At last, the dull thud of the shovel struck wood, hollow and unyielding.


    Hex froze, his chest heaving from the effort.


    With spade and gloved hands, he cleared away the remaining soil to reveal the coffin''s damp wooden lid. Carefully, he carved through the packed earth around its sides, making space to slide one of the boards beneath the coffin''s head.


    Elsbeth crouched at the pit''s edge, lantern light flickering in her eyes.


    “Ready?” he asked, his voice rough with fatigue.


    Elsbeth nodded, gripping the first board as he heaved. The coffin shifted with a groan, its weight a grim reminder of the burden they carried—not just in effort but in spirit.


    At last, the box rested at an angle, tilted toward the grave''s edge.


    Hex climbed out of the pit, brushing dirt from his sleeves as he glanced toward Cordelia. She knelt at the northern point of the circle, murmuring a low chant, scattering loose soil taken from the grave over the runes etched into the earth.


    Elsbeth’s arms ached from holding the board steady. Her muscles screamed in protest, but she refused to falter as Hex slid the second board into place beneath the coffin. Together, they tilted the box upward, the wood creaking ominously as it shifted with the boards.


    They stood together, heavy breaths freezing in the air.


    Cordelia inspected the angle but was unsatisfied.


    Hex groaned and returned to the hole, pushing the coffin to a steeper angle as Elsbeth adjusted the boards so it rested at a steeper incline.


    Climbing out, Hex joined the girls as they surveyed the result. They gave a simultaneous nod of agreement.


    They were ready.


    "Harrow! Come!" Cordelia whispered.


    The dog rose from his spot near the crest of the hill and padded into the circle.


    "Good boy, Harrow. Now lie down and wait."


    Cordelia gave a hand signal, and the dog made three tight turns of his body before settling down with his head resting on his front paws.


    Cordelia turned to them, her gaze steady and unreadable.


    She placed a hand on each of their shoulders.


    “It’s time to complete the circle,” she whispered.


    Extending her arms, she turned in a steady, clockwise motion, her voice low and resonant, repeating the phrase:


    “This circle is open but not unbroken.”


    When the final word fell from her lips, a warmth rushed through the air, dispelling the bitter cold.


    Elsbeth gasped at the sudden relief, feeling the pins and needles of thawing extremities.


    “Open the box,” she said, the command echoing in the stillness.


    Elsbeth fumbled with the crowbar tucked into her coat, the cold steel biting into her hands. She passed it to Hex, who hesitated, then set to work.


    The first nail gave way with a shriek, then the second. He paused, glancing over his shoulder. No one spoke. Taking a deep breath, he pried loose the remaining nails.


    With a final wrench of the bar, the cover broke free, and a sudden gust of air swept through the circle. The lantern light flared and flickered as if the tomb had exhaled a long-held breath.


    The boy lay still, his tiny hands folded neatly over his chest as though in quiet prayer. The body seemed too perfect, untouched by the grave''s decay. His skin was alabaster, unnaturally smooth, with no sign of blemish or bruise. His closed eyes gave the illusion of peace, but the faint smile tugging at his lips unsettled Elsbeth as if in death, he held some secret that the living could never know.


    A chill seemed to emanate from the coffin itself, and as the lantern light shone across his face, shadows gathered in the hollows of his cheeks, deepening the air of unnatural stillness.


    Hex knelt by the coffin, his jaw tight, his expression grim. He didn’t speak, but his hands moved with quiet determination, brushing the soil from the edges as if in apology for their trespass.


    Elsbeth clapped a hand over her mouth, tears stinging her eyes. Even in death, he was perfect and fragile—a lamb lost to a sleep from which he would never wake. But as sorrow surged within her, so too did an unwelcome nausea.


    She turned her head and retched into the dirt, her body betraying the flood of emotions she couldn’t contain.


    Cordelia crouched beside her, her hand light on Elsbeth’s back. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “Take a moment. We need you steady.”


