Sam’s hands hovered over the battered phone, thumb trembling. The cold made it hard to focus, but that wasn’t it—her nerves were shot, even as resolve hollowed out every other feeling. She forced the numbers into the keypad, pressed call, and the phone vibrated against her jaw like a living thing. She waited, each ring a punch through the deep dark, until at last Tyrone picked up.
“Sam?” His voice, worn thin but tough, a thread pulled through too many disasters in a single night.
“It’s me,” she said, breath frosting out in a cloud she could almost taste. “Lilly’s at Ravencrest Manor. I’m headed there now. Meet me out front if you’re not already dead.”
A beat. Static, and then a noise that might’ve been a bitter laugh. “Copy that. I’ll be there. If you see anyone on the streets—don’t stop. Most of them are too far gone.”
She hesitated. “Bring a gun, Ty.”
“That’s the plan,” he said, and then the call cut off.
Sam crammed the phone in her coat pocket and checked her kit—Ravencrest Heart on its chain, the Codex Umbra wedged in her bag, a stubby flashlight, and the clutch of stones in a zippered pouch. She patted herself down for any sign she’d forgotten something, then squared her shoulders and started walking.
The night was wrong. Not just too dark, but hollow, empty of every sound she’d come to expect from a town this size. No cars. No shouting. No air conditioners cycling on. Only the pulse of her boots on the sidewalk and the slow, syrupy drip of her own breath. Even the wind had quit, as if it wanted nothing to do with what was coming.
The first few blocks passed in a blur of adrenaline and memory. She skirted the edge of the square, keeping out of streetlamp range—half afraid of what she’d see if she walked in full light. Here and there she passed a window with the TV still flickering, playing old reruns to nobody or stuck on a Netflix screen. An empty stroller, overturned on the curb, the little blanket frozen to the seat. At the entrance to the church, a tangle of prayer candles guttered in the dirt, every wick drowned in its own puddle of wax.
The pendant grew warmer with each block. At first it was just a pleasant tingle, a comfort against the cold. By the time she crossed the old iron bridge near Market Street, it was radiating like a fever, and she had to fight the urge to rip it from her neck.
The bridge itself was bad. She’d always hated the way the river cut through town—too sluggish, too brown, the banks choked with trash and creeping green. Now it was worse. As she stepped onto the metal grating, she saw ripples moving upstream, against the current. Little bulbs of shadow, twisting and swallowing each other, then vanishing just as quickly. She picked up her pace, fighting the sick certainty that if she looked over the edge, something would be waiting to look back.
Halfway across, she heard it: a low, wet chuckle, echoing from under the bridge. The sound made her skin crawl. Sam tightened her grip on the pendant, pressed her free hand to the Codex in her bag, and kept moving.
The town’s layout forced her through the park. The swings and jungle gym glimmered with rime, each chain stiff as a corpse. She took a shortcut through the baseball diamond, ducking under the fence and weaving between the frozen bleachers. As she stepped onto the gravel path, something shifted at the edge of her vision—a smear of movement, just shy of real.
She stopped, heart hammering, and turned. Nothing. No one.
But the pendant pulsed, hot and fast, and in the pale red glow she saw, just for a second, a child’s handprint smeared on the metal post of the bleachers. The print was wet and glistened like old oil. Sam swallowed the taste of bile and broke into a run, not slowing until she was three blocks away and the only thing behind her was the sound of her own desperate panting.
As she approached the edge of the historic district, the world seemed to cinch tighter. The houses grew taller and closer, the trees looming overhead like hunched witnesses. Every footfall kicked up a spatter of gravel and dead leaves, and the sound echoed down the empty street with embarrassing clarity.
She saw a movement at a second-story window—a face, watching her with dull, unblinking eyes—but when she glanced back, it was gone.
The final stretch to the Manor was a single, straight avenue lined with black iron lamps and stone gateposts. Sam’s breath came out in ragged clouds, each exhale a mark on the otherwise unbroken silence. The Ravencrest Heart now thudded in time with her pulse, and the skin at her chest itched like a healing burn.
