The Ravencrest tome lay under Sam’s palm, humming with a low, feverish energy that seemed to vibrate directly into her bones. She could feel every pulse of it in her skull, echoing the irregular beat of the glowing runes on the bookshop’s walls. Candlelight warped her shadow across the desk, long and crooked, like the ancestors she’d spent the night reading about. With each exhale, the air grew heavier, thick as old blood, the only movement the slow drip of wax onto her notes.

She pressed her palm to the book, half-expecting it to bite her again. It didn’t. This time, it merely radiated heat, a relentless, low-grade fever. Sam stared at her hands—wounded, ink-stained, trembling with exhaustion—and wondered if the book was really waiting for her to finish the ritual, or if she’d already crossed the point of no return.

A sudden gust rattled the shop’s front windows. The runes brightened in response, blue-white and electric. She winced, blinking away a splinter of pain behind her eyes. Somewhere in the building, the heating vent cycled on with a rattling groan, followed by the soft, familiar footfall of Tyrone Shaw.

He entered with the cautious posture of a man expecting to find a crime scene. His sheriff’s jacket hung open, shirt clinging to him with sweat and something darker that hadn’t quite washed out. He was limping—favoring his left ankle, maybe from the tangle with his father in the alley—but his presence filled the room as if he’d brought the whole police department with him.

Sam didn’t turn around. She didn’t trust herself to look him in the eye. Instead, she forced her focus on the Ravencrest tome, flipping to the diagram of another yet unknown ritual and rune. The familiar tension wound tight in her chest, the same knot of old arguments and unresolved blame.

“We need to talk,” Tyrone said, voice flat and businesslike, but not unkind.

Sam let the silence ride out until it became a dare. Finally, she closed the book. “Talk, then.”

He sighed. “You know what we saw at the school. It’s chaos out there. People are losing it, attacking each other. Kids are… I don’t even know what to call it. Chanting, vandalizing, acting like a flock of little cultists.”

Sam grimaced. “That’s how Nyxalloth works. It feeds off panic, fractures the mind, turns every fear into a weapon.”

Tyrone’s jaw flexed. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it sound like you’re the only one with answers. Or like you’re the only one who gets to decide what happens next.” He advanced, knuckles white on the edge of her desk. “This isn’t just about your family, Sam. It’s about the whole goddamn town. My father. Lilly. Everyone.”

She set her mouth into a hard line. “I know that, Ty. That’s why I’m trying to figure out how to stop it.”

He looked like he wanted to hit something, or maybe just collapse onto the floor. “You can’t solve this by yourself. I don’t care how much you think you understand. There are kids out there wandering the street at three in the morning. I have a duty—”

She cut him off, louder than intended. “You think I don’t? You think I want any of this?”

He pushed off from the desk, started pacing the cramped aisle between the classics and the cheap paperbacks. “We should be evacuating. Getting people as far from town as possible.”

She scoffed. “Go ahead. Tell me which roads aren’t crawling with possessed psychos or whatever those things are. And if they leave, what stops the entity from following them? It’s not like Nyxalloth cares about a speed limit.”

He rubbed his forehead, as if trying to scrub the whole situation from his mind. “We can get people to the church. The library. Anywhere with solid walls and enough people to fight back if they have to.”

“It won’t matter,” Sam muttered. “If we don’t seal Nyxalloth, nothing will.”

His anger flared again. “You think you’re the only one with something to lose?” He gestured toward the back room, where Hank still lay unconscious. “That’s my father. And I don’t plan on burying him this week.”

Sam’s retort died in her throat. Instead, she reached for the page she’d been translating, shoving it across the desk at him. “Read this. It’s not just about blood, Ty. It’s about intent. Someone in the Ravencrest line has to willingly offer themselves. It’s the only way to close the circle. If you want to save your dad, help me figure out how to do it without…”

She trailed off. She couldn’t say the words. She didn’t need to.

Tyrone stared at the page, lips moving as he read the cramped script. The room filled with a thick, suffocating silence. He looked up, eyes glassy with something she’d never seen from him before. Not anger, not disappointment—just pure, existential dread.

“Jesus, Sam. You’re talking about—”

“Sacrifice,” she finished for him. “Yeah. I know.”

