Hellfire – Princess of Hell

The ceiling had a water stain in the corner, shaped like nothing in particular. I’d been staring at it for several minutes.

Behind me, the brush moved through my hair in long, even strokes. Isabella worked from the ends up, the same methodical patience she brought to everything. Across the room, Aria sat cross-legged on the windowsill in someone’s borrowed shirt, counting notes from a wallet she hadn’t opened yet.

“The mortal realms are genuinely different,” she said, without looking up. “Like, back home everything is so… practiced. Everyone knows what they’re doing, everyone’s performing. Here they just—” she made a small helpless gesture with the wallet, “—go for it. It’s chaos. It’s kind of amazing.”

Isabella drew the brush through a tangle, unhurried. “Lack of technique is not the same as authenticity.”

“No but it’s more fun.” Aria finally looked up. “Don’t tell me you weren’t into it. I saw your face, Bella.”

A pause. The brush kept moving.

“The enthusiasm had its merits,” Isabella said.

I looked at the bed.

Five of them, spread across it in a configuration that defied comfortable geometry. Breathing. Alive. I’d checked, which said something about me that I preferred not to examine.

The thing was, Aria and Isabella had moved before I’d finished cataloguing the situation, stepping back into the men’s path with the particular ease of predators who’d already calculated the outcome. And then somehow I was there too, and one of them had his hand at my waist, and I had—

I stopped.

The stain on the ceiling didn’t offer any perspective.

What I remembered was the heat of it. The specific sensation when the essence came in, the way my thoughts had gone briefly, blissfully clear the way they only did when I was feeding. I remembered sounds I’d made. I remembered being thoroughly, enthusiastically present for every second of something I’d had approximately zero intention of doing when I left the club.

The brush stilled. Isabella set it on the nightstand with a quiet click.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she said.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’ve gone a different kind of quiet.”

Aria hopped off the windowsill and dropped the emptied wallet onto the pile with the others. “Oh, she’s doing the thing. The staring-at-nothing thing.” She picked up the next one. “Lily. It was fun. Stop making it complicated.”

“I’m not making it anything.”

“You’re absolutely making it something, I can tell by your shoulders.” She glanced up. “Was it the one with the—”

“No.”

“Because I thought he was—”

“Aria.”

She grinned and went back to the wallet. Across the pile, the accumulated contents of five evenings’ worth of city salaries sat in a loosely organized stack.

“We have roughly twelve hours,” Isabella said, from behind me. “Before the sealing.”

The sealing. Charles, and Miriam, and the thing beneath the Underground that needed closing. The actual reason we were here. I reached for that, held it like a handhold.

Twelve hours.

Aria stood up, stretched both arms overhead, and looked at the pile with open satisfaction. “So. Shopping.” She said the word the way she’d said it every time since yesterday, like she was still testing how it felt in her mouth. “I want to see this Oxford Street.”

I pushed off the bed.

The vital essence sat warm and settled in my chest, humming faintly, the way a full stomach did except it went deeper than that. My thoughts were sharp. My body felt calibrated.

It was not my body.

I picked up my clothes from the floor.

* * *

Oxford Street on a Sunday moved like a single disorganized organism, thousands of bodies pressing in every direction with no apparent awareness of one another. Aria found this delightful. She kept stopping without warning, which meant the woman behind her nearly walked into her back for the fourth time in an hour, and she didn’t notice once.

“Oh. Oh, this one.” She held up a burgundy wrap dress against herself, turning to face us. “What do you think?”

“It’s not what I’d expect from you,” I said.

“That’s the point.” She draped it over her arm with the satisfaction of someone collecting trophies. “I can be classy. I contain multitudes.”

Isabella’s gaze moved from Aria to the dress and back. She said nothing. The silence was precise enough to qualify as a statement.

Aria hugged the dress tighter. “I’m buying it.”

