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“I was containing it,” Morgana says, not looking away from it for even a second. Sweat stands out on her forehead, and her voice is fraying at the edges. “I was containing it perfectly well until it decided not to be contained.”

“The veil’s thin here,” Felix says, appearing at my elbow out of nowhere. Blood is already trickling from a cut above his eyebrow that clearly nobody’s had time to deal with. His usual composure is nowhere in evidence. “Has been for months. It weakened when I dragged Dis through. Then all the crossing back and forth, right above this exact spot, wore a groove in it nobody thought to check. Morgana was trying to properly ward it before it did exactly this.”

“Can she close it?” I ask.

“She’s trying,” Felix says, not taking his eyes off the tear.

“Can anyone close it?” I ask.

Nobody answers that one, which is its own kind of answer. The silence that follows sits in my chest like something physical.

Dis is standing closest to the tear, shadows coiled tight around him. He watches it with the focused stillness of a man doing rapid, cold calculations. I imagine it’s how he watched a hundred other battlefields open up in front of him, over however many centuries he’s actually lived. “It is open,” he says, to the room in general, “and it is not closing quickly. We will not get a moment like this again.”

“Meaning what?” I say, though some cold, sinking part of me already knows exactly what he means before he answers.

“Meaning we strike now,” Dis says, “while the door stands open and their side is unprepared, rather than waiting for them to choose the moment and the ground themselves.”

“Agreed,” Hex says, already moving. He’s already shifting into something coiled and dangerous at the edges, red eyes gone sharp and focused. Felix nods without hesitation. Even Adam, pale, and gripping a rolling pin like it might do anything at all against what’s coming through that tear, nods too. It happens so fast, the whole room deciding together in the space of about four seconds flat, that I don’t get so much as half a breath to say wait. To say anything at all.

Twelve hours ago I opened a window for him. Twelve hours ago I kissed him like the entire rest of the world had quietly agreed to stop existing for a while.

Now the room is arming itself to hurt him. It’s happening too fast for me to stop it. Some small, treacherous part of me isn’t even sure I’d have known what to say if I’d had the time. What is there to say, really, when the people you love most have been placed on either side of a tear in the world?

Shapes are gathering on the other side of it. Shadow men, dozens of them, resolving out of the dark the way Dark formed in my bedroom just last night. And among them, unmistakable even at this distance, even through violet light that’s wrong in every direction, amber eyes.

He’s looking straight at me.

I can’t read him. I want to be able to, so badly it physically hurts, some fierce, useless ache behind my ribs. But the light between us is wrong and the distance is wrong. All I can actually make out is that his face has gone somewhere I’ve never seen it go before. Something caught between horror and betrayal and a grief so raw it reaches me even through a tear in the fabric of two separate worlds.

Does he think I did this? Does he think I chose this? That everything last night, the smoke and the window and his mouth against mine, was a lie built to soften him up for exactly this moment? Some elaborate distraction dressed up as tenderness?

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. There isn’t time for anything to come out. Hex is already moving, already through the tear. Then everything is happening at once, too fast and too loud and too much all in the same second.

I don’t fight. I watch it all happen from somewhere that feels several inches outside my own body. There’s a version of this where I do something. Where I’m useful. Where the prophecy that apparently built me for exactly this moment actually does something when I need it to. Instead, I find myself backed hard against the counter, frozen and useless, watching my own war happen in front of me like a spectator at a car crash I don’t have the reflexes to swerve out of. My whole body is locked somewhere between fight and flight and simply not moving at all.

I glance down at my arm. The star mark sits there, ordinary, unlit, doing precisely nothing at all while the coffee shop I work in gets torn apart around me. Something in me breaks a little further at the sight of it. Whatever I’m meant to be capable of, whatever forty years of goats and scripture apparently built towards, it isn’t this. It isn’t now. It’s just my own arm, pale and unremarkable and entirely useless, while people I love get hurt three feet away from me.

Felix gets hit. A shadow man’s strike catches him across the ribs and sends him sprawling into an upturned table with a crash that makes my stomach lurch. He’s up again almost immediately, swearing with real feeling, blood running freely now from somewhere above his ear and staining his collar. But he’s up. Still moving, still swearing, still casting his magic, which somehow makes it worse rather than better.

Morgana takes a hit and stumbles sideways, one hand flying to press against her ribs. Blood soaks dark through her pale robes in a spreading patch I can’t stop staring at. She keeps standing anyway. She keeps chanting, voice gone ragged and thin but never actually stopping. Apparently that’s simply what she does. Hold the line, even when the line is actively bleeding.

Near the tear itself, someone new steps forward on the other side. Purple eyes catch the strange light and hold it. Waist-length black hair moves like it has its own private weather system, entirely separate from the chaos around it. For one single, terrible moment the shadow men on our side flinch back from him, a visible ripple of retreat passing through them. Then he’s simply there among our side’s front line, fighting. Brutal and fast and entirely, chillingly unbothered by any of it. I understand without anyone telling me a single thing about him that whoever that is, he’s not someone anyone in this shop wants to test twice.

Hex takes the worst of it. I see the exact moment it happens. A blade of something dark and solid passes straight through where his shoulder should be. He doesn’t bleed the way a person bleeds. He frays instead, edges guttering like a candle caught in wind, translucent in a way that makes my whole stomach drop straight through the floor. He keeps fighting anyway, snarling, refusing outright to fall.

I think, with a clarity that terrifies me more than anything else has all afternoon, that I am watching someone I love come apart in real time, thread by thread. And I am doing absolutely nothing about it, standing here with my useless, unlit arm, while the whole world burns.

Then the front door bangs open.

He’s standing in the doorway, tall and wrong in exactly the way I remember. It’s the one memory I’ve apparently spent months refusing to let myself have properly. He’s dark all through, shadow clinging to him the way it clings to Dark and to Hex. His eyes have gone pale and dimmed, like two lanterns burning through fog. My whole body goes cold and distant and strange. I know him. I know exactly what he is and exactly what he did. I have never once let myself actually think about it since, not really, not properly. I filed it away somewhere I didn’t have to look at it directly, the way you’d close a door on a room you’re not ready to walk back into and then simply never mention the room again.

“Wraith,” Dis says, and his voice has gone somewhere flat and old and careful all at once.

Hex peels away from the fight in the same instant, red eyes blazing. He moves on Wraith with the singular, terrible focus of someone settling an old, unfinished account. Wraith doesn’t fight back at all. He simply cowers, folding in on himself, one arm coming up over his head. The sound he makes low in his throat isn’t a threat. It isn’t a growl. It’s just fear, plain and small and entirely unshielded. The sound of something that expects to be hurt and has simply decided not to fight it.

“Stop!”

The voice cuts through everything, sharp enough that even Hex hesitates, fist still raised. I turn to find Felix’s dad shoving through the door behind Wraith, dark eyed and furious, already moving to put himself bodily between Hex and the thing cowering on the coffee shop floor.