    The weight of the moment hung heavy in the silence.


    Having come this far, they all knew there would be no turning back. Whatever came next had to be meaningful—providing answers, purpose, and redemption for what they would do.


    Hex would not say it aloud, not here, but the thought echoed relentlessly in his mind:


    May God have mercy on our souls.


    <hr>


    Elsbeth stood as she started to recover and withdrew a handkerchief from her coat pocket, daintily wiping the bile from her lips and chin. She still looked pale, but color was returning to her face.


    Hex moved to her side, placing a steadying hand on her shoulder.


    She pushed him away gently. “I’m fine, Hex—really. Thank you, though.”


    Hex raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “You just vomited, Els. No need to rush. Take a moment.”


    Elsbeth huffed, embarrassment coloring her cheeks. “I did not vomit, Hex. I merely retched—there is a difference, even if you’re too coarse to appreciate it.”


    “There she is,” he said with a grin. “Feeling better already.”


    Her expression was deadpan as she removed the watch from her pocket. “Seven minutes, 22 seconds,” she called to Cordelia, shoving the timepiece back into her jacket.


    “Yes, Els,” came the dry response. “Seven minutes and 18 seconds.”


    They were ahead of schedule. They needed to start at the cusp of the witching hour, three past midnight.


    With a few minutes to spare, Cordelia sat perched on the grave’s edge, deftly rolling loose tobacco into paper.


    “Roll one for me, will ya?” Hex asked, settling onto a mound of dirt.


    Cordelia handed him the finished cigarette and began rolling another.


    “Hex?” Elsbeth said, her tone sharp with disapproval.


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    “Come on, Els. You’re my sister, not my mother,” he quipped. “Besides, it’s the middle of the night, and we’re sitting in a cemetery after digging up a child’s grave.”


    He gestured to the boy’s coffin.


    “If I’m going to reassess my choices, smoking doesn’t even make the top five.”


    Hex’s words struck a chord. Elsbeth knew he was right. The deeper they ventured into this life, the more she felt the pull of another—one she was desperate to leave behind but had never managed to escape. Pretty dresses with crinoline hoops, perfect hair, polite conversation. A world of tea and sewing, afternoons spent hosting callers, nights at the piano. Safe, respectable, endlessly dreary.


    She had chosen a different path—a life with Cordelia, filled with puzzles and danger, science and alchemy. But the world she yearned for, Medicine, would never truly accept her, and the one she’d rejected, polite society, never stopped pressing its demands.


    She felt stretched thin, straddling two worlds she could never fully belong to. Only her father understood her choices, always telling her, “Stay true to yourself, Els. Happiness will follow.” She clung to his words, though the path ahead felt anything but straightforward.


    “Roll one for me, won’t you, Cee?” she asked.


    Cordelia handed her a cigarette, already lit. Cordelia always knew when she was teetering. Elsbeth loved that about her.


    Hex leaned in, lighting his own from the ember of hers. The three sat silently, slowly drawing, the smoke rising in thin spirals. If her mother could see her now—smoking in a cemetery, the grave of a child yawning open at her feet—it would be the end of her.


    They let the minutes pass in quiet thought, and when the hour neared, Elsbeth stamped out her cigarette, watching Cordelia take one last drag.


    It was time to do what they had come to do.


    <hr>


    Cordelia withdrew a pair of tiny spectacles from her pocket and placed them carefully on the boy’s face. She had lifted them while examining the boy’s room during their inquiry at the Wright house.


    She adjusted the frames with a surgeon’s precision, her fingers lingering briefly as though reluctant to disturb the unnatural stillness of his small form.


    While adjusting the lenses, she examined his exposed skin, searching for unusual marks or abrasions, but found nothing unusual.