He ran a hand down his face, the lines of exhaustion deeper than she’d ever seen. “There has to be another way.”

She almost laughed. “That’s what I’ve been saying all night.”

Tyrone slumped into the battered chair across from her, elbows on knees. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Sam let her eyes drift toward the back room, where the faint echo of Lilly’s voice rose and fell in a soft, steady rhythm.

That’s when she realized it had gone quiet.

Sam shot to her feet, heart hammering. “Where’s Lilly?”

Tyrone looked up, eyes wide. “She was with my dad.”

Sam bolted for the hallway, slamming into the side door just as Lilly stumbled out of the storage room. Her skin was translucent in the candlelight, blue veins spiderwebbing across her arms. She walked in slow, deliberate steps, like a windup doll on the verge of running down.

“Lilly?” Sam said, breathless.

Her sister’s gaze was unfocused, pupils huge and luminous in the half-light. She was murmuring, words too soft to catch. Sam reached out, grabbing her gently by the shoulders.

“Lilly, hey—hey, look at me.”

For a split second, Lilly’s eyes cleared. She smiled, but it was all wrong—too serene, too empty. “It’s almost time, Sam,” she whispered, the voice not quite her own.

A tremor ran down Sam’s spine. “Time for what?”

Lilly didn’t answer. She blinked, the strange light in her eyes flickering, then went slack. Sam caught her, guiding her to sit on a stack of unopened boxes. Lilly’s lips moved, the language liquid and alien, syllables sliding into each other like oil on water. Sam’s skin prickled with recognition—she’d seen those words in the margins of Emil’s journals, in the bloodstained notes her mother left behind.

Tyrone approached, voice trembling. “Is she…?”

“Not herself,” Sam said, pressing her hand to Lilly’s forehead. It was burning with fever, but underneath, her pulse was steady. “I think the entity is using her. Or at least trying to.”

Lilly shuddered, a sudden spasm coursing through her. She locked eyes with Sam, and for a brief, terrible moment, her irises flashed the deep, liquid black of Nyxalloth’s domain.

“Blood calls to blood,” she crooned, in a voice that was both hers and not. “The circle must close.”

Then she slumped again, eyes rolling back, and Sam almost dropped her in shock.

A new sound crashed over them—a shrill, inhuman wail from the front of the shop. The runes above the windows exploded into white-blue brilliance, casting the entire room in harsh, surgical light. Sam’s ears rang with the noise; it felt like the world was splitting open along some ancient fault line.

Tyrone cursed and ran to the window, gun drawn, though Sam doubted it would do much against a creature that fed on fear and madness. She joined him, shoving aside a display of bestsellers to peer through the warped glass.

The street outside was packed with townsfolk, arms outstretched, faces twisted into parodies of joy and pain. They rocked and chanted, a crowd bound by a single, monstrous will. At the center of the street, right beneath the flickering lamp post, something impossible flickered in and out of existence.

It was her mother.

Sam’s mind reeled, refusing to believe it. But there she was—Jill Peterson, her hair a tangle of gold, her eyes lit with the same wild desperation Sam remembered from the last night they’d ever spoken. She stood surrounded by shadows, arms wide, as if trying to hold the entire town in a single, impossible embrace.

Sam pressed her face to the glass, tears burning in her eyes. “That’s not real,” she whispered. “That’s not—”

But the apparition turned, meeting Sam’s gaze. It smiled, soft and maternal, then bared its teeth in a rictus of agony.

“She’s calling us,” Lilly intoned from somewhere behind her, voice perfectly calm.

Sam spun around. “What?”

Lilly’s voice, coming from the back of the store, like a loud whisper, “Mom’s calling. I have to go.”

Before Sam or Tyrone could react, the backdoor was slammed open.

Tyrone lunged after her, but Sam was faster, vaulting the desk and chasing her sister into the night.

They burst into the alley, flashlights sweeping frantic arcs through the darkness. The cold was so intense it made Sam’s teeth ache, her lungs burning with each breath. She screamed Lilly’s name, voice cracking, the sound swallowed by the wind.

Lilly was already gone. All that remained was a thin trail of blood droplets, glistening like rubies on the cracked concrete, and the lingering echo of her laughter, fading into the darkness where Nyxalloth waited.