We moved through three more floors like that. Aria accumulated: the burgundy dress, two silk blouses in colours that would pass unremarked on any London street, a blazer she would certainly never wear again after today, and a frankly alarming number of items that were exactly what you’d expect from her. The blazer purchase was clearly self-directed at Isabella, who acknowledged it with a single raised brow and said nothing further.

I found myself at a rack I hadn’t intended to stop at.

The clothes Lilith had sent me to the Academy with were not designed for mortal sensibilities. Elegant, fitted, expensive, and appropriate for a society where modesty was an afterthought rather than a genuine consideration. Back on earth, they read as something between nightclub and historical re-enactment. The outfit Miriam had provided was serviceable. The club costume existed for specific purposes.

An actual wardrobe seemed reasonable. Practical.

I pulled out a dark green blouse, checked the cut, put it back. Tried a structured jacket. A pair of trousers that would actually sit at the waist without requiring a glamour adjustment. A few other things I didn’t examine my reasons for choosing too closely.

At the mirror in the changing room I stood for a moment longer than necessary.

The green worked. So did the jacket. The trousers fit the way trousers were supposed to fit, and the overall result was someone who looked like she belonged in this city, in this country, in this century.

Faith had said, more than once, that I had the kind of face that photographers would follow around begging for permission. I’d always assumed it was something people said. The sort of affectionate exaggeration that relationships produced. Now, standing in a London changing room in a body that had nothing to do with the one Faith was thinking of when she said it, I understood what she meant. Saw the structural logic of it. The proportions.

It was a strange thought to have. I let it settle without pulling at it.

The body responded to nice clothes the way it responded to most things—with a baseline hum of approval, uncomplicated and instinctive. I’d stopped fighting that particular current. When I reached for a second pair of shoes I already knew what I was reaching for, and I bought them without deliberating.

Outside the changing rooms, Aria was waiting with both her bags and the specific expression of someone who had been patient for thirty seconds and considered that sufficient.

“You bought high heels.”

“They’re not—they’re a moderate heel, it’s not—”

“You bought heels.” She pointed at the box under my arm. “You went in there for a blouse and you came out with five inch heels. I’m not letting you weasel out of that.”

“I wasn’t planning to weasel out of anything.”

She looked at me the way she looked at things that pleased her, fully and without reservation. “Good.”

The spatial rings took the bags between us, Isabella’s and mine cycling through the contents with the quiet efficiency of pocket dimensions doing what they were built for. The weight vanished. Around us the street noise continued its indifferent roar.

Aria fell into step ahead of us, slightly too fast, the way she always walked when she was happy, turning sideways every few paces to keep talking without slowing down.

“I can’t believe you actually did it though. Two weeks ago you were, like—” she gestured broadly at nothing in particular, “—and now you’re buying shoes with a heel.”

“It’s a modest heel.”

“It is not a modest heel and you know it.” She grinned. “I’m just happy.”

I looked at her back, at the swing of the shopping bags she’d kept out of the ring because she wanted to carry them. “Happy about what, specifically.”

“That you’re finally realising how good you look in heels.” She said it simply, not a tease, and turned back to face the street.

I didn’t answer.

The heels were comfortable—since last night I’d known my feet felt better in them than without them. It wouldn’t be a lie to say this body was made for heels. Buying anything else seemed counterproductive.

There was also something else. A quiet satisfaction when I caught my reflection in store windows, the way the heels changed my silhouette. I pushed that thought away before it could settle.

* * *

The entrance to the Underground yawned open ahead of us, and we followed the signs deeper until we reached a cordoned-off section near the tracks. A man in maintenance coveralls waved us through without asking questions.

The ritual site sat in a maintenance tunnel branching off the main passage. Electric lights cast harsh shadows across rough concrete walls. Five people in dark suits stood in a loose perimeter around something that looked wrong in a way I couldn’t quite name.

Charles stood near the centre, hands in his pockets, looking every bit as rumpled as yesterday. No staves. No robes. No pointed hat. Just a tired man in a suit that had seen better days.

