The tether bucked in her grip like a living thing, and Abigail's teeth cracked together hard enough to taste copper.
She held on. She'd been holding on for what felt like hours—probably minutes, maybe less, time had stopped meaning anything the moment she'd reached through the corruption and grabbed hold of something that should never have been touched. The ritual circle blazed beneath her feet, focal stones pulsing in rhythms that had nothing to do with the physical world, and the air above the site had gone wrong. Not dark. Not bright. Wrong. The light bent in directions that made her eyes water and her stomach lurch, as if reality itself was flinching from what she was pulling toward it.
Mal'akheth.
She couldn't see the entity. It wasn't a thing that could be seen. But she could feel it through the corruption tether—feel its weight pressing against the boundary between the void and the physical plane, and that weight was staggering. Not physical weight. Spiritual weight. The mass of something older than Earth, older than the concept of mass itself, bearing down on a connection that ran through every corrupted cell in her body. It was like gripping a star. Impossible heat. Impossible gravity. Impossible scale. And she was the rope.
The corruption blazed golden through her veins. She could feel it in her bones, her teeth, the roots of her hair—every cell lit from within, burning with a light that had been hers since she was seven years old on an altar in a ritual chamber. Twenty years of carrying this thing inside her, and now she was using it as a weapon. Or a leash. Or a chain. She wasn't sure which metaphor fit anymore. The tether was the corruption and the corruption was the tether and both of them were Abigail, and the borders between those three things had been dissolving since she'd first grabbed hold.
Her knees ached against the frozen stone. The temperature at the center of the ritual circle had dropped below freezing despite the summer heat, and her breath came in white plumes that crystallized and fell like ash. The cold wasn't natural—it was the void leaking through the tether, the absolute zero of nothingness seeping into the physical world through the connection she maintained. Frost crawled across the ground beneath her, radiating outward in fractal patterns that looked almost deliberate, almost designed, as if the void had its own geometry.
She pulled.
The entity resisted. Not with intention—Mal'akheth didn't think, didn't scheme, didn't resist the way a person resists. It resisted the way gravity resists. The void-nature of the thing simply did not belong in physical reality, and every inch she dragged it closer was an inch against the fundamental architecture of existence. The air around the ritual circle warped visibly—heat-shimmer distortion, but cold. The kind of distortion you'd see above a highway in August, except this rippled inward rather than upward, pulling light toward the center of the circle like water spiraling down a drain.
She gained ground. Fractions of inches, spiritual inches, measurements that didn't correspond to any distance a person could walk. But each fraction changed the equation. Each fraction made Mal'akheth more real. More present. More here, in the physical world, anchored by the tether she held and the corruption that connected them. The focal stones responded to the entity's proximity with pulses of energy that she felt as vibrations in her fillings, her joints, the plate in her wrist from the fight in Baltimore two weeks ago.
More real meant more overwhelming. The closer Mal'akheth came to the physical plane, the more she could feel its nature: the void. Not darkness—darkness was still something, the absence of light but the presence of space. The void was the absence of absence. Nothing so complete it had weight. Nothing so total it had gravity. It pulled at meaning the way a black hole pulled at light, and standing at the edge of that pull with nothing between her and it but a tether made of her own cursed blood, she understood for the first time why the cult had worshipped this thing. Not because it was powerful. Because it was inevitable. The void was what everything became if you waited long enough.
Her jaw tightened. Her fists clenched. The golden light behind her eyes flared hot enough to blur her vision.
Not now. Not yet.
***
She could feel the team through the chaos. Not see them—the distortion made visual detail impossible beyond a few feet—but feel them through the tether's resonance, the way the corruption picked up the spiritual signatures of the people around her like a radio catching stray frequencies.
Haatim first. Always Haatim first, because his Gift cut through the corruption's noise like a blade through fog. A warm thread of spiritual clarity, steady and precise, running parallel to the tether somewhere to her left. She couldn't see him but she knew he was close—kneeling, she thought, from the angle of the Gift's output, the energy flowing upward from a low position. Channeling everything he had into a frequency that weakened the void-nature of the thing she was dragging into the world. The warmth of his Gift was the only thing that felt human in the chaos, and she held onto the awareness of it the way a drowning swimmer holds onto a rope—not with her hands, which were occupied, but with her attention, which was the only part of her that wasn't burning.
She didn't look at him. Couldn't afford to. The tether demanded her full focus, and if she turned her attention toward Haatim—toward the way his Gift felt like sunlight through a window on a cold morning, toward the memory of his voice saying come back during the worst breakthrough in Book 10—she would lose concentration. And losing concentration for even a moment meant loosening her grip, and loosening her grip meant Mal'akheth sliding back toward the void.
Niccolo next. The priest's prayers were different from Haatim's Gift: not a thread but a rhythm. A pulse. Steady and ancient, the cadence of Psalms and exorcism rites spoken in Latin and Aramaic, words that had been weapons against the darkness for two thousand years. She could feel the prayers arriving not as sound but as pressure—a gentle, insistent pressing against the chaos, creating pockets of coherence in the distortion where the air was just air and the light was just light and the cold was just cold. The pockets didn't last. They formed and dissolved like bubbles in turbulent water. But they kept forming, and their rhythm gave the chaos a structure she could work with—predictable intervals of clarity that she used to check her grip, adjust her pull, breathe.
