face, framed by darkness, lips moving but making no sound. Then it sharpened: Lilly, trapped behind glass, beating her hands against an invisible barrier, mouth open in a silent scream. The vision doubled, then quadrupled, until the shop was crowded with Lillys, each one mouthing her name, each one more desperate than the last.
Sam pressed her fists to her temples and shut her eyes, but the voices found her anyway. “You did this. You brought her here. You broke the chain, you started the fire, you failed—”
She rocked back and forth, whispering, “Stop, stop, stop,” but the voices only got louder.
A new shadow slithered down the hall, longer and thinner than the last, and this one whispered in a voice Sam recognized immediately.
“Samantha,” it hissed, curling the name into something obscene. “You always wanted to be the hero. You always wanted to save the day.”
It sounded like her mother. Or what she imagined her mother would sound like if she’d lived long enough to become a monster.
Sam clawed at her own arm, desperate to wake up, to find any sensation that was real. She dug her nails in until they drew blood, and the sight of it—bright red against the blue-white of her skin—snapped her back for a split second.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked up. Every window was blacked out now, the only light the dying flicker of the last candle and the faint blue shimmer over the door.
A thud shook the frame, so hard it rattled the books on the closest shelf.
Sam pushed herself up on numb knees and shuffled to the window. Outside, a wall of bodies pressed close, their faces blank and eager, their eyes rolled back to show nothing but white. Some were kids, some were ancient, some wore the t-shirts of the local high school, some wore nothing at all. All of them chanted, all of them watched.
She pressed her palm to the glass. Instantly, the nearest face turned, its mouth stretching impossibly wide.
It pressed back, matching her touch, leaving a smeared streak of blood and saliva on the outside of the window.
Sam staggered away, back to her circle, back to her failing wards. She tried the incantation again, but the words came out as a croak. She forced her voice louder, but this time it cracked in the middle, breaking on the word “line.” She slumped, arms wrapped around herself, and started to sob.
The room closed in. The floor rose up to meet her. She was sinking, drowning, dying by inches.
The last thing she saw before the world blinked out was a vision of her mother, standing in the doorway, lips sewn shut and eyes weeping black. The figure leaned close, whispered, “Finish what you started,” and vanished in a wash of darkness.
Sam curled around the Ravencrest tome and waited for the world to end.
Sam didn’t know how long she lay there—could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours. The ticking of the clock had given up at some point, battery dead or time itself broken, so all she had was the measured in-and-out of her own breath and the shifting brightness of the blue runes overhead. They guttered once, then stabilized. She realized, with a kind of dull surprise, that she was still alive.
She rolled onto her back, the floor cold through her clothes. Her cheek was crusted with chalk and ash; her hands were so numb she couldn’t feel her fingers at first. For a few glorious seconds, she almost believed she’d woken up in her college apartment after a bad night—her hangover from hell, a disaster of her own making. Then she opened her eyes and saw the smeared lines of salt and blood, the wards stuttering along the walls, and the ugly thud of fists on the shop’s facade. The nightmare was waiting, just where she’d left it.
Sam sat up, pushing aside the Ravencrest tome. She meant to grab a candle and relight it, but her arm knocked into a box shoved under the front counter. The whole thing spilled, and a scatter of loose photos and battered old receipts fluttered across the tile.
She blinked. Her mother’s face stared up at her from the mess.
It was a photo she’d seen a hundred times before, but it looked different now: Jill Caine, her name at the time, standing in front of The Dusty Gnome on its first day. Hair up in a tight bun, big glasses, a nervous but genuine smile. Her hands were shoved in her jacket pockets, but even through the grain of the cheap photo paper, Sam could see the tension in her jaw, the set of her shoulders.
For a long time, Sam just sat and looked at the picture. She traced the lines of her mother’s face with a trembling finger, as if the memory might transfer through skin to paper. There was a stubbornness there, a refusal to let fear or sorrow show—Sam knew that look, had practiced it herself since she was ten. In this photo, though, there was something else beneath it. Hope, maybe. Or just a scrap of pride at what she’d managed to build.
Sam tried to remember the last time she’d felt that, even for a second. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, which only left a new layer of grime across her nose.
The next thing she noticed was an envelope, tucked behind the photo. It had her name on it—just “Sam,” nothing else—in her mother’s unmistakable script. The envelope was yellowed but otherwise untouched, the edges sealed tight. Underneath it was a little Ziploc bag with a brass key inside.
Sam stared at the envelope for a long minute. It felt like a message from a ghost, or from a version of Jill who still remembered how to hope. She opened it with trembling hands.
The letter was a single sheet of plain white paper, protected in a plastic sleeve. The handwriting was slow, careful, but the lines at the bottom slanted hard, like Jill had been racing the clock.
Sam,
If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t make it. Or maybe you’re just more curious than I ever gave you credit for. Either way, there’s no time for a proper explanation, so I’ll get to the point.
You’re a Ravencrest, by blood and by will. I tried to keep you and Lilly out of it, but some things can’t be buried. I wanted to tell you in person. I wanted you to have the chance to choose for yourself, but if this letter reaches you, I guess I failed at both.
The book in the store is the original. The other copies are decoys. You already know that. What you don’t know is that there’s a way to strengthen the wards—something even Emil didn’t write down. He told me, just once, and I wrote it on the blueprints of the store. They’re hidden under the floor, behind the register, beneath the old cashbox. The key is for the lock I put there.
You have to act fast. The entity will try to break you first. Don’t let it. If Lilly’s with you, protect her. If you’re alone, do what you have to do. You’re stronger than you think.
I wish I’d been able to say this out loud, just once. I wish you’d believe me when I say I love you, and I always have.
—Mom
Sam didn’t notice she was crying until a fat tear splashed onto the plastic. She wiped it away and reread the letter, twice, three times, each time feeling the old wounds reopen. She let herself sit there, clutching the photo and the letter, until the next thud against the door reminded her there wasn’t time for nostalgia. What did her mom mean by “he told me”? He who? Surely she could not have meant Emil, he had been dead for over 100 years.
She looked at the key, still sealed in its little bag. The metal felt warm in her hand, almost alive, as if waiting for her to finally get a clue.
Sam stood up, dusted herself off, and got to work.
The first floorboard behind the register had always creaked, a trait Sam had hated as a kid because it gave her away every time she tried to sneak after hours. Now she was grateful for the tell. She knelt, ran her hands along the seam, and found the thin thread of wax her mother had used as a marker—a trick Jill taught her to use when hiding Christmas presents from her dad.
Sam worked the blade of her utility knife under the edge, pried the board up, and felt the sudden give as it popped free. Below was a black cavity, only a few inches deep, lined with the battered, pitted metal of an old cash box. The lock was brass, filigreed with a pattern that matched the Ravencrest sigil on the front of the tome. Sam slid the little key into the slot. It turned like it had been waiting for her hand all along.