The ruins of the Old Fell Church sat at the edge of the town like a rotting tooth in an otherwise healthy mouth. In 1864, it had been a sanctuary; tonight, under the bleeding light of the comet, it was a tomb that refused to stay closed. The air here was static, charged with an energy that made the hair on my arms stand up. It didn't smell like the pine and rain of the forest; it smelled like stagnant air and ancient dust.
"Do you feel that?" I whispered, my voice barely carrying over the crunch of dead leaves beneath my boots.
Silas stopped at the edge of the iron fence, his hand gripping a rusted spire. "The seals are screaming, Lyra. Can you hear it? It's not a sound—it's a vibration. Like a thousand voices all trying to draw breath at once."
"I don't hear voices," I said, stepping closer to him, "but I feel the weight. It's like the ground itself is trying to pull me down."
Silas turned to me, the comet's light turning his skin into polished marble. "That is the hunger. It radiates from the earth. A hundred years of starvation creates a vacuum that wants to be filled. You shouldn't be here. Every step we take closer to that altar is a step into their territory."
"We've already established that 'shouldn't' doesn't apply to me anymore, Silas," I replied, meeting his gaze. "I'm the girl who came back from the river. If I can survive the Wickery, I can survive a basement full of ghosts."
"They aren't ghosts, Lyra," he said, his voice dropping into a dark, hollow register. "They are very real, very angry, and if Jax succeeds, they will be very, very loud."
We stepped through the broken archway of the church. The roof had long since collapsed, leaving the nave open to the sky. The comet's tail draped across the stone floor like a funeral shroud. In the center of the ruins sat the stone altar, covered in vines that looked like blackened veins.
"So, where is it?" I asked, looking around the desolate space. "The entrance to the tomb?"
"Beneath our feet," Silas said. He walked toward a heavy iron grate set into the floor near the back of the chancel. He knelt, his fingers tracing the ancient symbols etched into the metal. "The founders used a combination of iron and mountain ash to seal them in. It was meant to be eternal."
"Eternal is a long time for a lock to hold," a voice drawled from the shadows.
I spun around. Jax was sitting on a high piece of crumbling masonry, dangling one leg over the edge. He looked perfectly at home in the ruins, the moonlight catching the wicked glint in his blue eyes.
"You're late, brother," Jax said, jumping down with a silent, feline grace. "I was starting to think you'd lost your way in the library. Too many dusty books, not enough action."
"Stay back, Jax," Silas warned, standing up and shielding me with his body. "I won't let you do this. You have no idea what you're unleashing. Those people down there... they weren't like us. They were monsters even before they turned."
Jax laughed, a sharp, echoing sound that seemed to provoke a low groan from the earth beneath us. "Monsters? We're all monsters, Silas. Some of us just have better tailors. And besides, I'm lonely. I think it's time for a family reunion. Don't you want to see our old friends?"
"They aren't friends. They are a plague," Silas hissed.
I stepped out from behind Silas, my heart hammering against my ribs but my voice steady. "What do you actually want, Jax? Is it just about the chaos? Or are you just that desperate for Silas's attention?"
Jax's smile faltered for a fraction of a second, his eyes narrowing as they landed on me. "You have a very sharp tongue for someone who's one trip away from being a snack, Lyra. But since you asked... I want the town to remember. I want them to look up at that comet and realize that the history they celebrate is built on our bones. I want to see the fear in their eyes when the 'myth' walks through their front doors."
"You're using them," I said, gesturing to the ground. "You don't care about the history. You just want to burn it all down because you can't stand that Silas found a way to be something more than a predator."
Jax was in front of me in a heartbeat—not a blur, but an instantaneous shift in reality. He leaned in, his cold breath ghosting over my cheek. "You think you know him? You think because he saved you from a watery grave, he's a saint? Ask him about the church in 1864, Lyra. Ask him who held the torch."
I looked at Silas. His face had gone deathly pale, his eyes fixed on the floor.
"Silas?" I whispered.
"I did what I had to do to stop the killing," Silas said, his voice barely a thread of sound. "They were slaughtering the town. Families. Children. I couldn't let it continue."
"He trapped them," Jax sneered, circling us again. "He led them here under the guise of safety and then slammed the door. He listened to them scream for days, Lyra. Is that the man you want protecting you? A man who can bury his own kind alive?"
"I chose the living over the dead!" Silas roared, the dark veins pulsing beneath his eyes.
"And now the dead are choosing back!" Jax countered.
He lunged for the grate, but Silas intercepted him mid-air. The two brothers collided with the force of a car crash, slamming into the stone altar. The impact sent a cloud of dust and ancient ash into the air. They were a whirlwind of limbs and snarls, a violent, blurring dance that moved too fast for my human eyes to follow.
"Silas! Stop!" I screamed.
The ground beneath me began to shake. A low, rhythmic thumping started—not from the brothers, but from below. Thump. Thump. Thump. It sounded like dozens of fists hitting the underside of the stone floor.
Jax managed to kick Silas away, sent him flying into a pile of timber. Jax landed on the grate, his hand gripping the iron bars. "Can you hear that, Lyra? That's the sound of a hundred years of thirst. It's a beautiful song, isn't it?"
