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When I press my palm against the linoleum, expecting cold, I feel warmth instead. Not surface heat. Something deeper. Something that makes my teeth ache and my vision blur at the edges.
I pull my hand back fast.
The crack is just a crack. Old building, old floors. That’s all.
But my heart won’t stop hammering.
CHAPTER 4
Malak
The cypress root splinters under my grip. Black ichor wells between my claws where I’ve gouged too deep into my own palm, trying to claw out what doesn’t belong.
Her.
The widow’s grief sits in my chest like swallowed coal, still burning, still alive. I should be hollow by now. Empty. Ready to hunt again when the next moon bleeds copper across the sky.
Instead, I’m choking on vanilla and burnt sugar.
The swamp water laps at my thighs, thick as tar, warm as blood. Mosquitoes cloud around my head in a living veil, their whine drilling into my skull. I let them feed. Let them drink until they burst against my skin in tiny explosions of red.
I should be checking the wards. Every full moon for two centuries, I’ve walked the perimeter where the barrier runs through the Hollow like a scar in reality. Fed power back into the cracks. Kept the Rot from seeping through into the world above.
But I can’t. Not without my strength.
The barrier is fraying and I’m stuck here, hollowed out, because I was too stupid to keep my distance from a grieving widow who smelled like burnt sugar.
Pain might help. Might drown out the phantom echo of her pulse hammering against my ribs.
It doesn’t.
A bull gator surfaces ten feet to my left. Yellow eyes lock onto mine, pupils narrowing to slits. It’s big. Twelve feet easy, scarred snout testimony to decades of survival. The kind of predator that knows its own territory, knows what belongs and what doesn’t.
Right now, I don’t belong anywhere.
The gator’s tail whips through the algae-thick water. I taste the displacement, feel the pressure wave before it connects. The blow catches me across the ribs hard enough to crack bone if I were solid. I stagger, boots sinking deeper into the silt.
My lips peel back. The sound that rips from my throat isn’t language. It’s the scrape of tectonic plates, the groan of continental shelves grinding into dust. Pure void-sound that makes the Spanish moss shiver and the tree frogs go silent.
The gator holds for three heartbeats. Then it drops, sinking back into the black water without a ripple.
Smart beast.
I drop to my knees. Mud swallows me to the chest, cold and thick, smelling of rot and old magic. I shove my head under, holding myself down in the murky dark where light dies and sound becomes texture.
Maybe I can drown her out. Flush her sweetness from my system like poison.
My lungs don’t need air, but I count anyway. One hundred. Two hundred. Three.
When I surface, gasping more from habit than necessity, she’s still there. Lodged behind my sternum like a fishhook, barbed and refusing to let go.
“Fuck.”
The word echoes off the water, gets swallowed by the drone of cicadas starting their evening song. Shadows lengthen between the mangroves, purple-black fingers reaching across the surface. This is my hour. The space between day and night when my kind moves easiest, when the veil wears thin.
I should be hunting. Should be miles from here, following some new trail of loneliness to its source.
Instead, I’m scrubbing at my arms like I can peel her off. Like the swamp can wash away whatever sickness has crawled into my core.