I’d expected wizards to be more… wizardly. Apparently Earth’s magical practitioners favoured sharp tailoring and professional appearances.

Aria stopped beside me. “So where are the astral parasites or whatever?”

Isabella studied the room without comment, her gaze tracking across each suited figure before settling on the structure at the tunnel’s heart.

Charles turned at Aria’s voice. “Don’t pay mind to the others. The sealing will proceed as planned.”

I looked past him to what we’d come here to seal.

It looked like a Transport Gate. Same basic architecture, same vertical ring configuration. But where Hell’s gates were carved from obsidian and basalt, this one was ordinary stone, and the spatial geometry felt… unstable. Incomplete. Like someone had tried to build a bridge and stopped halfway, leaving the supports exposed to forces they were never meant to handle.

Isabella leaned closer to me. “I suspected we’d be cleaning up after some mortal’s mistake.”

“How so?”

“Some fool probably tried to open a permanent portal. Tore the veil instead.” Her tone carried the particular disdain reserved for incompetent amateurs.

Aria glanced between us. “What’s the veil?”

“Barrier between planes.” Isabella kept her voice low. “My mother mentioned it in passing. I don’t know the mechanics, but with it torn, the astral bleeds through into physical space.”

I filed that away. I’d read about planes in the library—layers of reality nested inside realms, worlds within worlds. The theoretical framework existed, but I hadn’t gone deeper. Hadn’t needed to.

Now I wished I had.

I turned to Charles. “So, what do we do?”

He pointed to three chalk circles arranged in a triangle around the gate. “You’ll be sitting there. Use whatever method you normally use to siphon vital essence from them.”

“Fine.” I paused. “Where’s Miriam?”

“She’s not coming. She’d only be in danger, and she doesn’t know how to wield magic.” Charles nodded toward the suited figures. “I’m sufficient supervision.”

I looked at the others again. They watched us with the careful neutrality of people who’d been briefed but weren’t entirely comfortable with the briefing. “And them?”

“Support from the AOR. They’re here to observe, supply the ritual with mana, and call for help if things go south.”

“Do you expect things to go south?”

Charles met my eyes. “No. But preparation costs nothing.”

“Fine.” I started toward the nearest circle. “Let’s get moving.”

Aria bounced ahead of me. “This is going to be interesting.”

Isabella followed at a more measured pace. “I doubt that.”

I took my position in the circle furthest from the gate. The chalk lines were precise, the geometry familiar. Aria settled into the left circle with unnecessary enthusiasm, while Isabella claimed the right with her usual economy of motion.

Charles walked to the centre point between us and the gate.

A staff appeared in his hands.

Not manifested from nothing—I caught the shimmer of spatial displacement, saw the way his fingers adjusted to weight that hadn’t been there a moment before. He’d pulled it from storage, the same basic principle as my ring but executed with different methodology.

The wood was dark, almost black, carved with symbols I didn’t recognise. Silver caps on both ends. Practical rather than ornamental.

So there were staves involved after all.

Charles planted the base against the concrete. Around us, the suited figures began a low chant, and the air tasted suddenly of copper and ozone.

* * *

The chanting settled into something rhythmic and low, and the air changed. Not temperature—something underneath temperature. The ambient mana in the tunnel shifted the way a current shifts when you wade deeper into a river, pressure building against the skin before you consciously register the resistance.

I closed my eyes and let the sixth sense do what it did. The AOR mages formed a slow wheel of energy around Charles, feeding inward, and Charles redirected it upward through the staff toward the gate. Clean, controlled. Whatever they lacked in raw power, they compensated for in precision.

The gate surface churned.

I’d seen Transport Gates activate before. They filled smooth and even, like mercury levelling in a tube. This was nothing like that. The membrane across the ring bucked and shivered, and the geometry behind it felt wrong in the same way a load-bearing wall feels wrong when you tap it and get hollow.