The Manor’s roofline appeared over the horizon first, then the massive bulk of the building itself. Even with her memory of it as a museum—sterile, unremarkable, shorn of any real menace—the sight of the house at midnight was a gut-punch. The black stone sucked up every bit of ambient light, making the windows look like broken teeth in a skull.
She slowed at the gates, more out of awe than fear. The driveway was lined with twin rows of cypress, every tree older than the country. The drive itself was gravel, and the sound of her boots on it was a deliberate, crushing percussion. She imagined the noise would alert anything in the house to her presence, but there was no other way forward.
Halfway up the drive, the pendant flared, a sudden burst of crimson that painted the path with bleeding shadows. Sam staggered, blinded by the intensity, and nearly dropped the Codex. For a moment she thought she was dying—her heart seized, her vision whited out.
She blinked. The world had gone liquid, the edges of everything swimming and doubling, as if she was looking at the scene from underwater. The cold was sharper now, so raw it made her teeth ache. She pulled in a breath, watched it hang in the air, then took another step forward.
The pendant continued to pulse, each beat a little brighter, a little faster. The world started to dissolve at the edges—the sky a smear of purple and gray, the trees bending toward her with every step. Sam felt eyes on her, not just from the house, but from the ground, the air, maybe even the memories packed into the stones of the building itself.
She could see the grand entryway—its columns, its doors, the dull brass plate stamped with the Ravencrest crest. She remembered being dragged here as a child for field trips and holiday photos. She remembered hating it, the way every room seemed to be hiding something just out of view.
Now, the whole house seemed to shimmer, vibrating with anticipation.
Sam managed to stumble to the bottom of the steps. The world did not resist her. In fact, the world itself seemed to want her there.
She gripped the Ravencrest Heart through her shirt, the heat from it almost unbearable, and then the world blurred, colors and shapes swirling around her like paint thrown in a bucket. The air was sucked from her lungs. The earth tipped under her feet.
She blinked, and the present was gone.
She opened her eyes into another century. The world had snapped into hard-edged focus, colors scalding and real, as if the night’s monochrome had been replaced by some savage painter working in pigments Sam had never seen. She staggered, chest tight, the air suddenly heavy with the scent of blooming roses and the sticky sweetness of fresh tar. Ravencrest Manor stood before her, new and obscene, its black stone steps blazing in the afternoon sun.
For a second, Sam wondered if she’d died. The house was wrong, all wrong. No iron fence, no plywood patching the windows. The gardens were lush, obsessively manicured. Even the gravel path sparkled, each stone turned and polished, arranged with fanatical precision. A carriage waited by the front, horse steaming and restless, the driver in full livery, face blank with boredom or worse.
Sam looked down at her hands. They were the same. She touched her chest, felt the heat of the pendant still there, throbbing in time with her own heartbeat. She was herself, but not here. A ghost in her own bloodline.
No one noticed her. The men by the carriage looked through her as they stacked boxes and sacks, their movements fluid but mechanical, dreamlike. She took a shaky step onto the path, expecting resistance, but her boots crunched on the gravel, solid as ever.
The front door was open. She felt a pull—magnetic, irresistible—and walked inside.
The entry hall was monstrous in its grandeur, twice as wide as she remembered from childhood tours. The floors were marble, black with veins of gold. The walls, a lurid shade of green, were crowded with oil portraits and taxidermied birds with glassy eyes. Every sconce was lit, flames dancing in glass, flooding the space with heat and a stink of burning oil.
Her eyes adjusted. Sam could see, down the long corridor, a pair of small children playing. A boy and a girl, maybe five and seven, dressed in starched formalwear, the girl’s hair braided tight, the boy’s in a sad imitation of his father’s. They sat on the floor, hunched over a chess set, the pieces grotesque and oversized—some looked almost alive, the pawns painted with tiny, twisted faces.
A voice echoed from a side room, cutting through the hush like a razor. “You will not speak to me of discipline, Lilly.”
Sam drifted toward the study, her feet barely skimming the floor. She could feel the boundaries of the house—every hallway, every room—mapped in her bones. She passed through the doorway without a thought, and saw Emil Ravencrest for the first time.
