Page 110 of Ashen Souls

“I'm standing. Why? What's wrong?”

A ragged inhale bled through the speaker. “It's Thomas. Thomas from Contracts.”

“What about him?”

“He's gone, Aves.”

I frowned, gripping the edge of the dresser. “Gone? Like he dropped out?”

“Missing. The police are swarming his frat house right now. The entire block is taped off. One of his brothers went into his room this morning to check on him.”

“Harper, what happened?”

“The room was demolished,” she whispered. “But not like a normal frat fight. The guys who broke the door down said the leather sofa, the mattress, his clothes… everything was shredded to ribbons. The whole room was just... completely torn apart.”

Silence stretched across the line.

I want to tear him apart.

The words I had spoken the day after Thomas assaulted Harper echoed in my skull.

“And there's something else,” Harper continued, her voice dropping lower. “The door was deadbolted from the inside. The windows are on the third floor and intact. But the police are spooked because there's no blood anywhere. Just... ash. A thick layer of gray ash covering the floor. And the guys said it smelled like sulfur and burning rock.”

Sulfur. Ash.

“Harp,” I managed to say, her name scraping over my dry throat.

“The cops are treating it as a bizarre kidnapping, but Aves... the guys who found him said the claw marks on the walls didn't look human. They didn't even look like tools. They said it looked like a wild animal was trapped inside with him.”

The phone slipped from my grasp, clattering onto the floorboards at my feet.

Harper’s voice called my name from the speaker, but I couldn't answer. I stared blindly at the opposite wall.

I had passed a sentence in a moment of human anger.

And a primeval demon had reached across dimensions to execute it.

I left the phone on the floor, grabbed my boots, and walked out.

Outside, Vesbridge just kept moving. Students crossed intersections clutching coffees. A group of freshmen laughed near a bus stop. A bicycle bell rang in the distance. The city maintained its routine, completely oblivious. That was the most isolating part: walking around with a literal apocalypse ticking inside my veins while everyone else just bought coffee and complained about midterms.

I moved blindly. I just needed to put as much concrete as possible between myself and the apartment.

As I navigated the crowded sidewalks, the true scale of Daeren’s reach began to crystallize in my mind.

He hadn't just slipped into my dreams and dragged my consciousness to his hell realm. He had reached into a deadbolted room on a busy campus and incinerated a human being. The barrier between his infernal dimension and my reality wasn't a locked vault—it was paper. And he could tear right through it whenever he pleased.

It wasn't just about me anymore. Harper. Ethan. My family. If a passing thought was enough to summon him, who was next? Just by standing near me, I had painted a target on the back of everyone I loved.

Overhead, the clouds thickened into the color of wet slate.

Hours passed in a dizzying loop of sidewalks, shop windows, and traffic lights. My racing thoughts never truly quieted, but they eventually exhausted themselves, leaving behind a cold, hollow focus.

I didn’t register my surroundings until my boots hit a familiar curb. I stopped, staring at the painted white lines of the crosswalk.

The bridge. The intersection. The precise coordinates where my timeline had fractured.

It looked ordinary: faded asphalt, a chipped street sign, the dull brick façade of a corner bodega. There was no trace of the twisted metal or blood. Nothing remained to mark the exact second my life had split wide open.