Chapter 63: Royal Displeasure
The stillness after climax was a deep, resonant thing, more profound than the night itself. Bruce sat between Sera and Veyra on the cliff-side bench, the sweat cooling on his skin, the salt-tanged breeze a gentle apology for the earlier heat. Sera’s head rested on his shoulder, her breathing slow and even. Veyra’s cheek remained against his thigh, her eyes closed. For a few stolen minutes, there was no duty, no prophecy, no coming tournament. There was just the three of them, the vast indifferent ocean, and the warm, tangled aftermath.
It was Veyra who tensed first.
A subtle change in the pressure of the air, a faint taste of ozone and cold stone. She lifted her head, her grey-green eyes snapping open, wide and alert. Sera felt it a heartbeat later, straightening up, her body coiling from post-coital languor into a readiness so instantaneous it was like watching a blade unsheathe.
“Bruce,” Veyra said, her voice devoid of all its previous softness.
He followed their gaze back toward the grand pavilion. The space was empty, washed in moonlight. Then, without sound, without any distortion of light, two figures stood on the marble floor as if they had always been there.
They were impossibly tall, regal in a way that made the word seem insufficient. The man’s build was like carved obsidian, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, clad in armor that seemed to drink the light rather than reflect it. His face was severe, handsome in a sharp, unforgiving way, his hair the color of a starless night. His eyes were black pools, depthless and cold.
The woman beside him was his equal in every stark, beautiful measure. Her hair was silver, a frozen waterfall cascading down her back. She wore a gown of shifting shadows, and her face held a beauty so precise it was chilling. Her eyes, the same bottomless black as her husband’s, swept across the distance and pinned the three of them on the bench.
Bruce felt it then—a pressure in the air, a weight on his spirit. It wasn’t hostile. Not yet. It was judgmental.
Sera stood up, fluid and deadly. She didn’t reach for a weapon. She didn’t need to. Her nakedness was not vulnerability here; it was a statement. Veyra rose more slowly, a shadow detaching from another shadow. Bruce pulled his trousers up, fastened them, and stood beside his wives. He felt no urge to cover himself. This was his home.
The walk back across the compound felt longer than it was. The night sounds had died. Even the geckos were silent. Bruce, flanked by Sera and Veyra, entered the pavilion. The figures turned to face them fully.
The silver-haired woman’s gaze passed over Bruce without lingering, a dismissal so complete it was more insulting than any curse. It settled on Sera.
“Daughter,” she said. Her voice was like shards of glass tumbling in a frozen stream—clear, musical, and sharp enough to draw blood.
“Mother,” Sera replied. Her tone was flat, a polished shield.
The obsidian king’s eyes flicked to Veyra. “Firstborn.” The single word was a slab of stone dropped into a still pond.
Veyra inclined her head a fraction. “Father.”
The queen’s black eyes finally deigned to acknowledge Bruce. They swept from his face down to his bare chest, then back up, a flicker of something ancient and disdainful in their depths. “And this is the mortal whose bed you now share? Whose claim you prioritize over your blood?”
“He is my husband,” Sera said, the words leaving no room for debate.
“He is mine as well,” Veyra added, her voice softer but no less final.
The king let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. It was the cracking of glacier ice. “Husband. A title bestowed in a borrowed dimension. Your thrones gather dust. Your legions whisper. You left a realm to rule for a… compound.” He said the last word as if it were a synonym for a dung heap.
Bruce had stayed silent, assessing. He knew who they were, of course. The Sovereigns of the Shadow Realms. Parents to the women beside him. Ancient powers who viewed love and loyalty as transactional currencies, if they viewed them at all. The warmth he’d felt minutes before hardened into a cold, dense knot in his gut.
“They chose,” Bruce said, his voice cutting through the brittle air. “They stay.”
Four black eyes focused on him fully now. The pressure intensified. He felt it pushing against his skin, testing the boundaries of the divine energy within him. It met the solid, immovable wall of his own power, the legacy of Naga, amplified by the bonds thrumming silently in the air between him and all his wives. The pressure found no purchase.
A flicker of surprise, minuscule and quickly veiled, passed through the queen’s expression.
“You have some… substance,” she conceded, though it sounded like an accusation. “A curious alloy of local divinity and human stubbornness.” She turned back to Sera. “The Tournament of Eras approaches. The Convergence is not a parlor game for upstart gods and their mortal consorts. Realms will be unmade. Powers will be extinguished. You are needed at the head of your armies.”
