Sam sat frozen for a second, sweat slicking her hair to her forehead, hands clamped on the edges of the box and the cold of the tile gnawing through her jeans at the knees. She gently opened the box, not sure what to expect but hope was there.

Inside, nestled in the black velvet lining, was a cargo of family ghosts.

The first layer was a dozen stones, each the size of a small golf ball and carved with intricate, jagged runes. The marks glimmered faintly, as if catching a light from somewhere just out of sight. She lifted one and felt an instant zing up her fingers, like static but sharper. The grooves were blackened with age, some barely visible, some raw and fresh as if newly inked. She rolled one in her palm. It vibrated faintly, as if the stone itself was desperate to be remembered.

Under the stones were stacks of yellowed index cards, covered edge to edge in her mother’s spidery handwriting. Sam rifled through them: ritual instructions, diagrams, little notes about timing and intent. One card was marked “For Sam,” and she tucked it into her pocket without reading, needing to savor the idea that her mother had planned for this moment.

She set the cards aside and found, cradled in the bottom of the box, wrapped in a velvety cloth, a pendant.

It was heavier than it looked— a shiny black stone with red in the middle, the color of fresh blood. The surface was etched with tiny, elaborate glyphs, each line so fine she could barely follow it with her eye. A length of silver chain snaked around the stone binding it and looped around to form a necklace. The pendant was warm to the touch, when Sam closed her fingers around it, a jolt of something hot and electric raced through her arm and into her chest.

Her vision twisted. The bookstore receded, replaced by a subterranean cold so absolute it felt like she’d fallen into the planet’s core. A single bare bulb flickered overhead, painting the stone walls with shadows that moved out of sync with the light. Sam’s mouth filled with the taste of dirt and iron.

Ravencrest Manor’s sub-basement. She knew it instantly, even though she’d never set foot there herself.

In the center of the room was a sarcophagus of shadow, a cocoon woven from black smoke and the memory of violence. Every so often, the smoke would thin, and she saw her sister curled inside—a pale, perfect shape, eyes open and unblinking, arms wrapped around her chest. Lilly’s lips moved in a slow, silent incantation. She looked peaceful, but the air around her was alive with teeth.

The darkness was not empty. It crawled and writhed, thick with intelligence. Here and there, the smoke bulged and rippled, resolving for a fraction of a second into mouths filled with glassy, birdlike teeth, and then, deeper, to the wet black eyes that followed Sam with hungry delight. It was Nyxalloth, no longer shy about showing itself. It spiraled around the coffin, occasionally darting a tongue of itself inside, testing the shell, licking the air as if to savor the promise of a meal yet uncooked.

Sam’s mind rebelled, tried to pull away, but the vision held her locked. One of the eyes swiveled to focus on her, and the teeth below it smiled.

Then the entire room pitched sideways and Sam was back in the shop, gasping, pendant glowing with bright white light in her palm. She let it drop, her hand numb and trembling. The vision lingered in her mind, and now that she’d seen it, she knew with sick certainty: the only thing holding Lilly together was the last vestiges of the binding ritual. And Nyxalloth was moments away from finishing the job.

Sam lined up the stones, following the pattern from the top card. She set them in a loose circle on the tile, careful not to break the existing salt and chalk lines. Then she read the next steps, lighting fresh candles—three at each point of the triangle her mother had drawn in black marker on the underside of the floorboard. She whispered the incantation, voice raw, but the words came easier this time, almost as if they’d been waiting in her mouth for years.

The candles flared, burning twice as bright as before. The blue runes on the walls pulsed in time with Sam’s heart, growing stronger, steadier. The shadow that had haunted the far wall slithered back, hissing, as if repelled by the new energy in the air.

Sam felt something shift inside her. Not strength, exactly, but a steadiness she hadn’t known she was missing. For the first time since Lilly disappeared, since this night began and everything fell apart, she felt the smallest tingle of hope.

Then she sat back and waited, listening to the storm of chanting and violence outside, feeling the wards pulse and flex with new power.

She thought of her mother, of the time Jill had spent alone in this same store, fighting her own nightmares. Sam pressed her hand to her chest, feeling her heartbeat and each breath, and let herself cry for a minute—just long enough to clear the grit from her eyes.

When the next thud came, it was met with a ripple of blue-white fire. The mob outside screamed, then fell silent, as if the shock had knocked them back a step.

She pressed the pendant to her forehead, as if to cool the fever, but the bright light and warmth only pulsed harder. Sam clenched her teeth and let the rhythm ground her. She reached for the letter again, desperate for instructions, for a way to do what her mother never could.

She reread the final paragraph, tracing the lines with a bloodied finger: “You’re a Ravencrest, by blood and by will. I tried to keep you and Lilly out of it, but some things can’t be buried. I wanted to tell you in person. I wanted you to have the chance to choose for yourself, but if this letter reaches you, I guess I failed at both.”

