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I sought Mother Krevna. Her name was always a whisper in the Undermarket, a legend in the Forbidden Quarters. They said she could open doors sealed by tribunal accords.

I found her hut perched on the edge of a ravine, a structure that looked as if it had been grown from the rocks rather than built. It was covered in moss and hanging bones, surrounded by a fence of iron spikes that were topped with the skulls of small animals. Smoke curled from the chimney, smelling of sage and burned hair.

The wolves halted at the gate, their hackles rising and a low growl rumbling in their chests. They did not like this place. Neither did I. But desperation is a powerful anesthetic. I pushed the gate open and walked to the door, which opened before I could knock.

Mother Krevna sat by the hearth, a figure wrapped in layers of ragged shawls. Her face was a map of wrinkles so deep they looked like fissures in the dry earth. Her eyes were sunken and frosted, blind to the world of light but saw everything in the dark.

“Ahh, the broken daughter,” she rasped, her voice sounding like stones grinding together in a riverbed. She did not look at me but at the space above my head. “You carry a heavy shadow, child. And two hounds of war.”

“I need passage,” I said, my voice rusty from disuse, “to the Crimson Keep.”

She cackled, a dry, brittle sound. “Every darkened creature wants to go to the keep. Few survive.” She turned her gaze toward me. “You have the blood. Lilith’s brood. I smell it. But you are…diluted.”

“Diluted?” I snapped, my anger flaring.

“Unrefined.” She spat into the fire, and the flames leaped, turning green. “You are fractured. Half light, half void. You tried to open the gate yourself, didn’t you? I felt the tremors. You nearly cracked the tectonic plate, foolish girl.”

“Can you open it?”

“I have the tool.” She reached into the folds of her rags and pulled out a coin. Lucifer’s coin. The same artifact we had sought in Kraków, the one that had cost a witch her life. “But the tool requires fuel. A toll.”

“I have nothing left to trade.”

Krevna laughed again, louder this time. “Money? What use do I have for paper in the mountains? No, child. The toll is energy. Specific energy.” She stood surprisingly tall, shuffled toward me, and sniffed the air near my neck. She whispered, her voice greedy. “You still have it. Buried deep under scar tissue. Under the void. The angelic light. The spark your father gave you.”

I froze. I thought the light was gone. That Valden had stripped the last of it. Or that I had burned it away in my rage at Houska.

“Mm-hmm. Still there.” Her long crooked finger traced the line of my sternum without touching me. “A thread that binds you to the high heavens. To the Archangel Michael.”

“I don’t want it,” I whispered.

Her blind eyes widened. “Then give it to me. It is volatile in you. Fights the void. Causes pain. Give it to me, and I will use it to power the coin. I will open the door to your mother.”

“If I give it to you,” I asked, my voice trembling, “will the connection break? Will I stop feeling?”

“The light is the conduit. Without the light, there is no signal. You will be silent to Heaven. Invisible to their memories. You will be purely and wholly a void.”

It sounded like oblivion. It sounded like peace.

I looked at the coin in her hand. It was the key to my escape, the key to my revenge, and the key to forgetting the golden eyes that haunted my sleep. I viewed that lingering spark of grace as a hook caught in my flesh, a line that Michael could tug whenever he pleased. I wanted it out. To be cold. To be empty.

“Take it,” I said.

Krevna didn’t hesitate. She began to chant, a low rhythmic droning in a language that predated speech. She held the coin up between us, and it began to hum, vibrating with a hungry resonance. She placed her other hand on the middle of my stomach.

The pain was absolute. It felt like she was reaching into my chest cavity and pulling my spine out through my skin. I screamed, caving in. My spine popped. Golden light bled from my back—a pale soft gold. My essence. My heritage.

It flowed into the coin, swirling like liquid fire. With every inch that left me, a piece of warmth died within me. The memory of sunlight on my face faded. The echo of Remiel’s touch turned to ice. Something snapped in me—a sound like a violin string breaking in a quiet room. My connection to Heaven was severed, and the presence I had felt at the back of my mind for centuries was violently gone.

I fell to my knees, gasping. The coin glowed with a terrifying brilliance and then dimmed, having swallowed the light. I looked at my hands. They were pale, grayish in the firelight. But I felt…nothing. No warmth. No cold. Just a vast, echoing emptiness.

“It is done,” Krevna whispered, cradling the coin like a newborn. “You are empty, child. You are ready.”

The portal spat me out onto the obsidian stones of the Crimson Keep’s courtyard. I was a sprawling mess of limbs and stolen wool that felt too heavy for the oppressive heat. The air here was not air at all but a thick sulfurous soup of ancient ash and the copper tang of blood spilled eons ago.

I had made it. I scrambled to my feet, gasping for breath, as my eyes adjusted to the red gloom of the infernal sky, which hung low and heavy.

I turned to call for them, for the guardians who had walked through the snow with me. “Fate? Fury?”