Lena Graves's Arc

Chapter 5 of 4

Lena climbed to the ruined cathedral with both soul halves in her coat. The vial from Damien rode in one pocket. Her corrupted blade rode in the sheath. She had everything the entity wanted, and that was the trouble. The priest wanted the door sealed. He had handed her the souls and said nothing about why. Until she knew his reason, she could not tell a rescue from a trap. Father Matthias waited at the broken doors. The scar split his gray stubble from brow to jaw. He did not look like a man who prayed. He looked like a man who guarded something. "You gave me the souls," Lena said. "Now tell me why the door matters. Or I walk, and you can seal it yourself." He studied the dark cathedral. Stained glass hung in broken teeth above them. "Forty years I kept that vial from the thing inside," he said. "The door is not a door. It is a mouth. Open it, and the kin pours through. Not one. Not two. All of them." "And you need me to walk in first." Lena's hand found her dagger. "Bait." "Bait," he agreed. His flatness was almost a kindness. "The thing wearing the boy will not come to me. It will come to the one who carries its brother. You draw it close. I seal the mouth behind it. Both halves burn with it." So there it was. No trick in the words. He meant to use her, and he had said so plainly. That was the one thing she could trust. Inside, a rasp rose from the dark. Amos Pell stepped into the gray light. His white cassock was filthy. His wrists wept where the bruises had split. His voice was not his. "You brought both," the entity said through the boy. "Come closer, sister. Give me my brother." Lena saw the plan whole. The entity wanted her near the door. Matthias wanted her near the door. Both would spend her to get their ending. She would not be spent. She drew the vial. She drew the blade. She did not walk toward the mouth. She drove the corrupted dagger into the vial in her own palm. Black smoke tore loose, both halves at once, and poured into the jewel at the hilt. The blade drank its own poison back. The gem went dark as a dead eye. The entity screamed in the boy's throat. The door in the dark did not open. "You fool," Matthias breathed. "The souls are in the blade now. Not burned. Loose." Lena backed through the broken doors, the dagger alive and black in her fist. She had the whole soul. The door stayed shut. But the thing she had locked in her own weapon pulled at her hand like a leash, and the priest followed, and the boy came after them both.