He pulled. The iron groaned, the ancient seals sparking with a faint, blue light as they resisted.
I didn't think. I ran toward him. I didn't have Silas's strength or Jax's speed, but I had the steak knife I'd taken from the kitchen and a desperation that felt like fire in my veins. I swung at Jax's arm.
He caught my wrist effortlessly, his grip like a vice. He didn't even look at me; his eyes were fixed on the grate. "Careful, little bird. You wouldn't want to break a wing."
"Let. Go," I hissed, trying to twist my arm free.
Jax finally looked at me, and his expression softened into something terrifyingly genuine. "You really do look like her. The same defiance. The same foolish hope. Kora fought me too, right until the end. Do you want to know what her last words were?"
"I don't care about Kora!" I shouted, kicking him in the shin with everything I had.
Jax didn't flinch, but he let out a dry laugh. "She said Silas was the shadow, and I was the flame. She was right. And flames always consume, Lyra."
He threw me aside. I hit the stone floor hard, the air rushing out of my lungs. I watched as Jax gripped the grate again, his muscles tensing. The blue sparks of the seal began to flicker and die.
"No!" Silas was back on his feet, but he was limping, his shoulder dislocated. He lunged for Jax, but Jax was faster.
With a roar of effort, Jax ripped the grate from the floor.
A blast of cold, foul-smelling air erupted from the hole, knocking both brothers back. It was the scent of a century of decay, of earth that had never seen the sun. And with the air came the sound—a collective, piercing shriek that tore through the night, drowning out the wind and the comet's hum.
I scrambled backward on my hands and knees as the first hand appeared at the edge of the pit. It was grey, the skin pulled tight over the bone, the fingernails jagged and long. Then another. And another.
"What have you done?" Silas whispered, his voice full of a pure, crystalline horror.
Jax stood at the edge of the pit, his arms spread wide as if welcoming home long-lost friends. "I've given this town exactly what it deserves. A memory they can't ignore."
Figures began to crawl out of the dark—hollow-eyed, skeletal things draped in the tattered remains of 19th-century clothing. They didn't look like Silas or Jax. They looked like ghouls, their humanity long since burned away by the hunger. They didn't speak; they only hissed, their eyes fixing on the light of the comet above.
One of them, a woman with tangled, matted hair and a dress that might have once been blue, turned toward me. She sniffed the air, her nostrils flaring. Her jaw unhinged, revealing rows of yellowed, needle-like teeth.
"Lyra, run!" Silas screamed.
He threw himself in front of the ghoul, his fangs bared, a guttural snarl ripping from his chest. He was fighting for me, but there were too many of them. Three more were already climbing out, their movements jerky and unnatural.
Jax watched the carnage with a look of detached fascination. "Look at them, Silas. They're beautiful. They're the truth of our kind. No poetry. No romance. Just the need."
"You're insane!" I yelled at Jax, grabbing a heavy piece of fallen masonry and hurling it at the nearest creature. It hit the thing in the chest, but it didn't even slow down.
I backed away toward the exit of the church, my eyes darting between Silas, who was buried under a pile of grey limbs, and the pit where more were still emerging. The comet was directly overhead now, its light illuminating the horror in clinical detail.
"Silas!" I cried out.
He threw the creatures off him with a burst of desperate strength and reached for my hand. "We have to go! Now!"
We ran. We didn't head for the town square—we couldn't lead them there. We plunged into the deep woods, the sound of the shrieks following us like a physical weight. Behind us, I saw Jax standing in the center of the ruins, the grey figures circling him like a dark congregation. He looked up at the sky and laughed, a sound that echoed through the trees until it felt like the forest itself was mocking us.
We ran until my lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass, until the light of the comet was the only thing keeping us from crashing into the ancient oaks. Finally, Silas pulled me into a small limestone cave hidden behind a waterfall of ivy.
We collapsed against the cold stone, our breathing the only sound in the small space. Silas was covered in dirt and blood—some his, most not. He looked at me, his eyes full of an unspeakable guilt.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm so sorry, Lyra. I thought I could stop him. I thought I could keep the past where it belonged."
"It's not your fault, Silas," I said, reaching out to touch his face. I didn't care about the cold anymore. I didn't care about the blood. "He's the one who opened the door."
"But I'm the one who provided the key," Silas said, leaning his head back against the cave wall. "He's right. My presence here... my obsession with you... it gave him the leverage he needed. If I had never come back, those things would still be in the dark."
"If you hadn't come back, I'd be at the bottom of the river," I reminded him.
I looked out through the curtain of ivy. The comet was starting to fade, the sky beginning its slow transition toward the grey of dawn. But the town below was no longer peaceful. I could hear the distant sound of sirens and screams. The hunger had reached the square.
"What do we do now?" I asked.
Silas looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a hard, cold resolve in his eyes. The "saint" was gone, replaced by the soldier I had seen in the archives.
"We hunt," he said. "We hunt them all. And then... I finish what I started in 1864. I'm going to kill my brother."
I gripped his hand, my fingers interlaced with his. The internal monologue that had been screaming in my head for days finally went silent, replaced by a single, crystal-clear thought.
The girl who drowned is dead. The girl who survived the church is something else. And if the crown is made of crimson, then I guess it's time I started wearing it.