Chapter 7

He had been back to Baldel four times since the alley, and each visit had worn a slightly deeper groove into the same private ritual.

He would leave the house an hour or two after his parents assumed him asleep, telling himself the exact same lie every single time—just one more look, and then I'll stop. He took the long, circuitous way, intentionally skirting the edge of the squatter settlement rather than cutting directly through its chaotic center. Once at the cathedral, he would spend an hour, sometimes two, combing through its cold, dust-choked interior with nothing but his phone's flashlight and a stubbornness that had begun to frighten him. He never found a single thing on those trips. Not the first time, not the second, not the third or fourth. He found only more silence, more decay, and more of that same oppressive, watchful quiet that made the hair on his arms stand straight up the moment he crossed the threshold.

And still, he kept going back. It wasn't logic that drove him anymore. Logic would have told him to stop the moment the second visit turned up nothing—to accept that whatever answers existed weren't going to reveal themselves just because he wanted them badly enough. But logic had stopped being the loudest voice in his head weeks ago. Now there was only the pull—quiet, constant, and utterly indifferent to reason, humming somewhere behind his sternum like a compass needle that refused to settle no matter which way he turned.

He understood his father so much better now than he had that first night in his bedroom, reading the old journal by lamplight and scoffing at the idea of a simple gut feeling driving a grown man into danger. ‘You can never be truly sure with these things, Liz,’ his father had said. At the time, Victor had thought it sounded like a weak excuse for recklessness. Now, that exact same certainty sat lodged behind his own ribs, and he finally understood that it had never been a conscious choice at all. It was simply something that happened to you—the way weather happened to you—completely indifferent to whether you wanted it or not.

The wound along his ribs told its own quiet, terrifying story, one he examined most nights in the bathroom mirror with a mixture of relief and creeping unease. By the second visit to Baldel, the deep gash carved by the creature had closed into a tender, angry line. By the third, it had faded to a soft pink. By the fourth, it was barely a whisper against his skin—a thin, pale seam that no ordinary injury should have healed into within a single week, let alone allowed him to press against without so much as a wince. He had started keeping his shirt on around his brothers at all times, not out of modesty, but because he didn't trust himself to explain the impossible speed of his recovery if Isaac noticed.

Today marked his fifth trip. It was the first time Baldel decided to notice him back.

The afternoon had turned heavy and bruised-gray by the time he reached the settlement's edge, low clouds pressing down over the ridge like a lid slowly closing over a pot. Victor kept to his usual path, hands shoved deep into his hoodie pocket, his eyes fixed on the dark line of trees ahead rather than the rusted iron shacks crowding the unpaved road on either side. Over four visits, he had learned precisely which alleys to avoid, which fire barrels tended to draw a rough crowd, and which stretches of the settlement were quietest at this hour. He thought he had learned enough to remain entirely invisible.

That day, he was wrong. Three men peeled away from a smoke-stained barrel outside a row of corrugated shacks, falling into step behind him before he had even consciously registered the shift in the air. It was a subtle change, one he might have missed a month ago, but which now prickled against his senses like static electricity before a lightning strike. He felt them before he properly saw them—a cold, glaring pressure settling between his shoulder blades that made every nerve in his body instantly sharpen.

"You're that boy," the first one said. He was wiry and sharp-eyed, his rough voice carrying easily across the damp air. He fell into an easy, unhurried pace a few feet behind Victor's left shoulder. "Been coming through here a lot lately."

Victor kept walking, subtly adjusting his stride, calculating distances without meaning to—the gap to the treeline, the narrow width of the path, the exact positions of the men relative to one another. "Just passing through," he said, keeping his tone light and even. "Heading to the woods."

"Nobody just passes through Baldel, on foot." said the second, broader than the first, a jagged white scar tracing his left eyebrow. He drifted up on Victor's right, boxing the angle in slowly and patiently, the way a man might herd livestock he wasn't in any particular rush to catch. "Not five times in one week."

"You've been counting," Victor said, forcing an easy smile he didn't remotely feel. "I'm flattered."

"What's a rich boy like you keep going into those dark woods for?" the third asked, sliding around to cut off the path directly ahead, his heavy boots crunching softly against loose stones. He was younger than the other two, his nervous eyes darting between Victor and his companions like he was still working out his role in whatever this was about to become. "Church folk say that cathedral's cursed. Say it eats people who go looking for what's buried under it."

Victor's stomach tightened at how uncomfortably close that landed to the truth, but he kept his face carefully blank. "I just like old architecture," he said smoothly. "You can’t blame me for that."

"Funny," the wiry one said, all humor vanishing from his face. "We like whatever a rich boy's got in his pockets. Empty them out, and maybe we let you keep passing through."