Something strained against the other side.

Then it came through.

A skull, roughly the size of a human head, trailing pale light like smoke unwilling to fully dissolve. It drifted out of the gate with the unhurried patience of something that had no particular reason to hurry, then oriented itself, seemed to locate Aria by some means I couldn’t identify, and moved toward her.

I braced.

Aria just put her hand out and caught it. Like picking an apple. The skull let out a sound between a shriek and a resonance frequency, high and wrong, and then it simply came apart. Pale light scattered, dimmed, and was gone. Nothing left on her palm.

“One down.” She dusted her hands together. “Gross but easy.”

I stared at where the thing had been. I’d expected it to pass through her. Ghosts, spectral entities, the general category of not-quite-physical—solid contact wasn’t the obvious play.

She caught my expression and grinned. “You were going to let it fly past you, weren’t you.”

I said nothing, which was answer enough.

More came through. Not a flood, a trickle—two, then a pause, then three. The gate’s instability seemed to pace them, or maybe they paced themselves. They spread outward with that same patient drift, and this time I reached for the nearest one without overthinking it.

The contact was immediate. My fingers closed around something that had the vague solidity of dense fog, and I felt the siphon open the way it always did during feeding, automatic as breathing.

What came back was almost nothing.

Cold, for one thing—vital essence always carried warmth, the particular heat of living things asserting their own existence against entropy. This was the opposite. A thin thread of energy so far removed from anything living that the temperature analogy barely held. Like touching a coal that had been dark for hours and finding the faintest trace of warmth still in the centre.

But the siphon took that trace, pulled it clean, and the skull came apart in my hand the same way Aria’s had. Scattered. Gone.

Miniscule. Barely a drop.

Enough.

Isabella dealt with hers in the same moment, and for a few seconds the tunnel was quiet except for the chanting and the faint troubled hum of the gate.

I looked at the empty air where the skulls had been, then at my hand, then at the gate still churning above Charles’s head.

Forty minutes of this, then.

Mystical pest control at the edge of a tear in the fabric of reality, beneath the streets of the city I’d lived in for three years, staffed by two succubi and a woman who used to be an engineer.

Nothing about that sentence was strange to me anymore.

The gate pulsed, and two more came through.

* * *

The static came first. Not sound exactly, more a pressure change, the kind that precedes lightning—the chanting faltered for half a beat, the AOR mages losing their rhythm before finding it again, and the gate stopped churning.

Nothing emerged.

Three seconds. Five.

“Prepare yourselves.” Charles’s voice bounced off the tunnel walls, stripped of its professional steadiness. “Something’s different.”

The arm came through before he finished the sentence.

It filled half the gate’s diameter. Not solid, not quite mist, somewhere between the two in the way that made my eyes refuse to settle on it. The claws at the end weren’t shaped like claws—they were shaped like the concept of claws, as if something had looked at the word rend and extruded it into three dimensions. The rest of the body followed, pulling itself through the membrane with the slow patience of something that didn’t understand resistance.

Reality around it looked tired.

I glanced at Aria. She looked at Isabella. Isabella looked at me, then at the creature, then back at me with an expression that did very little.

We had an out. The contract language specified we departed when the business concluded—nothing in it named who decided when the business concluded. Three sentences of legal ambiguity standing between us and the tunnel exit.

I didn’t move toward the exit.

Isabella read it on my face. A slow exhale through her nose, controlled and deliberate. “Fine. It is not as though we can die here.”

The thought hooked somewhere and pulled. Demons couldn’t die outside the Hell, their essence simply snapping back to Hell—reformation, inconvenience, not death.

A thought snagged. The rule assumed you were a demon. It assumed your soul was infernal, that the metaphysics of dispersal and reformation applied cleanly. I was a demon by body and circumstance. Whether I was a demon by whatever mechanism actually governed the rule—

I shelved it. Combat wasn’t the moment for ontological questions, and hesitation in a fight was a specific category of mistake.