“My army is here,” Sera said, her violet gaze unwavering. “My loyalty is here.”
“Sentiment,” the king spat. “A fatal flaw we believed you had transcended.”
“It is not sentiment,” Veyra said, stepping forward. Her voice was the whisper from the edge of a void. “It is symbiosis. His light gives our shadows definition. Our depth gives his light a canvas. What we have forged here is more powerful than any throne of cold stone.”
“You speak like a poet, not a queen,” her mother said, the disdain finally thawing into something like disappointment. “You were the first walker of the void. Now you walk behind a man.”
Bruce felt Sera’s anger flare, a heat against his side. He placed a hand on her bare arm, a silent request to let him speak.
“You see a hierarchy,” Bruce said, keeping his voice calm, conversational almost. “You see them ‘behind’ me. You’re wrong. They stand with me. There’s a difference. One you clearly don’t understand. Your loss.”
The queen’s silver brows lifted a millimeter. “Impudent.”
“Accurate,” Bruce shot back. “You came here expecting to find wayward children you could scold back into line. You found women. Queens in their own right. Wives by their own choice. You can either accept that, or you can leave.”
A terrible silence descended. The king’s shadow seemed to grow, stretching across the marble toward Bruce. It was a test, a show of dominance—a creeping tide of absolute nothingness. Before Bruce could react, Veyra took a single, graceful step forward. She didn’t confront the shadow; she simply stood in its path.
The advancing shadow stopped. Then, impossibly, it began to recede, not back toward the king, but flowing into Veyra, absorbed by her until not a wisp remained. She stood there, a fraction taller, her eyes gleaming with captured night.
“Do not,” Veyra said to her father, her voice quiet, “try to intimidate my husband with parlor tricks.”
For the first time, a real emotion showed on the king’s face: shock, followed by a dawning, grudging respect. His daughter had just consumed a piece of his own power, effortlessly.
The queen studied Veyra, then Sera, and finally Bruce again. Her gaze was different now. Calculating. “This bond you speak of… you believe it makes you stronger for the tournament?”
“We know it does,” Sera said.
“Then prove it,” the queen said, her voice losing its icy edge, adopting the tone of a strategist. “The opening conflicts have already begun on the fringe worlds. The Eaters of Light are mobilizing. They will seek the weakest points in the newly risen divine alignments.” Her eyes landed on Bruce. “Your… compound. This nexus of bonded power. It will be a beacon to them. A tantalizing feast.”
Bruce’s jaw tightened. A threat to his home, to his wives. “Let them come.”
“They will,” the king said, his anger banked now into cold certainty. “And they will not come with words and posturing. They will come to unmake everything you have built, to devour the light in your women and leave you a hollow shell weeping in the ruins.” He looked at his daughters, his expression unreadable. “If your choice is to stand here, then stand. But be ready to fight for it. Truly fight. Not a duel of claiming, but a war of annihilation.”
He lifted a hand. A tear in the fabric of the world appeared beside him, a vertical slit of impenetrable darkness. The queen gave Sera and Veyra one last, inscrutable look—a mixture of pity, frustration, and something that might have been the ghost of regret.
“Do not make us mourn you as martyrs for a mortal’s affection,” she said softly. Then she turned and stepped into the darkness. The king followed.
The rift sealed itself with a sound like a sigh, leaving behind only the scent of ozone and a heavy, impending silence.
Sera let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for centuries. Her shoulders sagged, not in defeat, but in release. Veyra leaned into Bruce’s side, her body trembling slightly from the effort of consuming her father’s shadow.
“Well,” Bruce said, his voice rough in the quiet. “That was a fun family visit.”
A strangled laugh escaped Sera. It was half a sob. She turned and buried her face in his chest, her arms wrapping around him with desperate strength. Veyra pressed closer on his other side.
“They’re not wrong,” Veyra murmured into his shoulder. “The Eaters… they are a nightmare we were taught to fear as children. They target bonds. They feast on connection.”
Bruce held them both, looking out at the peaceful, sleeping compound. The frangipani scent was back. A gecko chirped tentatively. The normal world was reasserting itself, but it was an illusion now. A fragile layer painted over a coming storm.
He thought of Camille asleep in their bed, of Lena’s laughter, of Ketut’s quiet wisdom, of all of them. His heart.