He was not what she expected. No cartoon villain, no shriveled old conjurer. He was tall, athletic, the face of a man used to getting his way—handsome in the kind of way that leads you to wonder if he always gets his way. His dark hair was slicked back, his suit flawless, but his eyes were the real draw: sharp, gray, unblinking. They bored into the woman across from him with the intensity of a man negotiating a hostage situation.
His wife, Lilly, was less beautiful than fragile. Everything about her was in motion—her hands, her eyes, the restless shifting of her weight from foot to foot. She wore a dress of deep blue, her hair pinned in an intricate twist. She looked exhausted, the skin under her eyes purpled with lack of sleep or worse. This Lilly, just like Sam’s sister, had beautiful blonde hair and deep green eyes.
Sam knew, with a clarity that hurt, that these were her ancestors. And that whatever hell she was living through, it had started in this very room.
Emil paced the floor, the heels of his boots tapping out a rhythm of impatience. “This is the only way,” he said. “You think I haven’t considered the risks? Every variable, every contingency—it’s all accounted for. The entity cannot escape, Lilly. I built this house for that purpose.”
Lilly’s hands trembled as she answered. “The children have nightmares, Emil. Every night, they wake up screaming about the thing in the basement. Is that what you wanted for them? Is that the legacy you wish to leave?”
He waved her off with a flick of his hand, a gesture Sam recognized as dismissive even across the chasm of time. “The children are safe. The entity is contained. I am the only one who can control it, and soon it will be at my command. No more poverty, no more shame—Peachtree Hollow will be the envy of the nation. Our children will be rulers, not victims.”
Sam moved closer, unable to look away. Lilly’s voice was raw, pleading. “You are not yourself, Emil. It’s the entity. I see it in your eyes. Sometimes you do not even recognize your own daughter. Last night you called her by another name. Do you remember?”
He stopped pacing, hands balled into fists. “That is enough. I will not have this conversation again.”
Lilly’s face twisted. “You do not hear the whispers, but I do. They call to me when I try to sleep. They say your name, Emil. And then they say mine.”
Emil stepped toward her, voice dropping to a hiss. “You would betray me? After all I’ve done?”
“No,” she said, almost too soft to hear. “But I fear you have betrayed yourself.”
He said nothing for a long moment. Then he turned, eyes bright with a strange, feverish joy. “Come with me. I will show you what I have accomplished. You will see the necessity.”
She shrank from him, but he was already out the door, motioning her to follow. Sam felt the pull again—the same invisible rope that had dragged her here in the first place. She passed through the corridor, watched the children freeze as their parents strode by. The girl clung to her brother’s sleeve, both of them wide-eyed and trembling.
Emil led them to the rear of the house, to a door that was not there in the present day. He opened it with a flourish and gestured them through.
The stairs to the basement were narrow and steep, every step carved from the same black stone as the rest of the house. The air grew colder with each step, the light from the lamps above dying quickly. Sam’s breath plumed in the darkness, and she saw, for a flash, the little girl’s terrified face as she clung to the banister and followed her parents down.
The basement was massive, domed like a cathedral, the floor laid in concentric rings of rough-hewn stone. In the center was a circle of brass, inlaid with symbols that Sam recognized from the Codex—binding sigils, meant to hold back something very old and very angry. Around the circle were more of the carved stones, each set into the floor with surgical precision.
Emil stopped at the edge of the circle and gestured grandly. “See? Not a sound, not a tremor. It is perfectly contained.”
Lilly shivered, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. “What if it is not enough? What if it escapes?”
“It will not,” Emil said, certainty absolute. “I have prepared for every eventuality. The stones are tuned to the frequency of its existence. The wards will never fail.”
Sam stepped to the edge of the circle, looked down. At first, she saw only darkness—a pit so deep it hurt to look at. But then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw something moving within. A swirl of black, shot through with veins of scarlet, churning and twisting in constant agony. It pressed against the edge of the circle, straining for freedom, but always snapped back by the unseen force that bound it.