Petrillo at the perimeter. She couldn't feel his spiritual signature the way she felt Haatim and Niccolo—Petrillo had no supernatural ability, just muscle and training and a stubbornness that would have embarrassed a mule. But she could feel the physical world holding steady at the edges of the ritual circle, the perimeter not buckling under the distortion, and she knew that was him. Holding the line. Keeping the manifestations at bay. Keeping the real world real while she reached into the unreal and tried to drag the unreal closer.
Somewhere beyond the perimeter, Emma watched. Calculated. Tracked the variables that Abigail couldn't track from inside the maelstrom—the anchoring percentages, the vulnerability window, the moment when everything they were doing would matter most. Abigail couldn't feel Emma through the corruption, but she trusted her with the absolute certainty of someone who had watched Emma identify Belphegor's strategy during the war, who had seen the pattern-reader save lives with nothing but her eyes and her brain and her refusal to look away.
They were all here. Every one of them. The whole team, in position, doing their part.
She pulled harder.
***
The tether screamed. Not a sound—a sensation, the corruption itself vibrating at a frequency that registered as agony in every nerve ending she owned. The golden light intensified until she could see her own bones through her skin, the luminescence running along the tendons of her forearms like liquid fire in her veins. Her arms shook. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel of blazing gold, the ritual circle shrinking to a bright point at the center of a darkness that was not Mal'akheth but her own body shutting down from the strain.
The entity shifted. Not closer—shifted. Like something vast rearranging itself in its sleep, disturbed by the persistent pull but not yet awake to it. The shift sent a pulse through the tether that hit Abigail like a blow to the chest. She staggered. Her left knee hit the ground harder—the stone was cold enough to burn through her pants, and the pain registered as distant, muffled by the golden fire in her nervous system, but real. Something real. Something physical. Something that wasn't the void or the corruption or the impossible weight of what she was trying to hold.
She braced. Gritted her teeth until she felt a molar crack. Pulled again. Harder.
The corruption responded. It always responded when she pushed—the golden power surging up from whatever deep place it lived in her blood, flooding her nervous system with heat and light and a terrible, seductive strength. She could feel it now: the power offering itself to her. Not fighting her. Not resisting. Helping. The corruption wanted to be used. Wanted to bridge the gap between Abigail and Mal'akheth, to complete the circuit, to dissolve the barrier between vessel and source. All she had to do was let it. All she had to do was stop fighting the golden tide and let it carry her toward the entity, let the borders dissolve, let the tether become her and her become the tether and—
No.
She clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms. Crescents of pain, small and sharp and exactly what she needed. She was Abigail. Not the tether. Not the corruption. Not the golden light. She was a woman with bitten nails and sore knees and a cracked rib from the staging area fight three days ago. She was the woman who made terrible coffee and worse jokes. She was the woman who had watched Arthur cry for the first time when they'd found the cure's possibility, and who had pretended not to notice because that was what you did when Arthur Vangeest showed you the cracked places in his armor. She was a person. A whole, specific, irreplaceable person. And she was pulling this thing into the world because she chose to, not because the corruption chose for her.
She pulled.
Mal'akheth came closer. Another spiritual inch. The focal stones flared—all nine of the central stones pulsing in unison, their calibrated energy interacting with the entity's proximity in ways she felt but couldn't describe. The distortion deepened. Sound began to break apart—Niccolo's prayers arrived at her ears as vibrations felt in the teeth rather than heard, the vowels smeared and the consonants lost to the warping of air. Somewhere at the perimeter, something crashed. Petrillo shouted a word she couldn't make out. The physical world was protesting the proximity of something that was never meant to touch matter, and every protest was a measurement of progress.
She pulled again, and this time the entity did not merely shift. It moved. A real, measurable movement toward the physical plane—she felt the difference in the tether the way you feel a fish take the hook, the sudden change from resistance to momentum, the weight transferring from static to dynamic. The entity was moving. Not willingly, not consciously, but physically. Actually physically. Coming closer to the boundary between the void and reality with each heartbeat she maintained the pull.
And with the movement came a change in the resistance. Mal'akheth's void-nature encountered the anchor points of the focal stones and began to interact with them. Interact was the wrong word. Collide. The entity's nature and the stones' calibrated energy collided, and the collision produced something she could use: friction. Mal'akheth couldn't slide back as easily with the stones pressing against its void-nature. Each stone was a catch, a ratchet point, holding the ground she'd gained while she gathered strength for the next pull.
The golden light in her veins flared white.
***
The warmth behind her eyes became heat. Became fire. The corruption surged past the limits she'd set—past the careful, practiced boundaries she'd built over three books of breakthroughs and recoveries and the constant, exhausting work of being Abigail-with-the-corruption instead of corruption-with-Abigail. The golden fire consumed thought. Identity began to unravel at the edges, the border between her and the tether dissolving like paper in water. The void pressed in from one side and the corruption pressed in from the other and she was the thinnest possible layer between them, a membrane stretched over an abyss—
Gone.
