Sam took the first step through the threshold, her boots clapping the ancient marble like a gavel. The air inside was colder, much colder, than the night outside, the chill instantly crawling up her legs and under her clothes, making her skin pebble in protest. The entryway was both perfectly preserved and utterly changed—each oil painting on the walls stared back with eyes blacked out, each sconce burned with a blue flame, and the runner rug down the hall undulated in slow, nauseating waves.
Tyrone came in behind her, pausing just long enough to shut the massive door with a muted groan. He moved past her, one hand on his holstered gun, the other clearing the corners with textbook precision. Sam almost laughed at the futility; what good was police procedure when the walls themselves might decide to eat you? But she kept that to herself, following him down the corridor with the Ravencrest Heart almost burning on her chest.
"Sam," Tyrone said, soft, just for her, "you seeing this too?"
She nodded. Her breath fogged in the freezing air. "Yeah," she said. "It’s not just you."
The front hall stretched on too long, like the camera zoom in a horror movie—no matter how far they walked, the end never got closer. At one point, Sam glanced over her shoulder and saw the front door was gone, replaced by a blank wall stitched with cracks in the shape of a spider’s web.
"We're committed," she muttered.
Tyrone gave a grunt and scanned left, then right. The side doors now had heavy, gothic knockers that Sam didn’t remember from any school tour. The walls seemed to ripple like the surface of a lake. Every few seconds, the baseboards would flex outward, then contract, as if the whole house was struggling to draw breath.
They passed a mirror. In it, Sam looked pale and feral, her curls standing out in a mad halo, the pendant at her neck throbbing like a second heart. Tyrone looked solid, but his eyes were all pupil, two black holes sucking up the weak light. Behind them in the glass, shadows moved counter to their direction. They both flinched and looked away.
The whispering started faint, like AM radio left on in a distant room. Sam couldn’t make out words at first, it almost sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents talking. With every step, the volume increased, and soon the voices were distinct—overlapping, sometimes echoing her own thoughts back at her, sometimes hissing curses, sometimes offering comfort in tones so sweet it made her stomach twist.
She clamped a hand over the pendant, feeling the warmth flood into her palm. It helped, a little. It was an anchor. "Ignore them," she said. "They’re not real."
Tyrone didn’t answer. He kept his back to the left wall, gun up, scanning every doorway.
The corridor bent. At the next intersection, the world doubled—two identical halls, two choices. Tyrone started left. Sam instinctively went right. The moment their hands broke contact, the whispering crescendoed to a scream. The floor dropped out beneath her, and for a split second Sam tumbled through darkness shot with blue fire. She landed hard, hands scraping against ice-cold flagstone, vision blurry with tears and impact.
Tyrone was there in an instant, hauling her upright by the collar of her jacket. "Stay close," he said. "The house wants us apart."
"No shit," she gasped, wiping blood from her lip. "I get it."
They took the left hallway together this time, every cell in Sam’s body screaming at her to keep some part of her in physical contact with Tyrone at all times. She tucked her elbow through his and didn’t care if it looked ridiculous. The corridor narrowed, the ceiling dropped to the point that Tyrone had to stoop. Portraits on the walls shifted as they walked by—old men in Victorian coats now sported three eyes, or teeth on their cheeks, or faces that split down the middle and grinned from within.
"Are we supposed to recognize any of these people?" Tyrone said, trying for bravado.
Sam shook her head. "They’re not people anymore."
The hall opened suddenly into a vestibule. The carpet here was fresh, but the design was all wrong: black and red, sigils repeating in tight, dizzying spirals. Sam looked at it too long and felt a little sick.
At the end of the room, standing perfectly centered beneath a hideous glass chandelier, was Angelica Graveltree. The innkeeper. She wore robes—dark, floor-length, stitched with the same symbols as the rug. Her face was more vivid than Sam remembered, every feature exaggerated, the smile impossibly wide. Her eyes—Sam blinked and looked again—her eyes were gone, replaced by a smooth, pale skin stretched taut over the sockets.
