Page 66 of Ghoul Me, Maybe
The ocean howls in answer.
Waves rise, towering like gods called from slumber. Winds scream across the cove. Lightning cracks—but doesn’t strike.Itarches,wrapping the wreck in a circle of raw magic that blisters the air and stinks of ozone and salt.
Sienna’s shouting something.
I can’t hear her.
All I can feel isthem.
The spirits.
They rise from the water, faces from a hundred wrecks—eyes hollow, mouths open in silence. Sailors. Drowned witches. Sirens who lost their songs. Fae that slipped through rifts and bled into the deep.
They circle us, tethered to the relic’s pulse. Waiting.
Judging.
The Collector tries to flee—too late.
A hand—skeletal and glowing—reaches from the tide, wraps around his ankle, anddragshim down.
He screams.
He doesn’t get a second one.
I close my fingers around the relic.
It bites back.
Power slams into me—visions, too fast, too loud. Screams. Laughter. Sienna’s face, Jonas’s voice. My owndeath. The binding. The regret. The love.
Thechoice.
“I won’t be your vessel,” I growl.
I don’t yell.
I don’t chant.
Idecide.
And Ibreak it.
I drive it into the deck with all the strength I have left.
Itshatters—not like glass, but likereality.
Light explodes.
A wave of force throws me backward, into the mast. Spirits scream—not in pain, but in release. The stormevaporatesmid-breath, like it was never there. The wind cuts out. The lightning vanishes.
The relic’s gone.
Ash.
Vapor.
Silence.
