Page 58 of The Baker’s Shadow

Black ichor spills from my mouth and hits the pavement, hissing as it eats into the concrete. The taste is bitter, wrong, like drinking liquid shadow.

“Malak!” Kaia drops beside me, hands on my shoulders.

I can’t answer. Can’t breathe. The connection to my realm is hemorrhaging, bleeding out through the broken wards, and I’m hemorrhaging with it. My shadow-self is trying to escape, to flee back into the darkness where it belongs, but there’s nowhere to go. The Hollow is compromised. The barrier is failing.

Another snap echoes through my chest. Another layer gone.

The barrier is collapsing.

The shockwave that follows knocks Kaia backward into a parked car. She hits hard enough that the alarm goes off, adding to the chaos. Every streetlight on Main Street explodes in sequence, glass raining down like deadly snow. The traffic light at the intersection sparks and goes dark. Someone screams from inside one of the buildings.

Then the sound starts.

From the direction of the swamp comes a shriek, but not one voice. Hundreds. Thousands. Layered over each other in a cacophony of starving, mindless hunger. The sound scrapes against my skull, makes my teeth ache, triggers every instinct I have that says run, hide, don’t let them find you.

It’s the sound of something that should never have been released. Something that the Old Ones locked away for good reason.

The Rot has broken through.

Through my fractured connection to the Hollow, I feel them pouring through the breach like water through a burst dam. Mud-like, shapeless, driven by nothing but consumption. They’ll eat everything. Life force, magic, flesh, bone. They don’t stop. Can’t stop. They’re hunger given form, older than memory, and Preston just set them loose on the town.

“Malak, talk to me.” Kaia’s face swims into focus above me, pale and terrified. Blood trickles from a cut on her forehead where she hit the car. “What’s happening?”

I force myself up, every muscle screaming in protest. My legs shake. The shadow-claws extend from my fingers unbidden, my body trying to prepare for what’s coming even though I can barely stand. Even the claws look wrong, flickering in and out of existence like a candle in the wind.

“Take the van.” The words come out wrong, garbled around the ichor still coating my throat. I spit, try again. The pavement hisses where the black liquid lands. “Drive away from the Hollow. Get out of town.”

“What?”

“They’re coming. They’ll consume everything in their path. You need to go right now.”

Another shriek echoes across the town, closer this time. Close enough that I can hear the individual voices within the chorus. Each one a different pitch of starvation.

The bakery van is parked at the curb twenty feet away, keys in Kaia’s pocket. She could make it to the highway in ten minutes if she leaves now. Get far enough away that maybe, maybe she’d be safe when they swarm through. The Rot moves fast but not faster than a car on an open road.

“I have to go to the breach.” I take a step toward the Hollow and stumble, catching myself against a lamppost. The metal is cold under my palm. Solid. Real. “Buy you time.”

It’s a suicide mission. I know it. She knows it. The Rot doesn’t stop for one guardian, even one of the old ones. They’ll tear me apart and keep moving, adding my essence to their collective hunger. But if I can slow them down, collapse part of the breach, channel what’s left of my connection to the Hollow into one final working, maybe she gets far enough away. Maybe the baby survives.

That’s all that matters now.

Kaia’s voice cuts through the chaos. “No.”

“This isn’t a discussion.”

“You’re right, it’s not.” She moves between me and the direction of the Hollow, planting her feet on the cracked pavement. Her hands are shaking but her jaw is set. “You are not dying today.”

I stare at her, this human woman who should be running, who should be thinking of nothing but survival and the life growing inside her. Instead she’s standing between me and certain death like she has any chance of stopping me.

“Kaia, you don’t understand what’s coming.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“There’s no time⁠—”

Something surges through our connection, violent and powerful. Not my magic. The baby’s. Kaia gasps and doubles over, one hand clutching her stomach.

Shadow-magic explodes outward from her in a wave.