Tyrone raised his gun in reflex. "Don’t move!"
Angelica did not flinch, did not even acknowledge the threat. She inclined her head in a slow, regal nod. When she spoke, the voice was deeper, more measured than before, yet familiar in its cadence. "You seek the sister."
Sam swallowed. "We do."
"Follow," said Angelica, and she turned with eerie precision, walking away from them down a side corridor that had not existed a moment before.
Tyrone glared at Sam, eyes shouting what his lips wouldn’t: Are we really doing this? But Sam shrugged and kept her grip on his arm, following the sound of Angelica’s footsteps on the marble.
The architecture of the house shifted as they moved. Doorways opened onto nothing but blank stone, or twisted into downward ramps that spiraled like snail shells. Sam lost all sense of direction, of up or down, only the searing cold and the grip on Tyrone’s jacket keeping her tethered to anything like reality.
Angelica stopped at another intersection, this one lined with tarnished silver mirrors. In each reflection, Sam saw herself—sometimes as a child, sometimes as an old woman, sometimes with eyes or mouths where they shouldn’t be. She looked away, then back, and in one mirror saw her mother, Jill, hair wild, hands outstretched, lips moving in silent warning.
She reached for the glass, but Angelica’s voice cut through her reverie. "It remembers," the woman said, not turning.
"It?" Tyrone said.
Angelica faced them, eyes still shut, but somehow focused directly on Sam. "The entity. It remembers every one of you. Every failure. Every promise unkept."
Sam felt her throat constrict. "Where’s Lilly?"
Angelica didn’t smile, not exactly. "She is waiting below. As are you." She turned away, her voice echoing down the hall. "Hurry. The circle is not yet complete."
Sam pressed her lips together, fighting down a wave of nausea. She forced herself to follow, knowing Tyrone would never let her go alone, knowing that whatever lay ahead was better than the slow, suffocating madness of these halls.
They descended a short, crooked flight of stairs. Angelica glided down as if she weighed nothing; Sam and Tyrone thudded after, every step ringing with the certainty that the stairs would vanish or collapse if they faltered.
At the bottom, another hallway—this one so narrow that Tyrone had to walk sideways, the gun at his side. The walls were lined with books, but the titles were gibberish, the covers alive with pulsing veins and ragged teeth. Sam kept her gaze locked on the pendant, letting the blue light of it guide her steps.
Finally, the corridor opened into a landing. Angelica stood at the head of a spiral staircase, the stairs descending into utter blackness. She turned to face them, and this time her mouth split into a grin so wide it nearly reached her ears. "Below," she said, "your story ends. Or begins."
She stepped backward into the void, the long robes trailing behind her like a veil, and was swallowed by the darkness.
Sam looked at Tyrone. "You ready?"
"No," he said honestly, "but that’s never stopped me before."
They clasped hands, the only warm thing left in this house, and started down the spiral, each step an act of faith against the seething, waiting dark.
The spiral staircase was impossibly steep, and with every turn the sense of gravity stretched and skewed. At the first landing, Sam looked up and saw that the space above her no longer resembled the house she’d left. The ceiling soared away, a parabola lost in darkness. The stairs themselves were made of a different stone—rough, gray, older than the country, the edges softened by centuries of wear or something far worse.
Blue fire flickered in sconces spaced unevenly along the walls. The flames gave off no heat. Instead, the air grew colder, so cold that Sam’s breath froze to her lips with every exhale. Ancient sigils—circles within circles, jagged runes carved in relief—covered every visible inch of stone. As Sam’s hand brushed the wall, she felt a tingling buzz in her fingertips, as if the markings were not so much carved as alive, waiting.
Tyrone’s boots sounded like gunshots on the steps, but Angelica’s bare feet made no noise at all. She floated ahead, hair trailing behind her like mist. Sam wondered, for a fleeting second, if Angelica was even truly here, or just a projection of the house’s will.
They rounded another curve, and the passage widened. Now the air was thick, heavy with the scent of wet earth and something sharper—iron, maybe, or blood. Sam fought back a wave of nausea and focused on the pendant, which radiated a steady blue glow, brighter with each step.