The alley was a trap for sound, swallowing even the frantic echo of their own footfalls. Sam barreled ahead, Tyrone close behind, flashlight beams jittering over piles of refuse and the low, bone-white curb. The night pressed in from all sides—cold, hostile, alert to their intrusion.

“Lilly!” Sam screamed. The word bounced off brick and came back at her, a mocking ghost. No answer. No movement. Just the faint metallic tang of blood and the slow ooze of a shadow too thick to be natural.

The droplets on the ground were not much—enough to show a path, not enough for real panic—but the pattern of them was all wrong, dot-dot-dash like a code meant only for the inhuman. The drops led east, toward the main street, and vanished at the threshold where cobblestones met the modern blacktop.

They burst out onto Market Street. Sam’s breath plumed in the freezing air, every muscle coiled and sick with dread. The town was empty. Not just quiet, but violently, deliberately vacant. No cars. No lights from the old apartments above the shops. No sounds but the whine of the wind. Even the rows of decorative trees seemed to lean away from the pavement, branches tensed in expectation.

A scream split the darkness.

It was not a sound Sam had ever heard from her sister. It was too raw, too animal. A sound of both ecstasy and terror. She sprinted, almost losing the flashlight in her haste, with Tyrone’s boots thundering after her. The scream twisted, rising in pitch, and then cut off, leaving an ache in the air.

“Lilly!” Sam tried again. Her voice was gone, lost to the vacuum of the square.

Tyrone caught up and pointed, wordless. Something glittered in the street. Sam ran to it, skidding on a patch of broken glass, and fell to her knees.

It was Lilly’s bag. Next to it, the silver locket that had belonged to their mother, its chain snapped and draped over the curb like a noose. The locket was open, both sides slick with blood. Inside was the faded picture: their mother as a teenager, and next to her, in a much newer slot, Lilly herself, grinning and awkward, both girls forever frozen in a time before any of this had started.

Sam’s hands shook as she picked up the locket, the chain biting into her fingers. She stared at the faces, her own tears blurring the glass. “I should have watched her,” she whispered, voice gone tight and shrill. “I should have known something was wrong.”

Tyrone squatted beside her, his movements careful, as if trying not to startle her. “Hey. Hey.” He touched her shoulder—a little too hard, but he was shaking too. “This is my fault, Sam. If I hadn’t been fighting with you, if I’d just—”

“Don’t.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, leaving a bloody streak across her cheek. “Don’t make this about you. I’m the one who brought her here.”

He pulled her up, maybe a little rough, and they both stood staring at the empty street. The silence had changed. It was thicker, charged. The glow from the runes above the windows of The Dusty Gnome blazed like warning beacons, but the rest of the town was dead. It was as if the whole world had withdrawn, leaving only the two of them to witness what came next.

They scanned the sidewalk. A trail of blood and dirt led west, toward the church, but then veered hard south and vanished entirely at the intersection. Sam felt her knees going out and leaned against the mailbox, gasping.

“Lilly!” she called again. The word seemed pitiful now.

Tyrone swept the flashlight in an arc. It caught on a patch of frost, a glint of something in the gutter: a paperclip, twisted into a rough spiral. Sam recognized it at once—Lilly’s old nervous habit, back from when she still bit her nails. She followed it, hoping for more clues, but the next street was just as empty, just as cold.

They paced the block twice, then three times, calling and searching. There were no answers. Only the relentless weight of absence, the knowledge that the town itself was in on the secret.

After the fourth pass, Sam slumped to the curb, head in her hands. “We lost her,” she said. “We lost her for good.”

Tyrone knelt in front of her. The sheriff act was gone, replaced by pure, helpless humanity. “We’re not giving up. Not yet.”

Sam raised her head, eyes burning. “What if she’s already gone?” she whispered. “What if she’s with it now?”

Tyrone looked at the locket in her hand. He didn’t answer.

The streetlamps flickered, dimmed, then guttered out entirely, plunging Peachtree Hollow into perfect, predatory darkness.

They drifted through the square, the darkness so deep Sam felt it pressing against her eyes. Her hand found Tyrone’s sleeve; she gripped it tight, as much for his sake as for hers. Every footstep felt like an intrusion, every breath a trespass. The town was utterly dead. The universe had shrunk to two battered survivors and the hollow echo of the name “Lilly.”

