Rhazek swallows. “Tell me how.”
I lift our joined hands higher. “Send it into the bond pathway. Not around me. Not over me. Through me, because I’m the channel the ritual is accepting.”
His eyes search mine. “And you will steer it.”
“We will steer it. I’ll aim. You amplify.”
Corin slams one iron stake deeper into the ground with the heel of his hand, then snatches up his hammer from beside the perimeter. “For the love of every dead scholar who ever warned against improvisational rites, do it now.”
The shadow drops.
It strikes my chest like winter swallowing a star.
Cold punches through the infernal heat, so brutal that my lungs seize. The thing tries to burrow in immediately, searching for fear, grief, mortality, any soft place it can widen into a wound. It crawls along my nerves in black threads, whispering without words that I am temporary, breakable, doomed to leave him grieving over my bones.
Rhazek snarls, and fire surges toward the bond.
I hold up my free hand. “Do not take over.”
The words cost me. My voice shakes around them, but my will does not. The shadow digs deeper, scraping at the place where the contract first marked me, where mortality meets infernal permanence and still refuses to apologize for existing.
Rhazek trembles. Actually trembles. The sight would undo me if I weren’t too busy being invaded by the world’s most persistent dead bastard.
“Sable,” he says, gutted.
“I’ve got it.”
“You are freezing.”
“I said I’ve got it.”
The shadow tries to spread toward my heart.
I redirect.
The bond pathway opens like a road made of flame and blood. I do not shove the corruption away from me; I turn it. I give it a direction it does not want. Down through the current, across the merged channel, into the space between Rhazek’s power and mine where dominance has no purchase. It thrashes violently, scraping my ribs from the inside, but the circle recognizes the motion and brightens.
Rhazek amplifies.
He does it perfectly.
No crushing wave. No imperial command. No ancient demon king deciding the universe should be grateful for his intervention. He pours power behind my redirection with disciplined restraint, a vast infernal pressure shaped to my hands. It is terrifyingly beautiful. The force of him moves where I guide it, and the bond does not scream. It sings low and fierce, a sound I feel in my bones.
Corin hammers iron into the ground as the outer ring fractures.
One strike.
Two.
Three.
Each blow sends a hard metallic note through the circle. Cracks race along the scorched soil, trying to split the spiralapart, but the iron anchors catch them, bite them, hold them in place like stitches through torn skin.
“Left quadrant failing!” he shouts.
“I see it,” I gasp.
“No, you feel it. I see it. Kindly appreciate my contribution.”