Victor stopped walking.

He held both hands slightly out from his sides, palms open, and let his voice drop into the calm, careful register he would have used on a territorial dog. "I don't want any trouble," he said softly. "I don't have anything worth taking—no phone, no wallet, nothing. Let me just walk to the treeline and I won't come back this way again. You'll never see me. I swear it."

"Is that an offer," the wiry one said, closing the last of the distance between them, "or a prayer?"

Victor understood, with a sinking, icy certainty, that talking his way out of this had never actually been on the table. He had wanted to believe it might be—some stubborn, naive part of him had wanted a version of reality where simple words were enough—but the men's postures had already shifted. Their weight settled forward onto the balls of their feet, hands loosening at their sides in the particular, practiced way that preceded violence.

He turned and ran.

It wasn't a conscious decision so much as an instinctual reflex, his legs moving before his brain had finished processing the threat, carrying him toward a narrow gap between two shacks with a speed that startled even him. For half a second, hope flared bright and desperate in his chest—maybe he could lose them in the maze of dirt paths, maybe his newfound speed would simply allow him to outrun them.

The hope died fast.

The three men were faster than their bulk suggested, and worse, they knew this ground the way Victor knew the layout of his own bedroom—every shortcut and blind corner mapped into muscle memory built over years of living there. A fourth man Victor hadn't even registered stepped out from behind a stack of rusted metal sheeting directly into his path, appearing so suddenly that Victor barely managed to twist his shoulder aside before slamming hard into a low wooden fence. The heavy impact drove the breath clean out of his lungs in a single, ragged gasp.

They had him boxed in within seconds. The narrow gap behind him was blocked by the broad man's bulk; the open path ahead was sealed by the stranger; the wiry one and the youngest closed in steadily from either side, forming a tight, unhurried square around him. It was a formation that spoke of practiced routine rather than improvised opportunity.

"Should've just emptied your pockets, kid," the wiry one said almost gently.

The first blow came fast—a looping right hook aimed square at Victor's jaw, thrown with the casual confidence of someone who expected it to land and end things immediately.

Victor didn't remember deciding to duck. His body simply reacted, his weight dropping low and fast in a single, fluid motion that felt borrowed from somewhere far more trained than his own eighteen years of life. His hand shot out on pure instinct, catching the man's wrist mid-swing.

What happened next unfolded far too quickly for Victor's conscious mind to track, even as he lived through every fraction of a second—a sharp, calculative twist of the captured wrist, an effortless redirection of the man's own forward momentum, and the wiry attacker went crashing hard into the fence behind Victor. The old wood splintered under his weight with a crack that echoed loudly across the quiet settlement.

The remaining three surged forward at once, and Victor moved through them like something else was steering his limbs.

There was no panic in it—or rather, the fear existed somewhere far away, distant and muted, observing from a distance while his body handled the immediate problem with a cold, terrifying efficiency. A precise strike here, landed to disable rather than injure; a redirected shove there, using an attacker's own weight against him rather than meeting force with force. Every motion was calculated. Every choice was executed a half-second before Victor's conscious mind could even process why it was the correct move.

He wasn't trying to maim them—some deep, stubborn part of him seemed genuinely committed to keeping every strike within the narrowest margin between defense and cruelty. But necessary force still meant the broad man doubled over gasping after a single, devastating strike beneath his ribs, all the air driven out of his lungs at once. It still meant the fourth man—the one who had materialized from nowhere—went down hard, clutching a wrist that had bent at an angle wrists were never meant to bend, his cry sharp and startled. It still meant the youngest of them, the one who had hesitated from the start, simply turned and bolted the moment he saw his companions hit the dirt, vanishing between the shacks without a word.

In the span of barely ten seconds, all four men were either groaning on the ground or fleeing, and Victor stood entirely alone in the gap between the shacks, his chest heaving, his hands trembling violently now that the strange, borrowed calm had nothing left to direct.

He stared down at his knuckles as though they belonged to a stranger.

‘I did that,’ he thought, and the realization arrived with none of the satisfaction he might have expected from successfully defending himself—only a hollow, creeping dread. He hadn't meant for it to go that far. He had wanted an escape route, not a demonstration. Yet some cold, ancient part of him—the exact same part that had driven the dagger into the monster's shoulder without a flicker of hesitation—understood precisely how much more lethal it could have been, and hadn't flinched from that capability at all. That was what frightened him most. Not what his body had done, but how easily, how naturally, it had known how to do it.

