As the blood tinted the ribbon of air red, it began to shift. That stretched space—that was the only way Liam could describe it—began to hint at something beyond the strange shimmer. It looked like a membrane pulling thin, hinting at something on the other side. A landscape—shapes like trees, like leaves, too dark and muddled—

“I told you. All we needed was some pain.”

Pitr reached down with his knife then and began sawing at Kieran’s ear, each creak of splitting cartilage loud as gunfire. Something chattered within the darkness between the oscillators, and Liam imagined a thousand hungry, gnashing teeth.

And then the gnashing was inside him—it was thrumming in his veins. His heart beat faster and his breath quickened as he absorbed his father’s screams, his pain. Liam felt heavier, like his bones had turned to lead. An energy raced inside him, cracking and pulsing with a heartbeat all its own.

The dark energy he knew existed, on paper and pencil scratch, was here. He felt it. He welcomed it. And the more Liam focused on it, the more he felt, with certainty, that he was pulling it into himself.

It sighed and shivered inside him—as though with relief. Like coming home.

Pitr must have sensed it, too, because he stopped the torture to look up at Liam with a glare. “What are you doing—No!”

Pitr lunged forward, crossing directly in front of the space between two worlds. He reached for Liam, but the gap pulled at him, its force magnetic. It sucked away Kieran’s blood from Pitr’s hand—feasted on his screams—

Then Pitr’s eyes turned black and the shadows deepened across his face. He was harnessing the power too.

“Yes. It’s mine.” A chorus of voices undercut Pitr’s as he spoke, skittering like spiders. “Mine. I gave it the sacrifice—I deserve the power—”

The darkness throbbed in Liam’s mind, whispering all the ways he could use it to make Pitr pay. Liam drew his hands apart and imagined the energy stretching out between his palms, tugging it back from Pitr’s grasp.

“No! It’s mine!” Pitr shouted.

He whirled to his captive and slammed the dagger into Kieran’s chest. Liam’s father groaned. It shredded at Liam’s eardrums. But it fueled him, too. All the torment this pitiful man had wrought on him and his mother. All of Pitr’s manipulations, all of the lies and heartbreak and subterfuge and denial. Liam drank it all up, even as he sensed Pitr doing the same. Binding that energy. Drawing it into himself.

But he couldn’t hold on to it forever. He needed to unleash it.