Page 126 of Incoronate
It rose from nowhere, from the tear itself, cold and sudden and carrying a scent that hit me so hard and so unexpectedly that my eyes burned. Rain, and night air, and something green and alive that had absolutely nothing to do with Sanguinarium’s rust-colored dead earth.
The wind whipped upward through the room, pulling at my hair, scattering nothing because there was nothing to scatter, filling the small stone space with a howl that climbed as the tear stretched wider beneath us.
“What is that?” Trace had to raise his voice over it, his eyes dropping to the dark opening between us, wide and uncertain.
“I don’t know,” said Dominic, his voice taut with controlled alarm. His hand had found my arm.
But I knew.
I could feel it. The Realm’s magic fraying and shrieking against the disruption, fighting to close what I’d forced open, and beneath that, beneath all of it, the faint but unmistakable pull of something familiar on the other side. Something that wasn’t red sky and dead earth and four decades of resigned hopelessness.
The tear was nearly three feet wide now, and the wind coming out of it was strong enough to lean into.
It was the way out.
I reached out blindly and grabbed them both, my hands clasping around a fistful of Trace’s shirt and Dominic’s forearm, and before the Realm could finish deciding what to do about what I’d done to it, before the tear could begin to repair itself and seal itself shut again, before I could think hard enough to lose my nerve…
I pulled us in.
41. OUT OF SERVICE
The darkness swallowed us whole. One second we were in that small stone room with the dead oil lamp and the red sky pressing down on everything, and the next there was nothing. No floor, no walls, no Sanguinarium. Just the cold and the black and the sensation of falling without falling, spinning without spinning, the void wrapping itself around us like something alive. Something that was deeply indifferent to our survival.
I didn’t let go.
My fingers were locked around Trace's shirt on one side and Dominic's forearm on the other, and I held on with everything I had even as the darkness tried to pull us apart, to separate us and reduce us to nothing. I felt it licking at my skin, tugging at the spaces between our bodies as if it were testing the grip. I tightened my hands until my knuckles ached, refusing to let either one slip away from me.
Just like I’d always done.
Port us. Now. Dominic’s voice came through the bond like a crack of sound in total silence, sharp and urgent.
He was talking to Trace but I already knew before the thought finished forming that it wasn’t going to happen. I could feel Trace through the bond, feel his soul and the shape of him, but where there should have been that steady, deep reservoir of Reaper power, there was almost nothing. Barely a flicker. The dregs of something that had been full an hour ago and was now scraped clean. He’d given me everything he had, and I’d taken it. I had to. And now we were spinning through the in-between with no way out but forward and nowhere to aim but home.
So that’s what I did. Squeezing my eyes shut, I did the only thing left to do. I thought of home. The Blackburn Estate. Not the idea of it or a vague, desperate want. I thought of the specifics, the creak of the third stair, the way the corridors smelled like sage and old wood, the exact quality of light that came through my bedroom window in the late afternoon and fell across the floor in a stripe of gold.
I held the image of my room in my mind the way Trace had taught me, layering detail over detail until it felt less like a memory and more like a place I was already standing in, and I held it.
The cold wrapped its arms around us and moved as the darkness thinned and the spinning slowed, as though we were suddenly a ship with a sail—with direction. Within seconds, the world began to solidify around us, our bodies lurching as though we were being thrown through a void and then dropping down out of thin air at our destination.
Only something was wrong.
I knew it even before my eyes opened. The smell hit me first. It wasn’t the familiar smell of home, of old wood and sage and familiarity. It was the smell of charred wood. Of ash and soot, as though something that had burned so completely and thoroughly that there was nothing left to decay. Just the cold ghost of what had once been there but wasn’t anymore.
Planting my feet firmly against the ground, I opened my eyes as everything inside turned to ice.
For the longest moment of my life, I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The black floor beneath my feet was scorched and warped, boards buckled and split, some of them collapsed entirely into the darkness below. Walls that were nothing but charred studs, stripped of plaster and paint and life. My bed, my dresser, the nightstand, all of it reduced to thesame gray ash littered across the ruined floor as I stood in the gutted skeleton of a house that had been burned to its bones.
My mind kept trying to find the room underneath it all, to map the wreckage back onto what it remembered, but there was nothing left.
It was all gone.
My chest felt as though someone had reached inside it and closed a fist around my heart.
Everything I owned. Every photograph I had left of my father. The wooden box of keepsakes I’d held onto from my childhood. Every small, ordinary, irreplaceable piece of the life I’d built inside these walls. It was all gone. Erased. Turned to ash while I was trapped somewhere else, powerless to stop it.
“What the fuck is this?” Trace’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Where are we?”
I couldn’t answer. My throat had closed over entirely. The tears burned under my eyes but didn’t fall, just built and built as I stood there staring at the ash that used to be my bedroom. My home. My life.