He didn't wait around to see if the wiry man would recover, or whether the youngest would return with reinforcements. Victor turned and walked briskly toward the treeline, checking over his shoulder twice, his pulse refusing to settle even after the settlement fell away behind him and the first dark pine trees rose up ahead. Only when the cathedral's looming silhouette finally broke the gray sky did he allow himself to breathe properly again, though the unease followed him the rest of the way, settling into his chest like a stone he couldn't put down.

The cathedral's interior greeted him with its usual stale, dust-heavy hush. Thin shafts of colored light fell weakly through the grime-caked stained glass, painting faded patches of crimson and gold across the cracked flagstone floor. Victor had walked this central aisle enough times now that the space no longer unsettled him the way it had on his first visit with his parents—the towering stone pillars had become familiar landmarks, the rows of decaying pews a routine layout. But today, still rattled from the fight, every creak of settling timber made him flinch, every shift of shadow along the perimeter walls drawing his eye a beat longer than necessary.

He made his way first to the iron trapdoor in the center aisle, kneeling to run his fingers once more over the rusted lock—more out of bitter habit than any real expectation. He had tried everything he could think of over his previous visits: prying at it with a flathead screwdriver stolen from his father's toolbox, striking it the way Timothy had struck the altar panel, even attempting to pick it with a bent wire after watching a handful of unhelpful tutorials online. The heavy iron had refused to yield, and Victor had begun to seriously wonder whether a key even still existed, or if it had been lost decades ago along with whatever secret the door was meant to guard.

Today, exhausted, aching, and still shaking faintly from the violent encounter in Baldel, he decided to stop being methodical.

Instead of searching the places that made logical sense—the spots a priest or caretaker might once have hidden something valuable—Victor started at the very back of the nave, near the collapsed remains of the entrance antechamber. He began working his way forward, pulling up every single moth-eaten runner laid across the flagstone floor, regardless of how unlikely each spot seemed.

Most concealed nothing at all but bare, cold stone, thick with decades of undisturbed dust and the occasional scuttling insect fleeing from the light. He kept going anyway, driven by the same restless, stubborn energy that had carried him through everything else since this nightmare had begun—through the sleepless nights, the hidden dagger, the alleyway, and the fight he had just walked away from with hands that still didn't feel entirely his own.

The work was filthy and tedious. Fine dust clung to his damp skin, catching in his throat, and more than once he paused to cough, his eyes stinging, wondering distantly whether he was chasing a ghost or simply sinking deeper into an obsession that had already cost him blood. The gray light filtering through the high windows dimmed as the afternoon wore on outside, the cathedral's shadows lengthening and pooling thicker between the massive pillars. Still, he kept pulling back rug after rotted rug, finding absolutely nothing.

He was three-quarters of the way up the aisle, his arms aching, his clothes coated in a fine gray film that turned his sweat into a pale, chalky paste, when he pulled back a small, rotted runner tucked into an obscure corner beside a collapsed wooden confessional—a spot so unremarkable that he had walked past it without a second glance on every previous visit.

Beneath it, set flush into a shallow recess carved directly into the stone floor, was a small iron ring.

Victor's breath caught squarely in his throat. For a long moment, he simply knelt there on the cold stone, staring at it, half-convinced his exhausted, desperate mind was manufacturing the shape out of shadow and wishful thinking. He reached out slowly, almost reverently, and brushed away the thick layer of grime with his fingertips.

The ring remained where it was—solid, real, and freezing cold beneath his touch.

He pulled it upward. It lifted a thin, flat stone slab free of the floor, no larger than a hardcover book, revealing a narrow, dark cavity beneath. Victor's pulse hammered so hard against his ribs that he could hear it echoing in his ears over the silence of the empty cathedral.

Inside, resting undisturbed on a bed of ancient dust, lay a single, heavy iron key.

It was ancient, its dark surface pitted with age, yet its teeth remained sharp, and completely untarnished. Along its bow, the exact same sharp, geometric symbols that were etched into the black dagger beneath his bed frame—and the untranslatable journal his father had found in the altar—were carved deep into the iron with flawless, unnatural precision.

Victor lifted it out with trembling hands. The weight of the metal settled into his palm with an odd, deliberate heavy presence that felt entirely disproportionate to its physical size. He held it up into the last slanting beam of faded light, watching the etched symbols catch and gleam faintly against the dull iron.

For the first time since this nightmare had begun—since the dreams, since the secret blade, since the monster in the alley and the stranger at the block party—Victor felt something other than confusion or dread take root inside him. It was smaller than hope, but far more grounding: the quiet, absolute certainty that whatever waited beneath that locked trapdoor, he was finally holding the key to reach it.

He closed his fingers tightly around the iron, stood up slowly among the settling dust, and turned back toward the trapdoor waiting in the center aisle—allowing himself, for the very first time, to imagine what was waiting on the other side.