Pitr’s eyes widened. He sensed what Liam was about to do. They were playing tug-of-war with the very fabric of time-space, the dark energy trickling through the hole between two worlds. He staggered forward, even as his legs stretched, swirling deeper into the hole. “It’s mine!”

But Liam found it was easy to command the energy that it was now inside him. As natural as walking, breathing. He’d been born for this. He knew how to take control. And the darkness promised him power far greater than Pitr could handle—the things it promised—

He thrust his hands together, compressing a mass of shadows into a ball. Relativity. Fusion. Explosion.

The shadows tore out of Liam as though he were casting a net. They spun around Pitr, coiling up his limbs. Pitr was screaming—even over the hungering oscillators, Liam could hear it—but as the shadows engulfed him, they stuffed the sound right back down his throat and slithered inside.

Pitr staggered into the undulating wall, the tear between the worlds. His hand still gripped Kieran by his bonds, though Kieran was slurping his last breaths through a punctured lung. Liam should feel something, he should feel relief or anger or regret—but all he felt was a dark smile bubbling out of him. Power coursing through him. Limitless.

The tear stretched wider. Inviting. After all, this was what the shadow world had been waiting for. A suitable offering. The perfect sacrifice.

But Liam had acted too fast. He’d expended all the energy at once. He dropped to his knees, the sudden weightlessness leaving him dizzy, nauseated. The other world had gotten what it came for—and now it was retreating, leaving Liam empty and cold.

“You’ll pay,” Pitr wheezed—

And then the portal closed up around him.

Too much, it had been too much all at once. The air where the portal had opened condensed, thickening. The oscillators screeched and snapped and pulled inward from their moorings, the gravity of the collapsing rift between worlds sucking them in. They crashed against each other, their whirring noise rolling frantically, then they fused together as the noise wound down, like a top losing its rotational momentum.

Liam sat back on his heels with a strangled cry. Pitr, his father, the blood, the gun, the dagger—it was all gone. And with it, the energy he’d harnessed from the other world.

But it had worked. Liam laughed, tears burning his eyes. Pitr had been right after all.

Oh, God. It was real. The shadow universe he’d only glimpsed in the space of his calculations, in the decimal-point error of his numbers. It was terrifyingly, undeniably real—just on the other side of reality, waiting for the right frequency.

And just like Pitr said, it was hungry for their pain.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PHILLIP