Three seconds. Maybe less. Maybe an eternity. Time didn't work inside the corruption when it consumed her. The golden light ate everything—her name, her history, her body, the distinction between self and power. She was the tether. The tether was the corruption. The corruption was the connection to Mal'akheth and Mal'akheth was the void and the void was everything and nothing and there was no Abigail, there had never been an Abigail, there was only the golden bridge between the world and the abyss and the bridge didn't need a name or a face or a cracked rib or bitten nails—
She fought back.
The practice saved her. Dozens of breakthroughs across three books. The first one had taken Arthur's voice calling her name to bring her back—she remembered his face, tight with terror, the scar on his forearm standing white against his skin as he grabbed her shoulders. The second had taken Haatim's Gift, reaching through the corruption to find the thread of Abigail buried underneath the golden fire. But she'd practiced since then. In basements and safe houses and the back seats of cars during long drives between ritual sites, she'd deliberately pushed the corruption to its edge and then pulled herself back. Over and over. Building the muscle memory of her own identity. Learning the terrain of dissolution so she could navigate it blind.
She came back. The golden light receded from white to gold. The edges of her identity solidified—Abigail, twenty-five, dark hair, brown eyes that hadn't been brown since childhood but would be again if this worked, sore knees, cracked molar, the taste of blood from her bitten lip. She was kneeling in a ritual circle with frozen stone under her knees and copper in her mouth. She was holding a tether to something from the void. She was herself.
Her hands were shaking. The tremor was violent enough that the tether vibrated in her grip, and for a horrible moment she felt the connection wavering—the entity's weight shifting as the tether's tension fluctuated. She clamped down. Steadied her grip. The tremor persisted in her arms but the tether held.
Three seconds lost was three seconds the entity could have retreated. Three seconds when the tether slackened and Mal'akheth could have pulled back toward the void, undoing everything she'd gained. She checked—reached through the corruption to measure the entity's position, a quick spiritual ping that returned with the entity's location relative to the boundary—and exhaled. A sharp breath that frosted in the air and fell as ice.
It hadn't retreated. The focal stones' friction had held it in place during her absence. The ground she'd gained was still gained. The ratchet had caught.
Relief lasted half a second before the next thought hit: she couldn't afford to lose time. Three seconds this time. What about next time? The breakthroughs were getting longer—the corruption was stronger here, closer to its source, feeding off Mal'akheth's proximity like a flame feeding off oxygen. Each pull brought the entity closer and each closer inch made the corruption more powerful and each power surge pushed her closer to the edge of dissolution. A feedback loop with her identity as the resource being consumed.
The window Emma had calculated—the vulnerability window, the narrow range during which Mal'akheth would be anchored enough to destroy but not yet manifested enough to be unstoppable—was approaching. Every second she spent fighting the corruption instead of pulling the entity was a second closer to that window sliding shut. And if the window closed, there would not be another. The cult's convergence had taken decades to arrange. The focal stones' alignment was unique. This was it. This was the only chance.
No pressure.
She almost laughed. The dark humor surfacing through the desperation, the same gallows comedy that had kept her functional through the war—through watching Dominick die, through Nida's possession, through the night in Cambodia when she'd come within a breath of letting the corruption have her just to make the noise stop. At least the golden eyes are distinctive, she'd said to Haatim once, and he'd looked at her with an expression that was half horror and half love and said, Please don't joke about that, and she'd said, It's either joke or scream, pick one.
She picked pulling.
The warmth behind her eyes pulsed. The corruption hummed in her blood, patient and eager and terrible. She could feel it waiting—ready to surge again the moment she pulled hard enough to need it. The partnership she'd never asked for and could never escape. Until today. If the plan worked, if every person on this team did exactly what they'd prepared to do, today was the day the corruption died at its source. Today was the day she stopped carrying a piece of the void in her bones.
Today was the day she got her eyes back.
She set her jaw. Wiped the blood from her lip with the back of her hand—the hand was shaking, the golden light in her veins visible through her skin, threads of luminescence running along the tendons and pulsing in time with her heartbeat. She looked like a lantern. She looked like a weapon. She looked like something that was burning itself alive to light the way.
She gripped the tether. Planted her knees in the frozen stone. Drew a breath that tasted of cold and copper and sulfur—the sulfur was new, rising from the ground where the void-energy interacted with the physical world, the smell of the boundary between what was and what wasn't.
She pulled.
The entity moved. The focal stones pulsed. The distortion deepened. Haatim's Gift burned steady at her flank. Niccolo's prayers held the rhythm. Petrillo's line held the world.
She kept pulling. Inch by spiritual inch, she was dragging the void into reality. And with each inch, the void became a little more real, a little more present, a little more vulnerable to the weapons they'd built to destroy it.
She didn't need to hold forever. She needed to hold long enough.
The golden light blazed. The cold deepened. The weight was staggering.
She held.
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