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He’s always known we’re witches. And tonight he is using everything he has to cover us.

Baz is beside me and I feel his gift activate through the tether, the bone manipulation, which is stronger now than it was before he died, as if the Saints bestowed him with a souvenir from his trip to the Mire. He’s using it to reach into the Mortis walls and pulling something up, and I don’t look at what he’s doing because I’m busy trying to not die, but I feel the focus of it, the controlled ferocity.

He’s extraordinary, the thought flits across my brain, the kind of thought that really has no place here and now, and then a Hollow gets too close as if to emphasize that and I push the ward out hard and the thought goes along with it.

I look across the room, trying to find my friends again. There are more Hollows now, the tears in the walls still opening, still breathing and one is heading for Nelle and Ambrose steps into its path. Just steps into it, no hesitation, only goodness and bravery, the way he does everything. The Hollow’s hand catches him across the chest and he goes backward into one of the long tables and takes the whole thing with him, the candelabra and florals and glasses all coming down together in a crash, and Nelle drops to her knees beside him immediately and I can see from here that it’s bad.

It’s bad. My stomach sinks.

Avelene makes a wailing sound and is trying to get to him and her cane is going as fast as it can go, whacking the undead left and right, and she can’t reach him. Nelle is already there thankfully with her hands pressed to Ambrose’s chest and that’s where I have to stop looking because I have my own Hollow to manage and if I break focus now the ward drops. Baz wouldn’t want me to make the same mistake he did.

So I hold the ward. I hold it until my hands are white and my breath is solid mist and the cold has moved from my fingers into my forearms and black veins are starting at my wrists, the visible cost of pushing this hard for this long.

He cannot die tonight, he cannot die tonight.

I know what it costs if he does and he cannot die tonight.

I push harder.

At the edge of my range I feel the veil.

It’s always there, the thin membrane between here and the shallows, here and the Mire, but tonight it’s thin in a way it shouldn’t be, pressed from the other side, and I can feel the pressure of it like someone is pushing a door you’re trying to keep shut. Something enormous and patient and vast, something that’s larger and older than the cosmos itself, has been pushing for a long time and tonight the walls of this room are helping it push.

I reach.

I don’t mean to. I don’t even have my book or Morena’s skull. It’s the reaching I do when I’m at the limit of what I can hold, the automatic extension of a gift that wants to go further than I can safely take it, and the veil gives under my touch the way it gave in the Midnight Classroom, and I go through.

Not all the way, though.

Just far enough.

The great hall is still around me, I can see the chaos of the attack and the candles and Baz beside me, his face tight with the effort of whatever he’s doing. But underneath it, like a second image laid over the first, I can see the other side.

The Mire. The dark water. The inverted sky where the red Bleeding glows up from the ground and the black presses down from above.

And I can see what’s in the water.

The plague-dead are there. They’re being pulled, gathered, and drawn toward something deep in the dark water, and as I watch I can see the thing that’s pulling at them. It’s so enormous and indescribable that I can’t really hold it in my mind all at once, I can only take it in pieces. It has been here since before the Mortis was built on this island. It has been here since before the island existed. The plague-dead flow toward it and into it and are absorbed and it grows and I know that the Hollows in the room above me are not an attack.

They are a test.

They are a proof of concept of what directed vessels can do in a closed space, what a roomful of necromancers bleed into the veil on the right night, how thin the membrane gets when you push it from both sides at once.

The Bleeding isn’t a symptom.

The Bleeding is a door.

And then something in the dark water turns its attention toward me.

Not the vast thing. I’m too inconsequential and mortal and puny for that thing. But something that sees from it, a tendril of awareness that swings in my direction.

It…it knows me. It has known me since that night I saved Baz.

And it has been waiting for me to come back.

The horror hits me all at once and I snap back into the real world.

Baz catches me. I don’t know when I started falling but his arm is around me and I’m on my knees on the marble and everything is ringing like I’m hearing things from underwater. Slowly the sound returns and Baz is saying my name close to my ear and the tether between us crackles.