Page 50 of Hellfire to Come
It touched me like an old grief and a forgotten promise. Comforting. Familiar. Alien.
Marking me.
I tried to inhale, but the oxygen was too thick, too heavy with old names and older debts. My lungs burned with the weight of it. My heart thundered a warning, too fast, too loud, but I didn’t retreat. I couldn’t. The circle held me. The spirits held me. I was theirs now, at least in part.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I felt Dominic trashing against the bindings they must’ve placed on him and my blood curdled in my veins.
And then…
Pain.
Not the blistering kind that tears through flesh or the kind that sears through veins like wildfire. This pain was deeper. Older. A quiet rending from within. Like something long knotted around my soul was finally being unwound, fiber by fiber, strand by strand. Gentle, terrible. A sorrowful release.
As if someone had reached inside and untied a thousand invisible knots that had held me together, and in doing so, showed me how tightly I’d been wound all along.
I gasped. A sound more sob than breath, and collapsed to my knees once again.
The world tilted sideways. The firelight fractured. The circle blurred into nothing but echoes of wind and shadow. My fingersdug into the dirt, clawing at something solid, something real, but even the earth beneath me pulsed like a living thing.
And through the din, through the deafening roar of blood in my ears, Laughing Crow’s voice reached me.
Low. Steady. Certain.
“The spirits accept,” she said. “But they will take something. They always do.”
I nodded, or thought I did. My body no longer felt like mine. My awareness was held together by frayed threads. Gravity no longer obeyed. Time no longer moved. But her voice anchored me.
They will take something.
And I would give it. Whatever they asked, whatever they claimed, I would not resist. I had nothing left to barter except this. This one thing I had never dared to give freely.
Surrender.
The last thing I felt before the dark pulled me under was the spark of magic I had carried my entire life, the legacy of my mother’s blood, that quiet ember passed down in silence and shame, beginning to shift.
It didn’t go out.
It didn’t flare into destruction.
It moved.
Changed.
Not stolen. Not extinguished. Not exiled.
But claimed.
Not entirely mine anymore. Not entirely me.
A new shape.
A new bond.
The magic was now part of something larger, older, deeper than even blood.
And just before consciousness dissolved into starlit shadow, I understood:
It wasn’t only my plea the spirits had answered.
