A rip opens behind me.
The air tears like wet cloth, revealing a darkness beyond the alley that smells of old blood, extinguished candles, and something sweetly decayed. The tendrils drag me toward it inch by inch.
Rhazek’s absence becomes louder than sound.
The tether stretches until it burns.
I feel him on the other side of the severed space, not gone, not dead, but cut off by the ward net with a brutality that makes the bond shriek through my bones. It is tearing. Not breaking cleanly, but fraying under force, strand by strand, each one ripping through my chest with a pain so intimate I nearly lose the breath count.
“Rhazek,” I gasp.
The barrier flares again, and from somewhere beyond it a burst of flame strikes hard enough to make the sigils scream. For half a second, I see him through the distortion—his form fractured, his eyes fixed on me with a violence that would set the world on fire if the net allowed it.
Then the barrier blinds me.
Corin throws himself at it with his shoulder. “Sable!”
I dig my heels into the cobblestones, but the shadow tendrils pull me backward. My boots scrape stone. Chalk dust, salt residue, and grit grind beneath my soles. The rip widens behind me, cold air spilling over my back like a grave opening its mouth.
I will not scream.
I will not give Maltherion the rhythm of panic.
I force one more breath into order, even as the tether strains past bearing.
Inhale.
Hold.
Exhale.
Corin’s face is the last clear thing I see, pale with rage on the other side of the barrier, one hand bleeding where iron has bitten through his palm.
He shouts my name again.
The shadows drag me backward through the rip in the air.
The tether tears into white pain.
The alley disappears.
Silence closes over everything.
14
RHAZEK
The bond turns into a blade inside my chest.
One instant Sable’s pulse is there, strained but intact, burning through the tether with furious discipline as she forces her fear into counted breath. The next instant the anti-manifestation ward closes around her, and the connection twists hard enough to tear coherence from the center of my form. Pain floods through me in a brutal white line, and the mortal house lurches sideways around my perception.
I collapse.
The floorboards crack beneath one knee as my hand strikes the wall, claws forming through my fingers before I can contain them. The air in the room blackens at the edges. Every ward sigil in the house screams with red light, responding to my destabilization and to the violence gathering under my skin.
The tether is not gone.
It is worse than gone.
