Page 64 of Ghoul Me, Maybe
“You good?” I ask him, not taking my eyes off the ritual.
“No,” he says. “Absolutely not. But I’mhere.”
That’s enough.
I turn to Sienna. “We go now, or we don’t go at all.”
She nods. “We go.”
The first ward hits me like a wall of broken glass.
I phase through it, my edges flickering, pain ricocheting through every splinter of me. The relic screams—not literally,but in my mind, a sound like every regret I’ve ever buried being yanked back into light.
The Collector raises his hands.
The tide shifts.
The waterlurchesupward—dragging with it specters. Old souls. Pieces of the dead whonever left.
Sailors with half-sunken eyes. Wrecked fishermen bound in kelp. Things older than humans that crawl through tide pools and whisper in barnacles.
He’s weaponized the veil.
I push forward.
I don’t feel my feet anymore. I don’t need to. I’mherebecause she’s here—because her heartbeat is the only thing anchoring me to this plane.
And I’ll burn this whole damn bay before I let him take that away.
“GET DOWN!” Mira screams.
An arc of raw magic slices overhead—blue lightning wrapped in cursed scripture. It cuts through one of the Collector’s men, sending him flying into a mast.
“GO!” I roar, charging.
I slam into a summoned shade, ripping through it with both hands. It screams, disintegrates, reforms behind me. I turn and snarl, phasing into its core, tearing out the energy inside like peeling away a soul from bone.
Sienna vaults the hull beside me, a dagger in one hand and her father’s charm in the other.
She slices a goon’s thigh, then punches him hard enough he stumbles straight into a broken spar.
Blood and seafoam mix.
The Collector doesn’t flinch.
“Too late,” he says, voice unnaturally calm. “The binding’s already begun.”
“No,” I growl. “It endsnow.”
I launch myself at him—spectral, savage, feral. But he’s ready. He chants something in a language I haven’t heard since the wreck first dragged me under.
A sigil explodes beneath me.
I scream as I’m flung back—pain blooming in my chest like frostbite. I hit the mast, slide down, flickering hard.
Sienna yells my name.
She dives for the relic.