She heard a voice, or maybe a hundred voices, whispering her name. Samantha, it said. Samantha, Samantha.
Emil watched the thing with hunger in his eyes. “It is almost ready. When the moon is full, I will draw its power into myself. The town will be transformed. We will be legends.”
Lilly shook her head. “You are mad.”
He looked at her, and for a moment, his expression softened. “No. I am a father who wants the best for his family.”
“Is that what you call it?” Lilly’s voice broke. “You would risk us all for this—this obsession?”
He turned away, gaze fixed on the pulsing blackness in the circle. “It is already done. The binding is complete. The bloodline is now tied to it, forever.”
Sam felt the words hit her in the gut. Bloodline. The pendant at her chest burned, brighter than ever.
The vision began to shudder, the edges of the world peeling away like the skin of a fruit left too long in the sun. The basement dissolved around her, replaced by flashes of the house in ruin—furniture smashed, windows broken, walls oozing with black slime.
Then, as the vision collapsed entirely, Sam found herself floating above the house, looking down as a great shadow rose from the foundation, spreading its tendrils out over the town. She screamed, but no sound came out.
And then, with a jolt, she was back in her own body, standing on the Manor steps in the present day, the pendant still burning against her skin.
For a full minute, Sam couldn’t move. She stood on the landing with her mouth open and hands shaking, sweat cooling under her arms despite the bitter cold. The night was back, the only light the weak, off-yellow spill from the Manor’s carriage lamps and the pulsing afterglow from the pendant. The vision was already fading—each detail dissolving like sugar in water—but the feelings were not. They stuck in her ribs and behind her eyes, sharp as glass, cruel as memory.
She swallowed, tasting copper and regret. She knew now, without question, how the cycle began and why it had to end with her. The Ravencrest curse, Nyxalloth, the madness that swallowed whole towns and left only haunted survivors—she could see every link in the chain. Every act of cowardice, every moment of hubris, all of it carved into the black stone of the house behind her.
She dragged herself upright and wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. The pendant was still warm, a comfort and a warning. She thumbed the surface, feeling the etching bite into her skin, then tucked it back under her shirt. Above, clouds tore across the moon, a full moon, and the house seemed to breathe with the rhythm of the shifting light.
From down the drive came the rumble of a car engine, punctuated by the regular tick-tick-tick of a bad lifter. Headlights raked across the lawn, throwing the cypresses into stark silhouette. The cruiser rolled to a stop at the base of the steps, and for a moment, Sam was blinded by the high-beams. Then the lights dipped, and Tyrone Shaw stepped out, uniform askew, one pant leg caught in his boot, blood on his knuckles.
He took the stairs two at a time, not even winded. “You all right?” he asked, voice pitched low for the hour.
She nodded, then shook her head. “Saw too much,” she said. “But yeah. I’m here.”
He stared at her, the old anger gone, replaced by something softer. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks, Sheriff. You got anything better than a gun on you?”
He patted his vest, shrugged. “Only got the one life. Plan is to keep it, if possible.”
She grinned, but it came out broken. “That’s not how it works for people like us.”
He nodded, as if he’d already resigned himself to the fact. “We going in now, or do you need a minute?”
Sam looked up at the Manor, its windows dark, its doors closed and waiting. She could feel the weight of all the history—hers, Lilly’s, Emil’s—pressing against her spine. She had no illusions about what they would find inside.
She squared her shoulders, adjusted the strap of her bag, and put her hand on the pendant. “Now,” she said. “Before it gets any stronger.”
They started up the steps together, two shadows cast long across the stone. Behind them, the lights from the car flickered, then went out. The silence that followed was absolute.
At the front door, Sam paused. She could feel the barrier—a film of dread, thin but impenetrable—waiting for her to step through. She closed her eyes, called up her mother’s voice, her sister’s smile, the memory of every lost thing she’d ever loved. She let it fill her, armor against what waited beyond.
When she opened her eyes, Tyrone was watching her, calm and ready.
“You got this?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and meant it.
Then she opened the door, and they went in together.