They reached a door that sagged in its frame, the bolts rusted deep in their brackets. Char streaked the lintel, dark fingers reaching outward, evidence that the fire had tried to claw its way free. Rhys stood rigid, his chest rising and falling.
“Here,” he said, his voice scraped raw. “My father’s chamber.” He drew a slow breath. “I slammed the door and threw myself against it as I tore off my coat and used it to choke the flames crawling up my leg. Then I dragged the marble console from there—” He dipped his chin, and Isabella followed his gaze to blackened hulk lying to one side, cracked down the middle, its gilt feet twisted. “—to lock her in.”
She made a soft sound of dismay. In her mind’s eye, she saw Rhys—not the man beside her now but the boy he had been—bleeding, shoving the weight of the marble with desperate strength, sealing himself on one side of the door, Catrin and his father’s body on the other. She saw him choking on smoke, flames melting his flesh, holding the line with nothing but will. Her heart ached. And in that ache, love flared again, terrifying in its intensity. He had survived hell and stood beside her now, willing to face it again. How could she not love him?
Jaw taut, he pulled open the door. Isabella lifted the lamp higher.
The chamber beyond gaped, blackened and bare. Fire had eaten it hollow, leaving beams split and charred. Sharp and acrid, the smells of smoke and ash layered with the damp tang of rot. The fine hairs at her nape prickled and rose. A single flame, that was all that stood between them and the devouring dark.
Rhys stepped in first, his limp pronounced on the uneven floorboards. Isabella followed, chest tight, pulse drumming too fast. Her gaze clung to the ruined hearth, the splintered beams, the scars the fire had left behind. Her mind filled with images painted by Rhys’s words: a man slumped at the desk, blood pooling beneath his head. Smoke, thick and black, as Rhys dragged the marble across the door. Catrin pounding and shrieking, flames licking hungrily at her skirt.
Horror suffused her, for his suffering and the choices he had been forced to make.
The ruined chamber closed around them, charred and unyielding. The lamp flame guttered, casting frantic shadows that leaped over the wreckage.
“The hearth,” Rhys said, and she followed where he led.
The stones were split and blackened, the mantel half-collapsed. Rhys crouched, one knee to the warped boards, and set his half of the grimoire on the stone. Isabella knelt beside him and did the same, the brass semicircles catching the lamp’s glow. The two halves lay side by side, broken arcs curving toward each other.
Rhys hesitated only a breath, then slid the halves together. The seam met, groaned like stone on stone, and held. A hum rose from the book, low at first, then climbing until it seemed to fill the marrow of Isabella’s bones.
“Give me your hands,” he said.
She set her palms in his, warm skin against warm skin, a human anchor in a room where nothing else was human.
At once the hush shattered.
The walls exhaled. Soot rained in a fine sift, pattering like sand across the ruined boards. The temperature swung in lurches—heat like the breath of a furnace on her cheeks, cold so sharp it sliced her ankles. The air swarmed with voices, whispers she had always heard alone, now thickened and multiplied until she could not count them.
Shapes gathered. At first nothing but mist, pale and quivering, then forms that almost resolved: the small stoop of a boy’s shoulders, a woman’s bent head, another child’s hand clutching at the air. Their edges rippled like candle flame in a draft, fading, returning, fading again.
“Rhys,” Isabella breathed. “You see them.”
His grip convulsed on hers. His eyes were wide, wet, starving. “I see them.” The words were broken, reverent.
The forms wavered, reached, and then the room turned.
Ash hissed across the floorboards, pooling in unnatural drifts. The soot on the ceiling began to run in slow rivulets, black as tar, trickling upward instead of down. A low groan pulsed through the beams.
The figures faltered. The mother’s bent head lifted, mouth moving in silent weeping. Her outline thinned, pulled taut, as if some unseen hook had snagged her spine. The boys shrank and wavered.
“She comes,” Rhys said, his voice hard and cold.
The temperature dropped with a sickening lurch, then rose until Isabella’s lips felt dry, her eyes stinging. The boards beneath them buckled with a groan, nails squealing as they tore free. The ruined walls breathed, inhaling their warmth, exhaling black.
Then the laughter came.
Childlike at first—high, sweet, delighted. Then it bent, cracked, multiplied, a dozen throats belching sound, reaching a crescendo that split the air.
Catrin.
She stepped out of the soot itself, half-formed, half-smoke. Her face flickered, perfect and monstrous in turns. The folds of her gown were slicked with oil, her pearl buttons swimming like eyes. Her jaw cracked wider than flesh would allow, splitting her face until smoke poured out in ribbons, black and slick, coiling like snakes.
Rhys’s grip on Isabella’s wrists tightened, anchoring her, but the force of those ribbons slammed into her chest, a hook tugging her ribs outward. Her ribs screamed. Her body arched as though she were being strung on wires. Terror clawed at her.
She gasped, head snapping back.
“Isabella!” Rhys’s voice thundered, ragged, frantic.