Aria was already moving. She dropped her glamour as she ran, the human mask dissolving, and her nails caught the creature across what might have been its shoulder. The thing made no sound but flinched—the whole mass of it contracting, reality around the wound compressing inward like a bruise.

Then it swept its arm sideways.

Aria left the ground, crossed six metres of tunnel, and hit the wall with a sound like a car door slamming. The dent she left in the concrete was visible from where I stood.

“Aria!”

“I’m fine.” Her voice was muffled. She pulled her face out of the plaster dust. “Not even close to Kara’s training. But this thing is—” she pushed upright, testing her jaw, “—nothing’s coming through when I touch it. It’s like trying to siphon through armour.”

Charles didn’t look up from the gate. “It’s still an astral parasite. Just an old one. Small ones were children, this one has been accumulating energy for centuries.”

That was the problem, then. The small skulls had worked precisely because they were nearly empty—touch, siphon, done. A vessel full to the brim didn’t yield the same way. Draining it by touch would take longer than Charles had.

“Ten minutes,” Charles said, still not looking up. “Hold it for ten minutes and I can seal the rift.”

Aria peeled herself off the wall, rolled her neck once, and settled into her stance. The playfulness in her posture was gone, she watching the creature with the expression she got when something had genuinely annoyed her.

Isabella angled toward my left shoulder. The look she gave me was brief, sufficient, the particular shorthand we’d developed that didn’t need words.

I nodded.

The three of us charged.

* * *

Isabella’s hand came up as she ran. “Catch.”

Two objects spun through the air. Aria snatched one without looking. I grabbed the other on instinct, fingers closing around a handle before I’d processed what I was holding.

A whip. Silver, or something that wanted to be silver, the cord thin enough that it should have felt fragile and didn’t. The grip was wrapped leather, worn smooth at the balance point. Someone had used this before.

I looked at Isabella. She’d drawn a rapier from wherever the weapon had come from, its blade catching the tunnel’s emergency lighting in a cold, clean line.

“Better than barehanded.” She was already moving.

“Oh, I love you,” Aria said, and went in swinging her short sword at the creature’s midsection.

I nodded at Isabella’s back and turned to face the thing, not following immediately.

It was large enough that it couldn’t track three directions without committing. Aria had its attention on the left, Isabella pressing from the right with short, precise thrusts—each one landing and withdrawing before the creature could close on her. Classic Isabella. Minimum exposure, maximum information gathered.

I circled.

The whip moved oddly at first, the cord too responsive, correcting for swings I hadn’t meant to make. I let my wrist settle into shorter movements and cracked it once against the tunnel floor. The crack bounced off the concrete, sharp and clean. The feel of it came back up through my arm and told me something useful.

I snapped it at the creature’s neck.

The cord wrapped twice, fast. The contact point lit up with a faint, cold pull—mana flowing through the whip’s length and into my palm like water finding its level. Not like touching the skulls. Cleaner. Structured. Whatever Isabella had thrown me, it was built for exactly this kind of work, and I made a note to be appropriately annoyed at myself for not being surprised that she owned it.

The creature noticed.

It turned its head—or the mass that served the same purpose—and pulled.

The cord went taut and I left the ground.

I unfolded my wings without deciding to. They snapped open in the half-second before I reached the creature, catching the stale tunnel air, and I curved upward rather than forward. The clawed arm passed below me, close enough that I felt the displacement.

I landed four metres back, heels first, and the wings folded themselves away.

The glamour had already been down. But those weren’t the wings I was supposed to have. I’d been maintaining the undersized common-succubus silhouette for two weeks, and what had just opened was nothing like that.

Nothing to do about it now. Charles was still chanting. The AOR mages behind him hadn’t broken rhythm.

“How much longer?” I called.

Charles’s jaw moved through two syllables of the ritual before he answered. “Nine minutes.”

Nine minutes.