Her mother’s voice echoed in her head, and she found herself reading the last lines aloud: “He told me, just once, and I wrote it on the blueprints of the store. They’re hidden under the floor, behind the register, beneath the old cashbox. The key is for the lock I put there. You have to act fast. The entity will try to break you first. Don’t let it. If Lilly’s with you, protect her. If you’re alone, do what you have to do. You’re stronger than you think.”

Sam shuddered, hugged her knees, and let herself sob for exactly ten sintoeconds before she wrenched herself upright. She dug into the hole that once housed the box and found the blueprints, folded to a crisp, the corners nearly rubbed through. There was no instructions or anything. Sam sighed and then remembered the note card with her name on it. She flipped it over and recognized her mom’s handwriting once again. “Blood will open. True name will bind. Wear the Ravencrest Heart, it will guide and protect you.” Below that, in a trembling hand, her mother had written, “Sign the book with your true name. Not your legal name like I did. The family name.”

Sam’s mouth went dry. She looked at her hands—already battered, already leaking scarlet in half a dozen places. She turned and stared at the tome on the desk, its brass-and-leather binding glistening in the candlelight. It looked alive, almost hopeful.

She closed the cash box, the weight of it grounding her. She gathered the index cards, the stones, the blueprints, and the pendant—Ravencrest Heart, the name fitting and horrible—and carried it all to the counter. She laid it out in a circle, the way the rituals in the cards suggested, then set the tome in the center.

She read the letter one last time, committing the steps to memory. Sign the book with the true name, in blood. The family name, not the one on the birth certificate. The words hummed in her bones, a secret that made the world make sense, at least for one broken, perfect second.

She wiped her face, fumbled for her pen on the desk and a letter opener. The blade was sharp; she felt it more as pressure than pain as it slid across the ball of her left thumb. Blood welled instantly, red and eager.

She took up the pen, dipped it in the blood still pooling on her thumb, and scrawled the name she had never before spoken aloud:

Samantha Elliandra Ravencrest.

The name bled into the page with all the other names, blood soaking in and the book devoured it all.

Sam closed her eyes, braced for what came next, and felt the world tilt, as if her very soul was being rewritten line by line.

The world did not collapse. It did not explode in light or thunder or a rain of teeth. Instead, the Ravencrest tome lay open on the countertop, its pages fluttering as if in a gentle draft. But Sam felt the change immediately. Every inch of her skin prickled; her bones buzzed with a sensation like static electricity or the aftershock of a panic attack. For a moment she wondered if she was dying, if this was the last synaptic firework before her brain went dark for good.

But it wasn’t death that claimed her. It was memory. Old and alien and not entirely her own.

She looked down. Her signature—her true, secret name—smoldered on the page, the blood rippling outward in fractal patterns. As she watched, the liquid webbed across the ancient paper, forming spirals and sigils and shapes that vibrated on the edge of comprehension. Then, slowly, it was drawn into the parchment, vanishing without a trace. Sam touched the spot where her name had been, half-expecting to find it wet and tacky, but the page was smooth, warm, and unyielding.

The book snapped itself shut, then reopened—this time on the first, previously blank leaf. There, in a hand more elegant than any living person’s, was a title: “Codex Umbra. Book of Shadows.”

Sam’s breath caught. She stared at the words, and with every second, more lines unfurled beneath them: dense columns of text in languages she shouldn’t have been able to read—Latin, Old English, even a spidery script she recognized from the margins of Emil’s diaries. The diagrams that accompanied them were breathtaking: circles within circles, trees of lightning, diagrams of ancient architecture that had been incorporated the Manor’s floors overlaid with burning lines of force.

She reached out and the book responded, pages flipping of their own accord. Her mind filled with the logic of the diagrams, the heat of the ink burning new synapses into her cortex. She knew, instantly and with the authority of generations, what the symbols meant. She saw the true architecture of the Manor: every curve, every angle, every stair designed as a rune of containment, each floor a chapter of a greater spell.

The next page hit her like a punch.

She saw herself, over and over, in a thousand old photographs—her own face morphing into the faces of the women who came before her. Some smiled, some wept, some stared into the void with dead, resigned eyes. All of them bore the same mark above the left wrist: the spiral of the Ravencrest sigil, rendered in blood or ink or, sometimes, a delicate burn.

The Codex told her the rest, Nyxalloth was not merely a parasite. It was a cipher, a force that read the fears and desires of its host and grew to fit them. Emil had built the prison for himself; his wife had anchored the circle with her own pain and sacrifice. But the ritual was incomplete, always incomplete, because every generation was weaker than the last. The entity fed on the Ravencrest bloodline—used it as both lock and key, and now it had Lilly.

