Sam barely had time to gasp before the first of them hit the stairs.

It started with a single, shuddering scream from above—the kind of sound a person only made when their brain finally gave out and handed the wheel to whatever was waiting in the shadows. The sound rolled down the spiral, gaining company and momentum, until a tide of footsteps pounded the steps, the stone amplifying each impact until the whole world was nothing but noise and bodies.

Sam’s lips were already moving, voice threading through the chaos: “Ex anima, ex sanguine, ex umbra…” The words shivered the air, setting the circle at their feet to a low, blue glow. Sam used some of her newfound power to seal the ritual circle in a sort of shimmering shield. She dug her nails into the binding stone in her palm and pulled Lilly close, never breaking cadence.

The first wave of townsfolk boiled into the chamber with the sick grace of a flash mob, eyes blazing, arms outstretched. They hit the invisible edge of the ritual circle and bounced, hair standing on end, fingers sparking blue. Sam heard the snap and sizzle of flesh burning, and the inhuman, simultaneous moan as half a dozen people reeled back, their mouths opened wider than nature intended.

Tyrone didn’t wait. He surged forward, catching a man by the collar and hurling him back into the others. The sheriff’s baton moved in tight arcs, every swing a lesson in anatomy. He cracked wrists, swept knees, jabbed hard into ribs and solar plexuses—never once aiming to kill, always to drop or stun. Even so, it was brutal. There was blood, bone, teeth on the stone.

Sam felt each impact in her bones, but she clung to the cadence, the song of her own breath and voice. The entity didn’t like that. It howled from the heart of the circle, a discordant bass that hit her in the spine and threatened to turn her insides to into bloody liquid. The shadow at the center thickened, rearing up like a storm column, eyes and mouths opening all over its writhing surface. Sam, on instinct, just like with Angelica, quickly shielded herself and Lilly as well. Nyxalloth lashed at them with tendrils of living blackness, but every time a tentacle grazed the blue circle, it recoiled in a burst of sparks and smoke.

Lilly flinched, but didn’t let go. “Keep going,” she whispered, fingers digging into Sam’s shoulder.

Sam nodded, never missing a beat. She recited the next phase of the invocation, pulling from the Codex now not with her eyes but straight from memory, the words burned into her by pain and necessity. “Vinctum est. Subjugatus. In aeternum.” She watched as the lines of the circle dug deeper into the stone, turning from blue to a furious, electric white.

More people poured in. They were everywhere—children, retirees, the girl who brought her coffee at the diner, the man who used to run the movie theater. All of them moving as one organism, eyes blank, lips moving in unison: “Nyxalloth. Nyxalloth. Nyxalloth.” They pressed against the circle, heedless of the burn, eager to throw themselves into the blue-white barrier. The smell of singed flesh was overpowering.

Patricia Abernathy appeared at the rear of the mob, face painted in ceremonial lines of black and red. She brandished the obsidian dagger overhead and began her own chant, the syllables sharp and ugly, designed to break concentration or worse.

Tyrone saw her and pointed, voice hoarse. “There!” But two more townsfolk tackled him from behind, dragging him down. He slammed one into the floor, the other heaved over his shoulder into the wall, but he was tiring fast.

Sam’s throat burned. She could feel Nyxalloth inside her head, probing for a weak spot. It sent visions—her mother, stitched into the wall, her father gnawing his own hands off, Lilly dead and cold—but she forced them down and focused on the glow at the edge of her vision.

The circle began to buckle.

The entity screamed. It surged outward, a hundred mouths opening in concert, biting at the circle, biting at her. The possessed townsfolk, sensing weakness, redoubled their assault. Lilly almost lost her balance as a woman in a bloodstained nightgown threw herself at Sam, shrieking. The blue barrier held, but just barely. The stone beneath Sam’s feet was hot enough to blister.

She raised her voice, letting it boom off the walls. “IN AETERNUM!” The binding was almost complete and with that last word Sam used more of the stolen power to stop everything around her and make them freeze in place. Nyxalloth was frozen but it’s eyes still moved and were staring at her in anger, hunger, and madness. The townspeople were also frozen in place, at least for the next few seconds.