I looked at the creature. It had taken three of us, one whip, one sword, one rapier, and a concrete wall to the face for Aria, and we were thirty seconds in.

I turned the whip handle once in my palm and watched the thing swing toward Isabella.

* * *

The creature’s arm came down toward Isabella in a wide, sweeping arc, fast enough that retreat wasn’t an option.

She didn’t retreat. She brought her arms up to block, crossed at the wrist, and the skin along her forearms darkened—not bruising, not shadow, something deeper than that. The colour bled from pale to grey to a black so dense it seemed to pull the tunnel light toward it. The creature’s limb connected with a sound like iron striking stone, and Isabella’s feet slid three centimetres across the concrete.

She grunted once, sharp and involuntary, and immediately drove her rapier into the joint where the creature’s mass shifted and compressed.

Whatever she’d done with her arms, it had worked. She shook them out as she moved, the darkness fading back to alabaster, and her expression had the particular flatness of someone refusing to acknowledge that anything had hurt.

Aria circled in from the left, sword low, and raked it upward through the creature’s flank. The stroke wasn’t clean—the thing’s density fought the blade—but she kept driving, leaning her whole body into it, until the short sword carved through. She pulled out laughing.

I gave her half a second to clear, then brought the whip down toward the base of the creature, where the mass gathered and narrowed before meeting the tunnel floor.

Legs, or whatever functioned in their place.

The cord snapped around something structural and I pulled hard. The creature’s balance shifted. Not much. Enough. It listed left, into Isabella’s line, and she was already moving—two short steps, one precise thrust into the same spot she’d hit before.

Repetition as methodology. She’d mapped a weakness in thirty seconds and was exploiting it without announcing the fact. I filed that away for later.

The creature righted itself with a sound like pressurized air escaping, then swung wide. Isabella sidestepped. The arc caught the corner of a support column instead and concrete dust rained down across the tunnel floor.

“Seven minutes,” Charles called, unprompted.

Seven.

Aria feinted high and hit low, slapping her palm flat against the creature’s underside. The contact pulled a thin thread of essence up through her hand—I could see it in the slight brightening of her eyes—but nowhere near enough to matter. She made a face like she’d bitten into something that tasted wrong and darted back.

I snapped the whip at the legs again, aiming lower this time, trying to find whatever passed for an ankle. The cord caught and wrapped. I braced.

The creature didn’t list this time. It kicked.

The whip jerked taut and I moved with it, letting the tension swing me wide rather than taking the force straight. The cord unwrapped itself on the follow-through and I landed sideways, one hand to the floor, and came back up.

Aria had closed again. She was faster than she looked, lighter on her feet than the sword warranted, her wings open just enough to let her pivot mid-stride without telegraphing direction. She cut twice across the creature’s midsection, rapid and shallow, drawing its attention down.

The creature obliged. Its mass compressed and it struck at her, fast, faster than it had moved in the last two minutes.

She took it across the shoulder rather than the chest. The blow threw her fully off the ground, and she hit the tunnel wall shoulder-first, then the floor. The short sword skittered six feet from her hand.

She didn’t get up immediately.

The creature turned toward her, the whole orientation of its mass shifting, gathering. One limb rose.

I was moving before the thought finished forming. Not calculation, not the careful opening seconds of reading trajectories and mapping angles. Something simpler than that. Older than anything I’d brought into this body.

That thing. That astral filth, that hollow, mindless, feeding nothing, had just put its weight on what was mine.

The thought was complete before I’d formed it, clean and absolute, and I was already moving. The whip cracked against the tunnel floor as I closed the distance, and I stepped into the space between the creature and Aria, shoulder to shoulder with Isabella, who had pivoted the same instant I had.

* * *

The creature’s limb was still rising.

Something in my chest cracked open like a furnace door.