Sam flipped to the next diagram: a banishment, or something like it. The process was clear, brutal, and direct. It required the book, the pendant (now humming on the counter where she’d dropped it), and a final offering of blood—fresh, from the heart, willingly given. The text was unsparing about the risks. If the will of the binder faltered, even for a second, the circle would collapse and the entity would escape for good.

The power in the blood was both sword and shield. But if it broke, if the user was not strong enough to hold the circle, then the binder’s soul would be consumed.

Sam stared at the final page, where the instructions were written not in any living tongue, but in a jumble of letters that made her head hurt to read. She understood it anyway. The signature of the line was all that mattered. Her blood was the final code.

Her hands trembled as she closed the book. The air felt electrified, as if she was living in the moment just before a lightning strike. She looked at the pendant. The red stone pulsed with each beat of her heart.

She remembered the vision of Lilly in the basement, wrapped in darkness and hope and the last traces of a family that refused to die. She remembered her mother’s voice: “You’re stronger than you think.”

Sam wiped the sweat from her brow and forced herself upright. The Codex Umbra lay heavy in her hands, but it was her burden now, and hers alone.

She breathed, slow and deep. The pain in her thumb had stopped. The wound had already scabbed over, the blood dried and dark as the ink of her ancestors.

She gathered the notes, the pendant, and the book. There was only one thing left to do.

Finish it.

The ritual wasn’t elegant. It was a patchwork of old world magic and brute-force desperation. Sam would have to open the Codex at the heart of the Manor, light the stones, and chant the invocation while holding the Ravencrest Heart against her own skin. There were three key phrases; each one was a weapon, but if recited out of order or hesitated over for even a heartbeat, the whole process would collapse. The book wasn’t shy about the consequences. Failure meant death—hers, or worse, Lilly’s.

Sam copied the incantations onto her arm in Sharpie, black sigils marching up her forearm like a parade of ants. She filled her bag with what little she could carry: the pendant, the ritual stones, a pocketful of matches, and the battered notebook of her mother’s annotations.

She lit the last candle, then killed the overheads, letting the store melt into a cave of shadow and flicker. The runes above the windows hummed a nervous blue, their light pulsing in sync with her heartbeat. For a second, it was almost peaceful. Sam allowed herself a half-smile, imagining her mother watching her from the other side of the veil, arms folded, shaking her head but proud all the same.

The first tremor hit like a fist.

Every bookcase in the shop shuddered; spines leapt from their shelves, raining down in a muffled avalanche. Sam ducked, but a copy of Practical Demonology smacked her on the head, its dust jacket splitting open like a rotten tooth. The air was instantly thick with motes of paper and a sharp, peppery smell as a second, more violent quake sent the front window into a spiderweb of cracks.

Sam steadied herself against the counter, clutching the Codex to her chest. A low, bass hum vibrated up through her shoes, a sound like the world itself preparing to snap in two. Somewhere deep beneath the floor, a groan of shifting earth was answered by a chorus of howling dogs, the sound twisted and wrong, too full of language for any animal Sam had ever heard.

She waited, breath ragged, for the shaking to stop. When it finally did, the silence was so deep she heard her own pulse drumming in her ears.

“Shit,” she said softly, and grabbed the pendant from the counter.

The moment her fingers closed around the Ravencrest Heart, the red stone glowed to life, casting a bloody halo on the wall. The chain uncoiled, alive and eager, and Sam slipped it over her neck. The pendant settled just above her sternum, hot as a fever, the metal buzzing with the anticipation of battle.

A third tremor—shorter, sharper—sent a stack of children’s books tumbling. Sam ignored them. She sprinted to the backdoor, unlatched the deadbolt, and shoved it open.

Outside, the sky was not the sky she remembered. It was twilight, but not a natural one. A bruised purple bled into angry orange at the horizon, and the sun was nowhere to be seen. Over the distant roofs of downtown, black tendrils rose and fell, swirling in patterns that hurt to look at for too long. Each tentacle of smoke writhed with the grace of a snake, the tips splitting and reforming as they licked their way toward the north side of town, toward Ravencrest Manor.

Sam stumbled into the alley, boots crunching on broken glass. The town was silent, not even the wind daring to move. She heard a distant thump—maybe another aftershock, maybe something much worse—but she didn’t hesitate. She squared her shoulders, pressed the Codex tighter to her ribs, and started to run.

At the end of the alley, she paused once. She turned and looked back at the battered, beloved wreck of The Dusty Gnome. Every memory she’d ever had of her mother was in that shop, from the first time she’d balanced on the step stool to help sort returns to the night she’d hidden behind the mystery section and read her first forbidden novel. She felt a pulse of regret, sharper than the cold, but she didn’t let it slow her down.

There was only one thing left to do.

She wiped the sweat from her brow, checked that the pendant was still glowing, and sprinted into the unnatural night, straight toward the Manor and whatever monster waited there for her.

The book was heavy. But it wasn’t nearly as heavy as the blood in her veins.