Page 9

It can’t.

I push deeper into the Hollow, where the water glows faint green from the magic seeping up through cracks in the bedrock. The mangrove roots here twist overhead like fingers, knotted and arthritic, forming a cathedral of living wood. This is where I come to shed. To purge the essence I’ve consumed and let it dissolve back into the earth.

I close my eyes. Reach inward to that place where I store what I’ve taken. The fear, the loneliness, the desperate hunger for touch that humans leak like sweat.

Nothing.

I try again, pulling harder. Searching for the threads of her grief, the exhaustion that had poured off her in waves, thick enough to choke on. I drank it all down. Every drop of her sorrow, her loss, the empty years she’d spent kneading dough in the dark while the world moved on without her.

It should slide out easy. A few hours and it’s gone, metabolized, forgotten like the hundred others before her.

But it’s still there.

Warm. Alive. Growing.

My claws extend. I dig them into my chest, tearing through shadow-flesh, searching for the foreign heat. Black blood wells up, viscous and wrong.

The pain is distant, theoretical. What terrifies me is what I find beneath.

Her heartbeat. Synced with mine.

“No.”

The word comes out strangled. I rip deeper, fingers closing around something that pulses with borrowed life. But when I try to pull it free, my body seizes. Every nerve lights up in revolt, muscles locking so tight my spine bows backward.

The essence isn’t just clinging. It’s rooted. Wrapped around my core like bindweed, growing through the spaces between what makes me me.

Because I gave her something.

The realization hits like a fist to the throat. Last night, when I filled the hollow spaces inside her, when I fed on her grief, something fractured. A piece of my core, raw and pulsing, tore free and passed into her flesh.

My kind doesn’t give. We take. We consume. We’re hunger given form, mouths that swallow light and shit out darkness.

But I fed her. Fed her myself.

“Stupid,” I snarl, driving my fist into the water hard enough to send ripples crashing into the roots. “Stupid, stupid.”

“Well, well.”

The voice drifts down like smoke, wet and amused. I snap my head up. Corpse-wisps float between the branches, their pale-blue light pulsing in the gathering dark. Three. No, five. More clustering in the shadows overhead, drawn by the alien sweetness bleeding from my skin.

“The hunger eats the human,” one sing-songs, voice like wind through a skull. “But this time, the human ate him back.”

A mud-man pulls itself from the water nearby, its body barely holding form. Clay and swamp gas and malicious intent shaped into something almost human. Its laugh bubbles up wet and thick.

“Fell for her, did you?” It tilts its head, the motion too fluid, too wrong. “Poor shadow-born. All tangled up.”

“Shut your fucking mouth.” I lunge at the nearest wisp. My hand passes through light and mist, closing on nothing.

They laugh. All of them. The sound echoes off the water, multiplies, becomes a chorus of mockery that makes my skin itch.

“She tasted good, didn’t she?” The mud-man grins, or what passes for a grin on something without a proper face. “Sweet little widow. All that grief. But you gave her something sweet too. Something you’re not supposed to give.”

Another wisp circles my head, so close its light casts my shadow on the trees. “Can’t take it back now. It’s hers. You’re hers. Stupid, stupid monster.”

I swipe at it. Miss again. My movements are too slow, too heavy. Like moving through syrup instead of air.

Because my strength isn’t here. It’s there. Miles away, sitting in her chest, keeping her warm.