That’s when they saw her. Under the only working streetlight for three blocks, Patricia Abernathy stood with her hands folded over a parasol, as if the night were merely damp and not a supernatural assault on all of creation. Her hair was immaculate, her antique dress pressed to a crispness that seemed to defy the chill. She smiled at them—a cat’s smile, content and hungry.

Sam stopped dead. Tyrone hesitated, then squared his shoulders, sheriff’s bravado cracking at the edges.

“What are you doing out here?” he barked.

Patricia cocked her head, as if the question was the most naive thing she’d heard all night. “It’s such a beautiful evening, Sheriff. One hates to be cooped up indoors.”

Sam stepped forward, voice shaking with rage. “Where is my sister?”

Patricia looked her up and down, gaze slow and deliberate. “The young Ravencrest has gone where she belongs. Blood calls to blood, after all.”

Sam clenched her fists. “If you’ve hurt her—”

“Hurt her?” Patricia laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “My dear, she is far beyond pain now. She is part of something much greater.”

Tyrone’s hand drifted to his sidearm. “Why don’t you tell us where she is? We’ll all go together.”

Patricia smiled wider. For a second, the lamplight caught in her eyes, and they reflected a swirling darkness that seemed bottomless. “I’m afraid that’s impossible. The house has called her home, as it always was meant to. The manor awaits its rightful heirs.”

Sam’s stomach dropped. “Ravencrest. You want us there.”

“Want?” Patricia’s voice was velvet over razors. “The will of the Old Gods is not a matter of want. Only inevitability. You have a role to play, Sam. Don’t resist it.”

Sam advanced until they were nose to nose, her hands balled into trembling fists. “If you’ve done anything to her—if you’ve let that thing hurt her—I will kill you myself.”

Patricia’s smile didn’t falter. “You’re welcome to try. But I’m merely the messenger, dear. The circle is almost complete. All that remains is for you to accept your place.”

Sam’s voice cracked. “Where’s my mother? I saw her in the street.”

Patricia’s eyes glittered with amusement and, for a flicker, something like pity. “She walks between worlds now. Not quite here, not quite gone. Perhaps you’ll join her soon.”

Tyrone tried to lunge forward, but Patricia stepped back—just a single, fluid motion—and the darkness swallowed her. The lamplight winked out, leaving only the afterimage of her smile burning in Sam’s brain.

The silence returned, this time absolute. Sam and Tyrone stood alone, shivering in the spot where Patricia had been. Neither spoke for a long minute.

Finally, Tyrone muttered, “I don’t even know what the hell I just saw.”

Sam slumped onto the base of the streetlight, cold to her core. “It’s not over,” she said. “It’s barely started.”

Tyrone knelt next to her, massaging his forehead. “I need to get back to the station. Round up anyone left. If there’s even a chance we can get them to safety—”

Sam grabbed his wrist, desperate. “We can’t leave Lilly alone with it. You heard Abernathy. They want us at the manor.”

He shook his head. “If we go charging in there without backup, we’re dead. I need you to check on my dad, make sure he’s okay.”

Sam nodded. She hated that he was right. Hated that she was suddenly so tired she couldn’t stand.

Tyrone stood, squaring his shoulders. “Promise me you’ll stay put. The wards on the bookstore—whatever your mom did, it seems to help. Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”

Sam wanted to argue, but her strength was gone. “Fine. But hurry.”

He touched her shoulder, fingers warm even through the layers of cold. “We’ll get her back,” he promised.

She didn’t answer.

He jogged off into the night, flashlight beam a thin, brave line against the black. Sam watched until he disappeared around the corner. Then she forced herself upright, fingers tightly wound around the locket and the battered bag.

The walk back to The Dusty Gnome was the longest of her life. The runes were still glowing, pulsing in a steady rhythm. She locked the doors behind her, drew the shades, and dropped onto the floor behind the counter.

She opened the locket. Stared at the faces. Her mother. Her sister. She let herself cry, then wiped her eyes, picked up the tome, and started reading. There had to be something—anything—in the old bastard’s notes that would save Lilly. Even if it cost her everything else.

She started to work, her voice a rough whisper: “Don’t fear. It’s your choice.”

The shop was quiet. The darkness outside waited, patient, as Sam dug in for the final fight.