Page 48 of Hellfire to Come
Let her hate me later. Let her scream and call me a monster. Let her leave me if she had to.
But at least she’d still be breathing.
Because I could survive her fury.
I couldn’t survive a world without her in it.
The fire flared suddenly, white-hot and unnatural, consuming all color for the briefest heartbeat of time.
Brooklyn dropped to her knees.
And everything…Everything went quiet.
My heart slammed once, hard against my ribs.
And I waited for the price.
For the answer.
For the moment I’d have to make the choice to let destiny decide our fates and take its toll…
…or destroy everything because of whatever it asked.
Chapter Nineteen
BROOKLYN
The circle felt alive.
Not metaphorically, but truly alive. As though it had lungs and breath and blood pumping through arteries sewn into the soil. The very air within it trembled with a presence I couldn’t name, but felt in my marrow. Gooseflesh bloomed across my arms as Laughing Crow completed the last invocation and stepped into the center of her ancestral magic.
Something shifted the instant she crossed that invisible threshold. It was like stepping into the eye of a storm. No chaos, no sound, just stillness so profound it bordered on violent.
The flames around the bowls did not sway in the breeze. They held perfectly still, glowing bright as stars but casting no shadows. The air was damp and warm and ancient. Like memory had seeped into the very bones of the earth and gathered now to watch me.
Terrified of what it may see… A monster? Someone unworthy maybe? I tried hard not to dwell on that thought. I didn’t know what I expected. Pain, maybe. Judgment. A voice booming from the sky to call me what I was a cursed thing, a half breed monster who dared beg mercy from forces far older than she understood.
But nothing came. Nothing except the pulse of power stretching outward in every direction.
Laughing Crow stood a few paces from me, her black eyes sharp, unreadable, rimmed with the reflection of the flames. She was silent, but her expression was no longer purely wary. There was something else beneath the lines of her face now. Something like curiosity. Or perhaps grief.
“Do not lie in this place,” she said softly, voice barely louder than a whisper. A thick silver strand fell over one side of her face making her expression mysterious and chilling. “It will unravel you faster than any blade.”
I nodded once. “I won’t.”
Her gaze lingered on me a moment longer before she knelt, laying her palms gently to the dirt at her feet. Her eyes closed. She didn’t speak in words at first. Only in breath.
One inhale. One exhale.
Then she whispered, not in English, but in something older. Something raw. Her tongue shaped syllables that pulled at the lining of my skull, vibrating in the hollows of my chest. I couldn’t understand the words, but my body did. My blood did.
The language of spirits. Of bones.
Smoke coiled from the firebowls as if summoned, curling into shapes that didn’t make sense. Feathers, teeth, rivers, wounds. My mouth was dry as dust. I could feel Dominic just beyond the circle’s edge, his presence taut with the kind of tension that preceded bloodshed. He would never interfere, but I knew what it cost him to stay still.
The chant rose, a crescendo of elements spun into harmony, and the temperature dropped again.
Laughing Crow opened her eyes.