“Then we get ready,” he said, his voice low and final. “We don’t wait for them to find us.” He kissed the top of Sera’s head, then Veyra’s. “First light. We wake everyone. We start planning a war.”
The moon watched, cold and distant, as the three figures stood entwined in the pavilion—a king and his queens, their peace shattered, their love now the foundation of a coming fortress.
The sky was still the deep indigo of false dawn when Bruce slid back into bed beside Camille. She stirred, mumbling, her body instinctively curling into his warmth. He wrapped his arms around her, breathing in the familiar scent of her hair—vanilla and sleep. The contrast between this gentle intimacy and the cold confrontation in the pavilion was a physical ache in his chest.
“Your heart is pounding,” she murmured, her voice thick.
“We need to talk to everyone,” he whispered into her hair. “Today. Now.”
She went still, then turned in his arms. Even in the dim light, he saw the sleep fall from her eyes, replaced by the sharp, maternal awareness that had always seen straight through him. She cupped his face. “What happened?”
He told her. The words came out in a low, steady stream—the sudden arrival, the glacial disapproval, the warning about the Eaters. He felt her fingers tighten on his jaw when he described the shadow his father-in-law had sent, and how Veyra had consumed it. When he finished, Camille was silent for a long moment.
“So,” she finally said, her tone deceptively light. “The in-laws dropped by and basically said we’re all going to be devoured by cosmic locusts. Lovely.”
A surprised laugh huffed out of him. “That’s one way to put it.”
She sat up, the sheet pooling around her waist. The soft light from the window traced the renewed youthfulness of her body, but her expression was all fierce, forty-two-year-old protector. “Then we get up. We make coffee. And we have a family meeting.”
By the time the sun broke the horizon, streaking the sky with coral and gold, they were all gathered in the grand pavilion. The remnants of last night’s debauchery were gone. The air smelled of strong Balinese coffee, fresh mango, and a taut, focused anxiety.
Bruce stood before them, clad only in the same linen trousers from the night before. He didn’t stand on a dais; he stood in the circle with them. Camille was at his right hand, Sera and Veyra at his left. The others were arrayed around on cushions and low chairs, wrapped in silks and cottons, their faces ranging from concerned to calmly resolved.
He laid it out plainly, no embellishment. “Sera and Veyra’s parents paid a visit last night. They weren’t pleased. They also delivered a warning. There are entities in the wider cosmology, called Eaters of Light, that target concentrated power like ours. They think we’re a shiny buffet set up for their arrival.”
A beat of silence. Lena, her hair still damp from a shower, blew out a long breath. “Okay. So it’s not just jealous ex-gods or rival pantheons. It’s… abstract hunger.”
“Very concrete hunger, according to them,” Veyra corrected softly. “They unspeak bonds. Unweave fates. What we have built here would be a particular delicacy.”
Sophia cracked her knuckles, the sound loud in the quiet. Her athletic frame was coiled. “How do you kill an abstraction?”
“You give it a form it can’t digest,” Sera said, her violet gaze hard. “You make your bond a weapon, not a meal.”
Priya, her expressive eyes wide with thought, spoke up. “This is a physiological threat. If they attack connection, it would be a psychic or spiritual corrosion. We need to fortify that, not just our physical defenses.”
“My grandmother’s stories spoke of such things,” Ketut said, her voice quiet but carrying. She looked at Bruce, her dark eyes seeing his energi. “They are afraid of true unity. Of harmony. They thrive on discord and isolation. So we must be seamless.”
Bruce nodded, scanning their faces. “That’s it. That’s the plan. We stop thinking of ourselves as separate beings with linked powers. We start operating as a single organism. We train that way. We fight that way.”
Anya, the newest wife, had been listening intently, her gold-violet eyes taking everything in. “A neural network,” she said. Everyone looked at her. She shrugged. “Sorry. It’s how my brain works. Right now, we’re a hub-and-spoke model. Bruce is the hub. We’re all connected to him, but less directly to each other. We need to be a web, where every strand is directly linked to every other strand. If one connection is attacked, the signal reroutes instantly through a dozen other paths.”
Lilith, who had been contemplatively sipping her coffee, set her cup down with a soft click. “That requires immense vulnerability. To open our core pathways to each other, not just to him.” Her golden eyes met Bruce’s, then traveled to each of the women. “No secrets. No private reserves of power. It would be a complete merger of divine intent.”