    Though she longed to examine the entire body—especially the wound around the throat—they had already ventured far beyond both reason and law. Still, if they came away empty-handed, she worried her frustration might overwhelm her better judgment. As if this wasn’t desecration enough, the thought of performing an autopsy at the grave site, even a superficial one, seemed a step too far.


    Elsbeth withdrew a small, tightly wrapped bundle of parchment from her coat pocket. The paper was thin and brittle, its surface gleaming faintly from the powder within. She handed it to Cordelia with delicate care, resisting the urge to voice a warning about its volatility. Their laboratory tests of the mixture had already provided ample caution for them both.


    Elsbeth clasped Hex''s hand and drew closer to him. She had witnessed Cordelia perform magic before—unexplainable things that had sown doubt and fear in her science-oriented mind. But nothing before had reached this magnitude. Tonight was entirely different, something that defied God himself. If it worked, it would shatter Elsbeth''s tenuous hold on her faith and damage her belief in knowledge and science beyond repair.


    When the third hour struck, Cordelia began her incantation, her voice low and rhythmic, carrying an ancient cadence that seemed to vibrate in the marrow of their bones. Though incomprehensible to Hex and Elsbeth, the sharp, guttural syllables struck like daggers into the silence, each word charged with an unsettling energy that set the hairs on their arms upright.


    Harrow raised his head slightly, his ears twitching as though attuned to a frequency imperceptible to human ears. His usually steady breathing had grown shallow, his golden eyes fixed on Cordelia with a mix of reverence and fear.


    Cordelia stood tall, her athame glinting faintly in the flickering lantern light. She lifted it in her right hand, tracing concentric circles in the air, her motions precise and hypnotic. As the blade moved, faint trails of shimmering light lingered briefly, marking the air with glowing runes before fading into the void.


    The first sign of the change came with an oppressive, suffocating silence so complete that Elsbeth could no longer hear her breathing. The circle seemed to shrink around them, the darkness thickening, swallowing everything outside its bounds.


    As the darkness became complete and absolute, Hex raised the lamp higher over the grave, but its feeble light barely cut through the pitch-black veil that enveloped them. Even the faint glow of the stars had vanished, leaving the sky an unbroken, featureless abyss.


    Elsbeth clasped Hex’s hand tighter, her pulse pounding in her ears like a drumbeat. The air within the circle seemed heavier, suffused with an energy that defied reason and belief. If Cordelia succeeded, everything Elsbeth held as truth would crumble beneath the weight of the impossible.


    Then, the oppressive silence lifted, and the wind came. It began as a faint whisper, a stirring of leaves that grew into a howling tempest. Dirt and debris spun wildly in a vortex just outside the circle, the barrier holding firm against the chaotic onslaught.


    Hex braced himself against Elsbeth, gripping the lantern tightly to keep it aloft, while Elsbeth clutched her coat against her chest, her knuckles whitening as she fought the urge to flee.


    Harrow flattened himself to the ground, his body taut and still, his gaze fixed on the twisting figures that stalked the circle''s edges.


    The groans began—low at first, like distant cries carried on the wind, swelling into wails, as the air rippled and strained as if the very fabric of the circle was under siege. It was a sound that seemed to crawl under their skin, vibrating in their bones and clinging to their thoughts like an unwelcome shadow. They were voices of anguish, despair, and rage, their mournful cries like fingers clawing at their ears and souls.


    Cordelia’s voice rose above the cacophony, her chants now a scream, raw and primal. Her face, barely illuminated by the flickering lantern, was a mask of fierce concentration, her lips moving with relentless precision as she called forth the etheric forces, her arms cutting through the air as she etched glowing runes that hung momentarily before dissolving.


    With a sudden gesture, flames burst forth from her fingertips, igniting the alchemist’s paper in her left palm.


    When the mixture of phosphorus and magnesium powder caught, a flash burst outward with an intensity that seemed almost alive, a searing white light swallowing the night whole, obliterating all darkness and replacing it with an unearthly, all-consuming whiteness.