The Codex glowed in her hands, every page turning itself in a wind only she could feel. She reached the final page—the one written in a language so old it didn’t even have a name. The letters twisted and crawled on the paper, trying to evade her, but she saw them clearly now.

She started the last phase, voice shaking but unbroken. “I call the name of the binder. I call the seal. Sanguine—”

The silence in the chamber lasted less than a breath.

Then Nyxalloth, sensing the end, went feral.

The darkness at the center bulged outward, shattering the peace. Tendrils of living shadow ripped free, fanning through the air with the snap of whips. The world blurred—Sam saw the blue circle, the stone, her own battered hands, then nothing but a mass of black, seething with eyes and claws and teeth.

The first tendril hit the circle and screamed. The next two followed, battering at the edges, sending up sheets of blue sparks and the stink of ozone. The entity was losing coherence, but it fought harder, each blow eroding the barrier, each lash aimed straight at Sam and Lilly.

She threw her arms up instinctively. A wall of blue fire erupted from the Ravencrest Heart, forming a dome around them. The entity battered it again and again, but the shield held. For now.

“Lilly!” Sam gasped, her throat closing with every word. “Help me—hold it—”

Lilly nodded, eyes wide and wild, and pressed her hands to the cold stone. The Codex was lost somewhere behind them, but it didn’t matter. The words were in Sam now. They burned in her blood, in her mind, in the blistered sigil on her palm.

Nyxalloth hit the barrier again, harder. The impact drove Sam back a foot, nearly toppling her onto her ass. She set her jaw and screamed the next line of the binding: “Sanguine, vinctum! You will not break me!”

She could feel the power draining out of her with every word, like sand pouring from a split bag. The shadow pressed in, desperate. It probed for cracks—memories, old fears, everything she’d ever doubted about herself or her sister.

Sam’s vision flickered. For a heartbeat, she was eight years old, hiding in her closet, the sound of glass breaking downstairs and her father howling at her mother. She was twelve, and the librarian was telling her she’d never be as good as her mother, not even close. She was sixteen, failing calculus, watching Lilly’s face as she read the email that said Sam wouldn’t be home for Thanksgiving after all.

The shadow whispered every secret she’d ever buried: You were never good enough. You always ran. You failed her, just like you failed everyone.

But Lilly was there, holding her up. “You’re here now,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”

Sam felt tears freeze on her cheeks. She tightened her grip on the pendant, the heat now pure agony, and shouted, “I bind you, Nyxalloth! I seal you with my blood!”

That was when she remembered the next line in the ritual, clear as day: “Blood for blood, heart for heart. The last of the line, willingly given.”

Sam’s hand shook. “It wants blood,” she breathed. “Our blood.”

Lilly looked at her, calm and brave. “Then give it what it wants.”

Lilly reached down, groped through the tangle of jeans and boots on the floor, and pulled out her brand new pocket knife. Sam recognized it, the gift she gave to Lilly. Lilly flipped it open, her hands steady even as the world shivered around them.

She grabbed Sam’s left wrist, met her eyes, and said, “On three?”

Sam nodded, heart hammering. “On three.”

“One,” said Lilly, and sliced the blade across both their palms, fast and decisive.

The pain was sharp, but nothing compared to what came next. Their blood, bright and impossible in the blue light, splashed onto the stone and then defied gravity, rising in a spiral of droplets. The blood hovered, then spun in place, forming a circle in the air above the Ravencrest Heart. The droplets arranged themselves into letters—old, alien, burning with an inner light.

Sam spoke the last line, voice cracking. “In aeternum. Bound forever.”

The blood-sigil blazed. The barrier collapsed inward, compressing Nyxalloth’s mass into a single point. The entity shrieked, every mouth and eye turned toward Sam in pure, howling hate.

Then it was gone.

The air whooshed in, slamming them both to the floor. The circle at their feet was now burned inches deep into the stone, the blood-sigil hovering above it, spinning faster and faster until it was nothing but a blur of light.

Sam crawled to her knees and watched as the light shot straight for the far wall. The wall itself—oldest stone in the house—bulged, then cracked open just enough to show an impossible depth behind it. The blood-sigil flew into the gap, and with a sound like a thousand doors slamming shut, the wall sealed itself. In its place was a faint, glowing scar, the binding mark of the Ravencrest line.