“It’s what we’ve been moving toward anyway,” Freya said, her young voice surprisingly steady. She reached over and took Viridianna’s hand. “Every ritual, every claiming, every stupid drunk night… it’s been weaving this web. We just need to make it conscious.”
The discussion unfolded from there, pragmatic and eerily calm. They weren’t panicking. They were problem-solving. Plans were made. Sophia and Sera would collaborate on martial drills that incorporated their combined abilities. Priya and Ketut would work on meditative practices to strengthen their shared spiritual lattice. Lilith, with her power of negation, and Anya, with her nascent control over light, theorized about creating defensive fields that could identify and repel corrosive psychic energy.
Bruce listened, a swell of pride so fierce it threatened to close his throat. This was his council. His partners. They were not afraid; they were focused.
“So we have our tasks,” Camille summarized, the kindergarten teacher in her bringing order to the divine war council. “We start today. No more lazy mornings.” She smirked, a flash of the woman who had confessed her deepest desires without shame. “Well, maybe some lazy mornings. But focused ones.”
The group began to disperse, murmuring in pairs and trios, already deep in conversation about frequencies of power and tactical alignments.
Sera lingered, watching her sisters go. She looked at Bruce. “They didn’t run.” She sounded vaguely astonished.
“Why would they?” He pulled her into his side, kissing her temple. “They’re queens too. You raised the standard, and they rallied to it.”
Veyra joined them, slipping an arm around Bruce’s waist. “The Eaters will come through a weak point in the dimensional fabric near a nexus of emotional energy. A place of powerful memory.”
A cold knot formed in Bruce’s stomach. He knew. They all knew.
“The old house,” Camille said, coming up behind him, her hand resting on his back. “In San Diego. Where we raised the kids. Where you…”
Where he had sat in his car with a pistol. His deepest pool of pain and memory.
“It’s our most vulnerable point,” Veyra confirmed quietly. “It is the tear in your personal fabric. They will smell it across realms.”
Bruce stared out at the rising sun, now glinting off the ocean. His past, that hollow ache he’d told Sera and Veyra he could no longer access, was now the declared battlefield. The symmetry was brutal.
“Then we don’t wait for them to find it,” he said, his voice low. “We use it. We turn my weakest point into our strongest trap. We go to San Diego.”
He felt the resolve solidify around him, a tangible force woven from eleven distinct wills hammered into one single, unbreakable purpose. The fortress of their love was no longer just a defense. It had gates. And they were about to march out through them.
The decision hung in the air, potent and grim. Going back there. Bruce felt the old house’s gravity pulling at his bones already, a phantom weight. Around him, the compound sprang into a different kind of motion, no longer a sanctuary but a headquarters.
“I’ll book the flights,” Anya said, pulling her silver-blonde hair into a severe ponytail, phone already in hand. “Private charter. There’s a company in Denpasar that doesn’t ask questions about unusual passenger manifests.”
“Weapons?” Sophia asked, looking at Sera. “Mine are in a locker in Valencia. Yours?”
“Dust on a throne in a realm I no longer recognize,” Sera replied, her voice tight. “We’ll acquire what we need locally. Hardware stores, forging shops. A sword is a shape. I am the edge.”
Camille moved to Bruce, her hand finding his. Her touch was warm, solid. “We’ll need to story for the neighbors. A sudden family reunion? Plumbing disaster?”
“We tell them nothing,” Bruce said, his focus narrowing to a sharp, practical point. “We go in quiet. We secure the perimeter. We wait.” He looked at Veyra. “How long?”
Veyra’s bottomless eyes were hazy, seeing the invisible threads of probability. “The tear is weeping. They’ve sensed it. Days. Maybe hours after we arrive. Their approach is a slow corruption, a stain spreading through dimensions.”
A chill, unrelated to the morning breeze, passed through the group. Hours. Lena crossed the pavilion and stood before Bruce, her brown eyes fierce. “I’m driving. You shouldn’t be behind the wheel when we get there.”
He didn’t argue. She was right. His memories of that driveway were a minefield.
The next forty-eight hours blurred into a logistical fever dream. Bags were packed not with vacations in mind, but for war. Simple clothes. Priya’s case of herbs and distilled tinctures clinked beside Sophia’s set of honed tactical knives. The private jet, a sleek Gulfstream, smelled of new leather and anxiety.
