Page 13 of Vows & Violence
It’s warm now. Not hot.Warm, like a pulse. Like it knows something I don’t.
Phoenix lifts a hand to signal a stop. I drop beside her behind a wide marble tomb, my breathing is shallow. She points between two crumbling mausoleums, and a light flickers. But it’s not fire. It’sdifferent. Too bright in the center. Flickering at the edges like it’s glitching in and out of reality.
I hear chanting before I see them. Low. Rhythmic.Wet. Like it’s being pulled from a throat that doesn’t want to speak.
Phoenix inches forward, and I follow her lead. We slip between two rows of gravestones, close enough now toseethem.
Five of them in dark red, almost black cloaks. Standing in a tight circle around a spiral etched into the dirt. Not drawn but carved deep, bleeding into the earth. I swear the edges twitch like they’re alive.
Each of the cultists holds something: bones, knives, a piece of flesh I don’t want to identify. One of them is holding up a skull that lookshuman. But smaller. Too small.
The chant gets louder. Their voices overlap, weaving into something guttural. The spiral begins to glow from the inside out, faint red at first, then brighter, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Phoenix mutters, “We need to stop this. Now.”
She moves to step forward, but I catch her wrist. “Wait,” I breathe. “Look.”
From the spiral’s center,something rises.
It’s not smoke. Not shadow. It’s like… flesh and fog at the same time. A form trying to take shape, arms that aren’t arms. A face that keeps sliding, trying torememberwhat it was. The cultists keep chanting. One of them startscuttinghis own arm, letting the blood drip into the spiral. The glow intensifies.
And then itseesus.
The thing in the center doesn’t have eyes, not in the way we do, but I feel it. A direct, intimate stare. Like it’s memorizing our taste.
My fingers close around Mama Dusk’s charm. The warmth isburningnow.
Phoenix rises, and so do I. She opens fire without a word. The first cultist hits the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, twitching once before going still. The spiral flashes brighter, almost angry, like it resents the interruption. Phoenix fires one more shot, fast and surgical. The second cultists drop.
I take the others. My aim is cleaner, rage anchoring me. The one with the skull jerks backward, blood spraying across the spiral.
The chantingdoesn’t stop. The last one, the biggest, falls to his knees and finishes the words. His voice cracks like bones splintering.
The spiral flares white.
Something screams. Not in the air, butin my head. I drop to a knee, eyes clamped shut. Phoenix grabs me, yelling something I can’t hear over the shriek echoing inside my skull.
Then… it stops. Silence.
I open my eyes. The spiral is gone. Just dirt now. The bodies are still there, but whatever they summoned, it didn’t finish coming through. Didn’t get what it wanted.
I reach into my jacket and pull out Mama Dusk’s charm. It’s cracked down the middle. Charred around the edges.
Phoenix meets my eyes. “That thing… it almost made it.”
I nod, chest tight. “Almost.” That feels like the worst word in the world.
Chapter Seven
Phoenix
The taste of copper and burnt metal coats the back of my throat and clings to my teeth. Something worse lingering behind it, like charred bone and old blood, like the breath of something that should’ve stayed buried. The kind of taste that makes you check your own skin just to make sure it’s still yours.
The air outside the cemetery hums. Not the wind nor the traffic. It’s deeper, vibrating, low, and steady, like the inside of a sniper’s scope just before the trigger breaks. The kind of stillness that comes before the shot, when your heartbeat aligns with the recoil you know is coming.
Ghost hasn’t said much since we fought our way out of that seance, but his silence is loud. Every time he shifts, I hear the question in him like a drumbeat under his skin.
Did that really happen?Yeah. It did. And it’s not done with us.
