The limestone crevice smelled of wet stone, moss, and the faint metallic tang of fear-sweat. Water dripped from a hairline fracture high in the ceiling, each drop landing in the shallow pool below with the slow, deliberate rhythm of a metronome counting down to something inevitable. The sound was the only thing that felt normal in a night that had long since abandoned normalcy.
Norman knelt closest to the faint golden glow spilling from the open Nyota ya Uhai. He had spread the charred parchment across a flat stone so the light fell directly on the faded ink. His fingers—still streaked with drying mud and pine sap—traced the looping Swahili annotations and the older, sharper sigils beneath them. Every few seconds his hand shook so badly he had to pause and press his palm flat against the cold rock to steady himself.
"It's not just a ritual page, Ken," he whispered. The words bounced softly off the uneven walls. "It's a contingency. A fail-safe. Martin didn't only fear the Succubus—he *anticipated* her. He planned for the moment she would turn on him. This page isn't a spell. It's a psychic back door."
Ken stood near the narrow entrance, one shoulder pressed against damp limestone. He kept his eyes on the curtain of ivy that screened them from the forest. Moonlight filtered through in thin, silver threads, but beyond that curtain the woods belonged to her now—violet pulses flickering between the trunks like signals from another world.
Courtney crouched a few feet away, rifle resting across her thighs, muzzle pointed toward the opening. Her index finger hovered just outside the trigger guard. Every few seconds she tilted her head, listening for the telltale crunch of Sheriff Miller's boots or—worse—the soft rustle of enormous wings folding against silk.
"What kind of back door?" Ken asked, voice low.
Norman exhaled through his nose. "A fragment. When she consumed his soul, she didn't digest him completely. She couldn't. Martin was too stubborn, too spiteful, too *structured*. A sliver of his consciousness is still anchored here—" he tapped the parchment "—like a splinter lodged under skin. It's fighting to keep from being erased. Right now it's weak, barely coherent, but it's there. If we can pull that splinter to the surface, force it back into activity, Martin can destabilize her from the inside. He can fray her concentration, fracture her focus, open tiny cracks in her defenses. That's the window we need to complete the banishment."
Courtney's laugh was short and bitter. She didn't look away from the ivy.
"You want us to *help* the man who turned a four-hundred-pound grizzly into a living chainsaw? The man who turned Harlan Miller—our goddamn sheriff—into a drooling thrall? No." She shook her head once, sharply. "We send them both straight to hell and call it a night."
Norman turned to face her fully for the first time since they'd entered the crevice.
"If we do that," he said, "the ritual's power gets split. The Nyota ya Uhai was never designed to banish something of her caliber alone. Martin's essence is already tangled inside her. If we try to rip her out without first weakening the connection, we might only succeed in wounding her—maybe banishing her for a decade, maybe a century. But she'll come back. And next time she won't bother with subtlety. She'll just burn the whole county to ash and start over."
Courtney's jaw tightened. "So we're supposed to trust Martin Hale to do the right thing?"
"No," Norman said quietly. "We're supposed to trust him to do the *petty* thing. The spiteful thing. The thing that hurts her most. He hates her now more than he ever hated us. That's the lever we pull."
Silence settled again, broken only by the drip-drip-drip of water.
Ken hadn't spoken yet. He was staring at the charred page in Norman's hands. The edges were blackened and brittle; the center still held the sharp, angry handwriting of a man who had spent years believing he could out-think a creature older than sin. Ken thought about the steel-jaw traps. The trip-wires. The bear. The smug certainty in Martin's voice when he had described his "Invisible Masterpiece." Forgiving a man like that felt like spitting on every grave he had dug.
And yet.
Ken remembered something Sister Mary Joseph had told him years ago, back when he still attended the small Sunday classes at St. Agnes before his mother stopped making him go. *A vessel filled with hate cannot carry the light of healing.* He had thought it was just another platitude at the time. Now it felt like a scalpel pressed against his ribs.
"We do it," Ken said.
His own voice startled him. It didn't tremble. It didn't waver. It simply filled the small space with quiet certainty.
Courtney's head snapped toward him. "Ken—"
"But how?" he asked Norman, cutting off any argument before it could start. "How do we wake him?"
Norman pointed to a small, tightly wound sigil at the bottom right corner of the page. It looked almost like a spiral galaxy drawn in iron-gall ink, except the arms of the spiral curved inward instead of outward.
"It requires a sacrifice of power," Norman said. "Not blood. Not life. Something more permanent. You have to feed a portion of the book's essence directly into the fragment. You'll be burning away a section of the Nyota ya Uhai forever. A whole domain of its capability—gone. Maybe the aura-hiding. Maybe the deep-tissue regeneration. Maybe something we haven't even discovered yet. Whatever it is, it won't grow back. Ever."
Ken looked down at the book resting against his thigh. The golden filigree on the cover still shimmered faintly, alive with centuries of accumulated intent. He thought about how many times that light had pulled him back from the edge. How many wounds it had closed. How many nights it had kept despair at bay simply by existing.