Bruce stared out the window as Bali diminished into an emerald jewel in an azure sea. Camille slept with her head on his shoulder. Sera and Veyra sat across the aisle, eyes closed, but he knew they weren’t sleeping. They were tracing the Weave, stretching their senses ahead to scout the psychic landscape of their destination.
Lena drove the rented, nondescript SUV from the San Diego airport with a calm, focused aggression. The familiar freeway signs were punches to Bruce’s gut. Exit ramps he’d taken a thousand times to soccer games, to grocery stores, to a life that felt like a sketch made by another man. The suburban streets unspooled, a monument to trimmed lawns and quiet desperation.
“Here,” he said, his voice hoarse.
The house was just a house. Stucco, tile roof, a struggling rose bush by the front door Camille had always tried to save. It was smaller than he remembered. Drabber. The driveway asphalt was cracked in the exact same place.
Lena pulled into the drive, killing the engine. The silence was absolute. No birds. The distant sound of a lawnmower from a street over felt like something from another world.
Bruce just sat, staring at the closed garage door. He could see the outline of his old car, a ghost behind the white metal. The pistol’s cold weight in his hand was a memory so vivid his palm tingled.
“Hey.” Camille’s voice, soft beside him. She didn’t say it’s okay or it’s just a house. She knew better. “We’re all here. This time.”
He nodded, swallowing hard. The back doors of the SUV opened, and the others spilled out, a starkly beautiful invasion of their own past. Neighbors would be peeking through blinds. A rainbow of goddesses hauling strange cases onto the lawn of a middle-class San Diego home.
Bruce forced his hand to move, opened the door, and stepped onto the asphalt. The sun hit his skin, the same California sun. It felt alien. He walked to the front door, keys long gone, but Priya stepped forward. She placed a hand on the lock, her power a subtle vibration. The deadbolt clicked over with a sound like a falling bone.
The smell hit him first. Stale air, carpet cleaner, and underneath it, the faint ghost of their old lives—spaghetti dinners, kids’ art projects, cheap laundry detergent. The furniture was gone, the rooms echoingly bare. Light slanted in through blinds they’d bought at Home Depot.
“The energy here is…” Ketut began, her voice a whisper. She hugged herself, her dark eyes sweeping the empty living room. “It is a wound. It calls.”
Veyra glided past Bruce, her silhouette swallowing the harsh sunlight. She stopped in the center of the family room, where their couch used to be. She knelt, pressing her palms flat to the beige carpet. “Here. The fabric is thin. It aches.”
Bruce walked to the spot. He remembered lying there on the floor sometimes, watching TV, feeling empty. He’d thought it was his own failure. Now he knew it was a leak, a spiritual slow bleed he’d been sensing his entire mortal life.
“So we set the table,” Lilith said, her golden eyes scanning the room with strategic coldness. “Anya, Sophia—help me with the boundary markings. Salt, iron filings, the patterns I’ll show you. We make the house a container.”
“A crucible,” Sera corrected, drawing a line in the dust on the floor with her fingertip. “We don’t just contain them here. We destroy them here.”
The group moved with practiced efficiency, each wife deploying her unique genius. Priya and Ketut began brewing a pungent tea in the kitchen, its steam carrying fortifying properties. Freya and Viridianna moved from room to room, Freya’s hands whispering over walls, sealing metaphysical cracks with pure creative intent, while Viridianna plotted paths of escape that didn’t involve doors.
Bruce stood in the center of it all, the focal point. He felt the web being woven around him, through him. Each wife’s power was a distinct thread—Camille’s resilient protection, Lena’s devoted possibility, Sera’s razor-sharp war, Veyra’s absorbing silence—all knitting together into a single, devastating tapestry. He was the loom.
Night fell swiftly. They didn’t turn on the lights. The streetlamp outside cast long, distorted shadows through the bare windows. They sat in a circle in the hollow family room, the fortified air humming. They shared Priya’s tea. It tasted of earth and bitter resilience.
“What do they look like?” Freya asked, her green eyes wide in the semi-darkness.
“They’ll wear a form you can comprehend,” Veyra answered, staring into the dark corner where the breakfast nook had been. “It will be made from the fear they find in you. A missed opportunity. A harsh word. A moment of despair.” Her eyes found Bruce. “They’ll wear yours, I expect. It’s the strongest flavor here.”