The whip hit the floor and I let it go. My hands were changing, nails lengthening, darkening, and my skin was going with them, the deep red spreading from my palms up my forearms, and somewhere above me my horns were doing something I couldn’t see but could feel, a heat that wasn’t unpleasant, that felt exactly right, that felt like remembering a word you’d had on the tip of your tongue.

I wasn’t thinking about any of it.

“You.” My voice came out wrong. Lower. Quieter. The kind of quiet that isn’t the absence of sound but the compression of it. “You actually thought you could touch her.”

The creature’s limb hung in the air. Its mass shifted toward me.

“That’s the stupidest thing anything has ever done in front of me.”

Isabella said something from my left. Her voice didn’t reach me. There was only the creature, the tunnel, and the very clear and simple fact of what I was going to do next.

I crossed the distance between us in a single step and hit it open-handed across its midsection. Not with the whip, not with a spell. With my hand. The force that came out of my arm wasn’t mine, or rather it was all mine, the fullest most accurate version of mine, and the creature left the tunnel floor and hit the far wall with a sound like a building coming down. Concrete cracked in a radius around the impact point. Dust fell from the ceiling.

It was embedded in the wall to the depth of half a metre before it stopped moving.

I walked toward it.

“Did you think that was going to be the end of it?” My voice was almost conversational now. I tilted my head. “Did you think I was going to let you get away with that?”

The creature’s mass churned, trying to pull itself free.

“Centuries,” I said. “You’ve been out there gorging yourself for centuries. Fat and slow and mindless, like a tick that decided it was a predator.” I stopped in front of the wall. “You’re not a predator. You’re not even a scavenger. You’re a parasite that got too big for the drain it crawled out of.”

I grabbed the limb nearest me and pulled.

The creature came free of the wall and swung and I caught the next limb with my other hand and drove my fist into the centre of its mass. It roared. The sound bounced off every surface in the tunnel, rattling Charles’s teeth from the look on his face, but it was background noise.

The wall took it again. Deeper this time. A section of the ceiling came down on the far side of the tunnel, nothing load-bearing, just debris.

I walked through the dust.

“Not even a mortal.” The words came out flat, factual, the way you’d note a some defect. “You’ve fed on vital essence for longer than most cities have existed, and you still couldn’t manage to become something. You just got… larger.” I crouched in front of where it was pinned, eye level with its churning mass. “Let me show you what a predator actually looks like.”

I pressed both palms flat against it and pulled.

Not with my hands. With everything underneath my hands. The siphoning was not the thin, cold trickle the smaller skulls had offered. This was a torrent, this was pressure equalizing between two vessels of dramatically mismatched size, and the creature screamed in a register that had nothing to do with sound, a frequency I felt in my back teeth, in the floor through my feet.

Its claws found my forearms. Raked. Bounced off.

I pulled harder.

The mass contracted. The density that had made it impossible to siphon before was collapsing inward, its form losing coherence, losing scale, losing every century of accumulated bulk in long shuddering waves. It thrashed. The claws came again, found nothing to purchase, came again. The roaring rose in pitch and then rose again and then became something smaller, something that was almost keening.

What remained was a skull. Ghostly, white, smaller than my fist, hovering in the concavity it had made in the concrete.

I looked at it for a moment.

Then I closed my hand around it, and the tunnel went quiet.

Charles hadn’t moved. He stood with his staff gripped in both hands and his mouth slightly open, and when I turned toward the gate his eyes tracked me the way small animals track larger ones.

The rift churned. I looked at it with that same mild annoyance that I'd give to a door left open in winter. I raised my hand closing my fingers slowly into a fist.

The rift followed. The edges pulled toward the centre, stone grinding against itself as the geometry corrected, and then it was sealed, and the tunnel was just a tunnel, and the only sound was dust settling.

I turned around.

Aria was upright. Isabella had her arm, and Aria’s shoulder sat at a wrong angle that she wasn’t letting herself acknowledge, and she was watching me with her mouth open and her eyes very bright.

I smiled at her.

The tunnel floor came up fast.