"How far does this go?" Tyrone whispered, voice barely carrying over the hush of the flames.
Angelica didn’t turn. "All the way," she intoned. "To the heart of it."
The word choice wasn’t lost on Sam. She clutched the pendant tighter, drawing on its heat as the world around her turned colder, meaner, more predatory.
The walls shifted from tight spiral to a gently sloping ramp, and the blue fire suddenly ended. They stepped onto a flat, flagstone floor that stretched out into darkness on all sides. The ceiling was lost in shadow, but Sam could see, far ahead, a ring of light—torch flames, red and orange this time, arrayed in a perfect circle.
She moved toward it, Tyrone at her side, every muscle in his body taut and ready. The pendant swung against her chest, the heartbeat of it thunderous in her ears.
As they approached, the floor sloped ever so slightly, funneling them to the center of the vast room. The torch circle marked the boundary of some kind of a ritual circle, maybe fifteen feet across. Arrayed at equidistant points around the circle were eight figures—four in the ceremonial robes of the cultists, four in street clothes. The latter stood glassy-eyed, motionless, the skin at their wrists and throats bruised and dark. Sam recognized a few: the barber from Main, the old librarian, the woman who ran the dry cleaner’s. The cultists wore masks, their faces featureless white except for elaborate symbols scrawled across the foreheads in oily ink.
And at the center, suspended above the ground, floated Lilly.
She was wrapped in a cocoon of black smoke, the darkness swirling and churning around her body, sometimes solid enough to resemble wings, sometimes dissolving into a hundred restless snakes. Lilly’s face was slack, eyes closed, mouth slightly parted. Her hands were crossed over her chest, the fingertips stained with something dark. The cocoon pulsed, and every so often the shadow would thin, and Sam could see Lilly’s body—limp, clothes removed except for her underwear, her skin marked with red sigils identical to those on the walls.
Sam staggered, catching herself on Tyrone’s arm. The voices that had haunted her in the halls were louder now, more purposeful. They hissed and sang in counterpoint, but there was a deeper voice below them all, a bass so profound it vibrated in her skull.
Nyxalloth.
The entity pressed against her mind like a thumb against an eyelid, cold and certain. The words were clear, this time:
The last daughters of Ravencrest blood. How fitting you should return to me.
Sam choked on a sob, the force of the presence almost enough to make her collapse. The pendant at her throat flared, white-hot now, the blue washed out by a corona of angry, electric light. She felt the touch of the entity recoil, just for a second, then redouble.
Tyrone’s voice cut through her panic. "We’ve come for Lilly," he said, steady, gun drawn and pointed at the center of the coiling mass of blackness at the center above Lilly. "Let her go."
One of the cultists peeled off from the circle. The mask was fixed in a smile, the body under it disturbingly fluid, every joint bending a little too far. "You misunderstand," it said, the voice dry and hollow. "She has been chosen. You will witness the binding, as is your right."
Sam forced herself to take a step forward. "She’s not yours. She never was."
The entity laughed—a sound that shook the stones under their feet. The cocoon writhed, the tendrils now sprouting teeth, then eyes, then fingers that twitched and beckoned Sam forward.
Angelica stood at the far side of the circle, head bowed, hands folded over her heart. She began to chant, the words ancient and ugly, each syllable a nail driven into the air. The cultists joined in, the cadence rising, the torches flaring brighter.
The pendant pulsed with every word, growing hotter and heavier. Sam felt it pulling her toward the center blackness, toward Lilly, toward whatever hell waited in the circle. She wanted to resist, to run, but she was rooted to the spot.
The voice of Nyxalloth was inside her head, calm and monstrous:
You will do what all before you have done. You will fail, and you will feed me.
Lilly’s eyes snapped open. They were black from lid to lid, pupils rimmed in bloody red. She saw Sam, and for a second her face twisted with recognition—fear, then hope, then agony.
Sam stepped to the edge of the blackness, ignoring the cold sweat pouring down her back. "Lilly," she said, "I’m here."