Bruce saw it in his mind. A shape of his own past loneliness, given hunger and teeth. The thought should have terrified him. Instead, a cold anger settled in its place. They wanted to use his pain as a weapon against the family he’d built from its ashes. The arrogance of it was almost amusing.
A low-frequency vibration began to thrum through the floorboards. The air grew thick, difficult to breathe. The streetlight outside flickered and died, plunging the house into deeper darkness.
In the corner of the room, the space warped. It was like watching heat haze over asphalt, but cold. The air itself seemed to bruise.
“They’re here,” Sera said, rising to her feet without a sound. Her violet eyes began to glow, the only light in the room now.
From the bruised air, a figure condensed. It was tall, vaguely humanoid, but smudged at the edges. Its surface shifted, mirror-like, reflecting fragments of the room—a blank wall, a dusty window. Then it settled. It wore Bruce’s face, but sunken, eyes hollowed by the very despair he’d felt in this room. It wore the cheap suit he’d owned for his accounting job. In its hand, it held a phantom, shimmering pistol.
The sight was a gut-punch. Bruce felt the old emptiness yawn inside him, a conditioned response. The Eater took a step forward, its mouth opening in a silent mimicry of a scream.
Then Camille laughed.
The sound was bright, sharp, and utterly out of place. She stepped forward, putting herself between the thing and Bruce. “Oh, come on,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “That’s the best you’ve got? The sad dad in a bad suit? That guy’s gone.” She gestured over her shoulder at Bruce. “Look at him. Really look.”
The thing hesitated, its stolen face flickering. Bruce felt the web around him tighten, glowing with interconnected power. He let it fill him, the love and the fury, the shared strength of eleven divine wills.
The Eater’s form rippled, uncertain. It tried another shape—a twisted memory of a childhood fear from Lena, a flash of battlefield loss from Sera. Each form flickered and died, unable to hold against the consolidated front of their bond. They were not isolated fears to be picked off. They were a circuit. An attack on one surged through and was dissipated by all.
The thing in the corner shrieked, a sound of tearing fabric and breaking glass. It wasn’t a scream of anger, but of frustration. Of hunger denied.
“My turn,” Bruce said, his voice echoing with a timbre that was his and more. He raised a hand, not in a fist, but palm open. The power that gathered was not a blast, but an invitation. A void.
Veyra’s shadow-walking negation, amplified by Lilith’s transformative skill, channeled through him. It was a wave of pure, devouring stillness.
The Eater of Light, confronted not with a shining, fragile soul to consume but with a hungrier, deeper nothingness, had a moment of cosmic confusion. It was the predator becoming prey.
The wave hit it. There was no dramatic explosion. The shifting form simply… unraveled. It frayed at the edges, its stolen substance pouring into the void Bruce offered, not as a meal, but as an obliteration. The last thing to vanish was the mimicry of his own eyes, the hollow look extinguished not by light, but by a deeper dark.
The silence that followed was absolute. The bruised air in the corner smoothed into ordinary, empty space. The streetlight outside flickered back on.
Bruce lowered his hand. The connection to Veyra’s power receded, leaving a peculiar, clean emptiness inside him, like a shadow after a streetlight is fixed. He turned to look at his wives, their faces pale and serious in the returning mundane glow.
“One,” Sera said, her warrior’s calculus immediate. “A scout. The main force won’t be so easily fooled. It will have felt that.”
“They’ll come for the nexus itself now,” Veyra confirmed, her eyes on Bruce. “For the source of the void that consumed their sibling. For you.”
Outside, the neighborhood was still perfectly quiet. A dog barked two streets over. A car engine started. The mundane world continued, oblivious to the teeth that had just snapped shut on nothing in this empty house.
Bruce walked to the front window, pulled the blind aside with a finger. The street was ordinary, tranquil. A perfect replica of the American dream he thought had trapped him. He let the blind fall back.
“Good,” he said, the word flat and final. “Let them come to the source. We’ll be waiting.” He looked around the circle, at each fierce, beloved face. “Get some rest. It won’t be long now.”
He settled on the bare floor, his back against the wall where his family photos used to hang. Camille came over, leaning into him. One by one, the others found spaces, a constellation of vigilance and waiting in the dark, empty shell of his old life. The trap was set. They were the bait, and the jaws.