Not a dimming or a weakening.
It was simply gone, between one breath and the next, and the place where it had been was so cold and so absolute that for one full second I could not move.
"Lila…”
The silence that answered me was not the ordinary silence of a house with no one in it. It was the silence of something severed.
I was through the front door before I had decided to move.
I clearedthe road between our yards in a single motion and landed in her backyard.
Immediately, I was met with turmoil and stench of fresh death.
The grass was black. Not burned, not dead in a normal way as if a drought had pulled the moisture from the surface, but blackened from beneath, as though something below the soil had reached up and taken the life out of it at the root.
Her flower beds, the ones she watered every morning while talking to each plant by name, were collapsed and gray.
The air tasted like sulfur and old fire and the specific darkness I had spent five centuries keeping out of this yard.
The stone circle blazed crimson.
The wards I had maintained for five hundred years were fracturing, the lines of infernal script peeling away from the stones like burning paper, the seals dissolving not because something had broken through from below but because they had been unlocked from above, deliberately and with knowledge no ordinary person should have possessed.
Ethan was kneeling at the far edge of the circle with something clutched in both hands, his head bowed, hisshoulders shaking. The Hellgate cracked and line of red ran through the center of the stone circle, dark and widened, pulsing as if it were alive.
And Lila was lying in the center of it.
My mate…
She was on her side with one hand curled beneath her cheek. The other hand was resting flat against her stomach. The stones beneath her were dark and wet and I knew before I reached her what the darkness was.
I dropped to my knees beside her.
"No. Please no…” I had nothing else left inside of me, I had gone cold and empty.
My mate…gone…
Our child…gone….
I heard Ethan before I fully understood what I was seeing.
"I did everything you asked." His voice broke on the words. He was still kneeling at the edge of the Gate, aphotograph in one hand, journal in the other, tears cutting through the dirt on his face. He looked like a man who had walked a very long road and arrived somewhere he had not truly let himself imagine. "I kept my end of the bargain.”
The ground split beneath him then.
The darkness that came through the Gate moved like something alive, like shadow with intention
It was there for Ethan. He looked at it with one terrible moment of understanding in his face, the expression of a man who had just grasped that it was too late. That he had indeed made a deal with the devil.
"No," he said.
It took him anyway.
He screamed once, and then the screaming stopped and something else inhabited him, something that wore his face and his voice and looked out from behind his eyes with an age and asatisfaction that had nothing to do with the man who had carried a little girl's photograph in his glovebox for two years.
"There was never a wish,"Malphas said, in Ethan's voice.
I watched it happen from where I knelt beside Lila and felt five centuries of careful containment collapse into something much simpler and much older than strategy.