Lilly’s lips moved, the words lost in the torrent of voices and chanting. The tendrils of smoke looped tighter around her throat and wrists, drawing her upright, presenting her to Sam and Tyrone like a prize.
The chanting reached a crescendo. Angelica raised both arms, the sleeves of her robe billowing like wings. The mask fell away, revealing a face that was not Angelica’s at all but a blank, featureless oval, the skin pale and glistening.
"You will join the circle," said the not-Angelica, voice magnified and inhuman. "Or you will be consumed by it."
Tyrone moved in front of Sam, gun fixed on the entity. "Back off," he barked. "Let her go!"
The cocoon of smoke convulsed, a ripple of mouths forming and dissolving across its surface. Nyxalloth spoke again, this time from everywhere at once:
It is done. You are too late.
The torches blew out, plunging the chamber into perfect darkness. The only light was the searing blue-white of the Ravencrest Heart, casting Sam and Tyrone’s shadows onto the walls in huge, monstrous shapes.
Sam felt her feet leave the ground, the air itself solidifying around her ankles and wrists. She screamed, but the sound vanished in the black. Tyrone fired, the report of the gun a burst of orange light, but the bullets vanished into the smoke, swallowed with an eager hiss.
Lilly’s voice, tiny but clear, cut through the madness: "Sam. You have to finish it. You have to break the circle."
The world snapped into stillness. Sam hovered above the center, face-to-face with her sister, the blue light blazing between them. The smoke shrank away from the pendant, as if repelled by the force of the family line.
Tyrone was pulled up beside her, held fast by the same invisible grip. He twisted, free hand reaching for Sam. "Do it!" he shouted. "Whatever you have to do!"
Nyxalloth’s voice, desperate now, tried one last time:
I am your only hope. Join me, and the pain ends.
Sam closed her eyes, let the pendant guide her. The blue light pulsed once, then twice, then burst outward in a shockwave of power that shattered the silence and threw the cultists and townspeople backwards like ragdolls. Sam reached for Lilly, her hand passing through the smoke as if it were nothing. Their fingers touched, and the world exploded in blue fire.
She was everywhere, and nowhere, and the only thing that mattered was her sister’s hand, warm and alive and pulling her through the dark.
For a heartbeat, the world was nothing but blue fire and a sense of falling forever.
Then sound returned, first as a ringing, then as a chorus of screams and chanting, then as the distant, measured thump of heavy boots on stone. Sam crashed to her knees on the edge of the inky blackness, the Ravencrest Heart molten-hot against her skin. Tyrone landed beside her, one arm thrown protectively across her back, the other still clutching his gun, knuckles white as chalk. The torches were burning once again though the fire now looked alive with purpose.
Across the chamber, the cultists and townsfolk staggered back to their feet, shaken but unbroken. The circle had fractured, but only for an instant; as soon as the blue fire faded, they closed ranks, eight pairs of eyes fixed on Sam and Lilly.
Lilly hung in the air, the cocoon of smoke thinner now, almost translucent. Her face was contorted in pain and panic, lips moving as she fought to say something. Sam tried to reach her, but the air in the center was thick as cement, every molecule vibrating with the presence of Nyxalloth.
Above, at the top of the stairs, a new figure stepped into the light.
Patricia Abernathy.
She wore the kind of robe Sam had seen only in bad horror movies—blood-red, hemmed with black, the sleeves so long they trailed on the stairs behind her. The cowl was thrown back, revealing her hair plaited in a crown across her brow. In her right hand, she held a dagger, obsidian-black and wet with what Sam desperately hoped was not fresh blood. Her left hand was outstretched, palm up, fingers splayed in a gesture of benediction or command.
She descended the stairs with theatrical slowness, each footfall a gunshot in the silence. "Children of Peachtree Hollow," she intoned, "the hour is upon us. The sacrifice of both daughters, on the night of the true moon, will awaken the age of Nyxalloth, and usher in the reign of the Old Gods!"