He thought about the five-year-old boy he had never met but already pitied.
He placed his left palm flat against the open book and his right palm flat against the parchment.
"Do it," he said.
Norman swallowed hard. "You're sure?"
"I'm sure."
Norman began the incantation.
The words were old—older than the forest, older than the limestone around them. They rolled out in a low, rolling cadence that seemed to pull gravity sideways. As the final syllable left his lips, the golden light inside the Nyota ya Uhai twisted violently. Gold became violet. Violet became something darker—bruised plum, then black at the edges.
Pain detonated in Ken's chest.
It wasn't physical pain, not exactly. It was deeper. It felt as though someone had reached inside him and begun unthreading a vital nerve—one thread at a time. The pages of the book fluttered as though caught in a sudden wind. Several of them curled at the edges, turned brittle, and crumbled into fine ash that drifted upward and vanished.
The golden filigree on the cover dimmed in irregular patches. Whole sections faded to dull, lifeless grey.
Ken's vision tunneled.
The cave dissolved.
He wasn't in Blithe Hollow anymore.
He stood on a narrow street paved with cracked asphalt. The air tasted of copper pennies and scorched wood. A moonless night pressed down from above, so thick it felt like wet velvet draped across his face. Silence ruled here—absolute, suffocating silence.
He looked down.
Bodies.
They lay everywhere. Men. Women. A teenage girl still clutching a broken broom handle. An elderly man curled around a small dog that had died with him. Blood had run in rivulets down the slight incline of the road, collecting in the gutters like spilled ink.
In the exact center of the carnage sat a child.
A boy, no older than five. He wore a small wool coat that had once been navy blue. Now it was mostly soot and blood. His hands rested in his lap, fingers laced together with unnatural calm. He stared straight ahead at the charred wall of what had probably been someone's front porch.
"Martin?" Ken whispered.
The boy turned his head slowly.
It was Martin Hale—impossibly young, impossibly small—but the eyes were wrong. They weren't the eyes of a child who had just watched his entire world burn. There were no tears. No trembling lip. No wide, shocked pupils. Just a flat, chilling neutrality. He regarded the corpses of his parents, his neighbors, his first-grade teacher as though they were nothing more than scattered leaves after an autumn wind.
At five years old, something essential had already been carved out of Martin Hale. Whatever had happened that night hadn't created the monster—it had simply revealed the hollow place where empathy should have been. The Invisible Masterpiece hadn't started with the Succubus. It hadn't started with the grizzly. It had started here, in this street, with a child who looked at death and felt… nothing.
The vision shattered like glass under a hammer.
Ken came back to himself with a violent gasp. He was on his knees in the crevice. Tears streamed down his cheeks; he hadn't even realized he was crying. Norman had caught him by the shoulders just before he collapsed completely.
"Ken? Jesus—Ken, are you okay?"
Ken couldn't answer for almost a minute. His chest heaved. The image of that small boy sitting in a street full of bodies wouldn't leave him.
"I saw it," he finally managed. His voice cracked. "I saw where it started. The 'Invisible Masterpiece.' It was never about art. It was never about revenge, not really. It was about filling a hole that's been there since he was five years old."
Norman stared at him, wide-eyed.
Before either of them could speak again, a new voice slithered into the cave.
Not from the forest.
Not from the air.
From the book itself.
"…So… you saw my prologue, Kenneth…"
The voice was weak, distorted, layered with static like a badly tuned radio. But it was unmistakably Martin Hale. Not the confident, sneering man who had orchestrated the bear attack. Not even the desperate man who had tried to bargain with a demon queen. This was something smaller. Something wounded. Something still vicious.
"She… she is trying to fold me into her shadow," the voice hissed. "Every second she works at it. Smoothing away the edges. Trying to make me part of her performance. I hate you. I hate everything you stand for. I hate your sanctimonious little healing light and your pathetic need to save people who don't deserve it. But I will *not* be consumed. I will not become another echo in her choir."
A long, rattling pause.
"Give me the opening," Martin's fragment said. "Just one clear moment when her attention fractures. And I will tear her apart from the inside."
Courtney stepped forward. She had been silent through the entire incantation and vision, but now her rifle was up—not pointed at anyone in particular, just ready.
"He's awake," she said flatly. "Now what?"
Ken pushed himself to his feet. His legs shook. He felt lighter somehow—emptier. The deep, instinctive well of healing power he had come to rely on was gone, burned away to reach this one bitter, broken fragment. The Nyota ya Uhai would never be whole again.
But the void inside him wasn't despair. It was clarity.
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
"Now," Ken said, "we go back to the clearing."
He looked at Norman, then at Courtney.
"We use the ghost to kill the queen."
Outside, far beyond the ivy curtain, the violet glow pulsed once—slow and deliberate—like a heartbeat that knew it was being hunted.