Page 125 of Incoronate
Trace reached across and closed his hand over mine where it rested on my knee. I looked at him. His blue eyes were calm in the low light, that immovable thing he carried in him when it mattered most sitting right at the surface.
“We’re right here,” he said, his deep baritone grazing over my skin like a vow. “We got you no matter what.”
I turned my hand over beneath his and squeezed once before letting it go.
Then I closed my eyes and let the room fall away from me. The sounds of the settlement outside, the distant murmur of voices, the low creak of the compound around us, all of it receded as I turned inward, looking for the place where my magic lived. It was always there, waiting. That vast and restless thing coiled somewhere deep beneath my ribs. But here, in Sanguinarium, it had been sluggish and dim, like trying to light a fire in a wet wind. I’d felt it earlier during practice, still present, still mine, but muffled somehow, as though the Realm itself were pressing its hands over the sound of it. But I wasn’t going to let it stay quiet anymore.
I reached for it the way I’d learned to. Not grabbing or forcing, but inviting it up. And this time I didn’t reach for just the surface of it. I reached all the way down to the bottom. To the part of me that came from Lucifer. That dark, ancient, enormous thing I’d spent every waking second trying to pretend wasn’t in me. The part that didn’t care about limits or frequencies or what the rules said it was supposed to be able to do.
It rose to meet me eagerly.
Power flooded through my veins in a slow, building wave, burning away the sluggishness as it went, filling me up from the inside out until my fingertips tingled with it and the airaround me felt charged. The runes on my arms brightened beneath my sleeves, a warmth I could feel even through the fabric.
And then I reached for them.
The bond between us was already humming, already warm and present the way it always was, but I pushed deeper into it now, carefully feeling for the thread that connected me to Trace first. His presence rushed toward me the second I touched it, bright and unwavering and utterly without reservation, his strength flooding into the channel between us like he’d been holding it ready, just waiting to be asked. I pulled it into myself and felt my magic expand.
Then Dominic. Darker. Deeper. That immovable, ancient quality his power always carried, winding into mine like it had always belonged there. I drew from him too, siphoning everything he offered without hesitation, feeling the combined force of it building in my chest until it felt almost too much to contain.
Almost.
I held it.
Then I pushed outward.
I aimed the way I’d learned to aim. Not at the stone walls of the room around us but at what lay beneath them. The invisible architecture of the Realm itself, that vast interlocking structure of Order magic that held this entire place together and sealed it shut. I could feel it now that I was pushing against it, the way you could feel a wall in the dark.
I pushed harder.
The Realm pushed back.
It was like pressing your whole weight against something that had been standing for centuries and had no intention of moving. A resistance so total and so certain it almost felt personal. Magic lashed back against mine, cold and exacting,trying to redirect me, to recognize me as Anakim and refuse me the way it refused everything else. But I wasn’t only Anakim, and the moment it tried to classify what it was dealing with, I felt it falter. Just slightly. Just enough.
I drove into that uncertainty with everything I had.
My hands had found Trace and Dominic’s knees at some point without my registering it, fingers pressing into fabric, grounding myself as the power surging through me threatened to sweep my focus sideways. The runes on my arms were blazing now, heat radiating off them in pulses that matched the rhythm of my heartbeat. I pulled more from the bond, and they gave it. Both of them, without hesitation, without flinching. Feeding the fire even as it burned bigger.
Come on.
The floor between us shifted.
It was subtle at first. Barely a tremor, the stone complaining underneath us as something deep in the foundations of the Realm registered what was happening and didn’t like it. The oil lamp flame bent sideways and then went out entirely, dropping us into dark lit only by the glow of my runes.
And then a crack appeared in the floor.
It wasn’t a crack in the stone. It was more like a crack in the air itself, running along the ground between us, thin as a hairline fracture but dark. The kind of dark that seemed to fall away on the other side of itself rather than just stop.
I stared at it and pushed harder until it widened.
Slowly, and then all at once, the crack split open into something that had no business existing in a stone floor in the middle of a vampire purgatory. A tear, ragged at the edges and dropping away into a dark that pulsed faintly, like something on the other side of it was breathing. It was small. Maybe a foot across. But it was there, and it was real, and I could feelthe Realm screaming against it, the magic of this place trying desperately to seal itself back up.
I wouldn’t let it.
I dug into the bond until I felt Trace and Dominic both lock into mine harder in response, pouring more into the channel between us, and I used every drop of it to keep the tear from closing, to work at its edges, to force it wider the way you force open a door that doesn’t want to give.
The dark below us shifted.
And then the wind came.