The cultists and townsfolk howled in unison, pounding the floor with their feet and hands. The sound reverberated through the chamber, dust sifting from the stones above.
Patricia reached the floor, swept her gaze across the circle, and fixed on Sam with a smile cold enough to freeze bone. "I see the bloodline has survived," she said, voice both amused and contemptuous. "I suppose the old man was right. There is always one more."
Angelica slid silently to Patricia’s right side, her head bowed in reverence. When she raised her face, the eyeless gaze was aimed directly at Sam. "They’re here for the younger one," she whispered, almost a caress.
Patricia gestured with the dagger. "Then let’s not disappoint them."
The cultists surged forward, grabbing the townsfolk by the arms and hauling them to their knees at the edge of the blackness that was the middle of the ritual circle. Each was positioned with their head bowed, wrists bared, eyes shut in perfect obedience. Sam recognized the librarian, now kneeling directly opposite her, mouth working as if reciting a prayer.
The chanting resumed, louder than before, the words thick and clotted with hate. Sam couldn’t understand them, but she felt the intent—violence, hunger, a longing so ancient it made her teeth ache.
The smoke around Lilly condensed, then shot outward in a corona of darkness, lashing at the chamber like a cyclone. Tendrils sprouted from the center, each tipped with a mouth, a row of glassy teeth, or a dripping eye. Nyxalloth was no longer content to hide.
It reached for Sam, for Tyrone, for anything alive in the room.
Tyrone aimed and fired. The bullet vanished into the smoke, but one of the mouths shrieked and recoiled, leaking black ichor onto the flagstone. "Keep shooting," Sam hissed, and Tyrone did, emptying the clip with the focus of a man in a shooting range. Each shot burned a hole in the smoke, but the wounds closed almost instantly.
Patricia laughed, the sound high and ugly. "You still believe in bullets, Sheriff? How quaint."
Angelica stepped closer to Sam, ignoring the pistol entirely. "You want your sister," she said, voice low. "But you don’t know what you’ll have to give for her."
Sam felt the entity probing her thoughts, rifling through her mind like a thief in a library. The memories came in a torrent—her mother reading stories by candlelight, the fights with Lilly over who got the bigger slice of cake, the way her mother’s eyes looked hollow the night she died. Nyxalloth was inside her, pulling at every thread of regret and guilt.
You will fail her, the voice promised. Just as she failed you.
Sam squeezed the pendant, feeling it burn her palm. "No," she spat. "Not this time."
She fought to her feet, knees shaking. The center pulsed with darkness, but she could see Lilly now—her face streaked with tears, her arms outstretched, pleading for help.
Sam ignored the cultists, ignored the howling, ignored even Patricia’s dagger. She fixed on her sister and the blue glow of the pendant, letting it blaze outward in a fan of light. The darkness recoiled, and for an instant, Sam saw the true shape of the entity: a mass of shifting, liquid shadow, every surface writhing with hungry mouths and grasping hands, eyes opening and closing at random. At the very core, Lilly floated, still alive, still fighting.
Sam took a step forward. The cultists snarled and tried to block her path, but Tyrone shoved them aside with his free arm, using the gun as a club. He took a slash across his cheek from one of their knives, but didn’t even flinch.
"You’re not getting her," he said, voice so sure it cut through the chaos.
Patricia howled with laughter, then leveled the dagger at Sam. "Then you’ll have to take her," she said. "With all the cost that comes with it."
Nyxalloth’s tendrils lashed out, but this time Sam was ready. She let the blue light of the pendant flare, catching the shadow like a net. It shrieked, the sound a physical force that made the stone floor buckle and crack.
"Finish the circle," Lilly whispered, her voice suddenly in Sam’s head. "Do what Mom taught you."
Sam knew what she had to do.
She reached into her bag, found the Codex, and opened it to the page that had haunted her since she uncovered the true codex buried within. Blood and will, it read. The binder’s name, spoken in truth.
She needed to prime the ritual and the codex like priming an engine before ignition. She held onto the pendant as it burned her hand and said the name she’d never dared to utter:
"Samantha Elliandra Ravencrest."