Lilly sagged against her, both of them bleeding and shaking. “Did we win?” she said, her voice so small it almost didn’t register.

Sam wiped her face, leaving a streak of blood and tears. “Yeah,” she said, and started to laugh. “We fucking won.”

They hugged—awkward, sticky, but perfect. The air was still blue, still humming, but now it felt clean, like spring after a thunderstorm.

Nyxalloth was gone.

They’d done it.

The blast that sealed the wall sent shockwaves through the entire chamber.

Patricia was the first to go, her body yanked off her knees and hurled backward into the arms of two cultists, both of whom collapsed under her weight. The obsidian dagger clattered away, spinning across the stones until it bounced off the new scar in the floor and came to rest inches from Sam’s boot.

The rest of the cultists followed, scattered like bowling pins. A few hit the wall and slid down, boneless and twitching; others simply sagged where they stood, faces drained, eyes suddenly vacant. All of them gasped, some whimpered, but none tried to rise. The old hunger was gone. Only the hollow remained.

Above, the house groaned—actual, architectural pain, boards and beams cracking as the pressure lifted. The warped geometry of the basement smoothed itself out with every creak. The lights, real and spectral, guttered and then steadied. The smell of burnt hair faded, replaced by the familiar musk of old stone and mildew.

Sam and Lilly sat on the cold flagstone, not talking, just breathing. Their hands dripped a slow, sticky trail of blood. It mixed on the floor, pooled in the new grooves, and ran toward the wall where the binding mark glowed. Sam could see the outline of the sigil, already cooling from blue to a faint, permanent white.

Tyrone was the only one on his feet. He stood hunched for a second, hands on his knees, catching his breath. Then, with the grim determination of a man who’d refused to die only to find himself back on the clock, he limped over to Patricia.

She was conscious, barely. Her makeup had run in black lines down her cheeks. He rolled her over with his boot, then produced the cuffs from his belt, the same set he’d used on Main Street drunks and runaway teens. He clicked them around her wrists, then recited, in the driest possible tone, “Patricia Abernathy, you are under arrest for the murder of at least three people, possibly a whole lot more. You have the right to remain silent, and honestly, I recommend you use it.”

Sam almost laughed, but her ribs hurt too much. Lilly rested her head on Sam’s shoulder, the weight a comfort after all the void.

The townsfolk who’d been possessed started to wake. The librarian first, then the barber, then a few kids in their varsity jackets. Each of them looked around, eyes wide and unfocused, mouthing the same questions: “Where am I? What happened?” They gawked at the ruins of the ritual circle, the blood, the bodies, and then at Sam and Lilly, who were bleeding all over each other and giggling like idiots.

Nobody knew what to do. Not even the cop.

The world was so quiet, now. So normal it was almost offensive.

Sam stared at the wall, at the new blue scar. She thought about Emil Ravencrest, and all the men and women who’d tried—and failed—to fix what he’d started. She felt her mother’s presence in the air, not as a voice or vision, but as a warmth. A pride.

Lilly picked at the edge of her ruined sleeve, then tore off a strip of fabric with her teeth. She wound it tight around both their palms, binding them together. “For the next time,” she said, and grinned.

Sam looked at their hands, then at Lilly, and felt the last of the terror melt away. “You think there’ll be a next time?”

Lilly shrugged. “There’s always a next time. But maybe we’ll be ready.”

Sam nodded, then tried her best to relax but she was in pain. The pendant at her chest was cold now, the threat was gone, but she didn’t need it now. Not with her sister here, and the world—at least for one night—finally quiet.

Tyrone finished trussing up Patricia, then wandered over and sat down hard next to them. He didn’t say anything for a minute, just breathed, then let out a slow, “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” said Sam, “holy shit.”

They stayed there until the lights from outside filtered through the cracks, until the lost and broken people in the room found their way back to themselves, until the air tasted like hope again.

When they finally stood, blood still seeping through the bandage, Sam took one last look at the blue scar on the wall.

It looked back at her.

But this time, it didn’t blink.