    The light hung suspended in the air, its brilliance so intense that Elsbeth and Hex instinctively shielded their eyes. Shadows fled before it, retreating to some distant corner of existence, leaving the circle bathed in a purity that felt alien and holy all at once.


    Elsbeth squinted, blinking rapidly as her vision struggled to adjust. In this otherworldly glow, all sound ceased, as though heaven held sway. Even the spirits’ groans had vanished, leaving only an unnerving quiet, every particle stilled as if frozen in time.


    Then, slowly, the light began to dim, fading like a dying ember until the familiar darkness of night crept back in. The wind stilled, and the vortex was gone—the circle remained intact.


    Cordelia stood, arms raised in triumph or supplication (Elsbeth couldn’t tell which), her breaths coming in deep, controlled heaves.


    Her body relaxed, and she lowered her hands, removing a small cotton bag from her pocket. Its only contents were purified salt. With deliberate care, she placed the bag into the boy’s cold hand, gently curling his lifeless fingers around it.


    Cordelia stepped back, her eyes fixed on the boy’s face, her expression unreadable.


    The three of them stood in tense silence, watching and waiting.


    Seconds passed, stretching into eternity.


    Then, faintly, the boy’s eyelids fluttered, his pale lips parting slightly as though to take a breath.


    Elsbeth’s hand flew to her mouth as his eyes opened—large, unfocused, and filled with bewilderment.


    The boy’s chest shuddered faintly, his small frame twitching as though unsure of its reawakening.


    His wide and unfocused eyes darted between them, pupils dilating like a newborn creature exposed to light for the first time.


    When his lips parted, the soundless motion carried the weight of a question no one could answer. It was as if he had awoken from the deepest sleep, dragged back to a world he did not understand.


    Elsbeth swallowed hard, her heart pounding. She wasn’t sure if fear or wonder gripped her, but she knew one thing: no matter what happened next, what she witnessed tonight changed everything.


    <hr>


    Elsbeth crouched at the grave''s edge, her breath steady despite the whirlwind of emotions roiling beneath the surface. She withdrew her sketchbook from the inside pocket of her coat and flipped to an empty page.


    She selected a charcoal stick from a case strapped to her belt.


    Her focus was entirely on the boy lying below, his chest rising faintly as though each breath was an effort drawn from some unseen well of life.


    The boy’s face, pale as alabaster, seemed almost serene now, yet his wide, unfocused eyes still carried the bewilderment of a soul caught between worlds.


    His tiny hand rested limply over the bag of salt, the stark white cotton contrasting against the darkness of his burial clothes.


    Elsbeth’s hand moved quickly, boldly capturing the boy’s likeness. The charcoal glided over the paper, tracing the soft curve of his jaw, the slight part of his lips, and the unnatural stillness that lingered in his limbs.


    She hesitated, then added the faint impression of the spectacles so carefully placed on his nose, their thin wire frames lending an eerie fragility to his features.


    The ritual had left its mark on the scene—the dirt mounded around the grave, the faint remnants of glowing runes in the soil, and the deep, unnatural quiet that seemed to hang over the circle. She tried to capture it all—the boy at its heart and the stillness that defied nature.


    She glanced up at Hex and Cordelia.


    Hex stood close by, his expression shadowed with awe and unease, the lantern casting long shadows across his features.


    Still standing within the grave, Cordelia watched the boy intently, her gaze unreadable but tense, as though bracing for something unseen.


    With a few final strokes, Elsbeth finished her sketch. It wasn’t perfect—her hands were trembling, and the charcoal smudged where her palm had brushed the page—but it captured the moment well enough.


    Elsbeth swallowed hard and closed the sketchbook, securing the leather strap as if trying to lock the image away.


    “Finished?” Cordelia’s voice broke the silence, low and steady.


    “Yes,” Elsbeth replied, slipping the sketchbook back into her coat.


    “All right then. Let’s meet Oliver.”