Read Chapter 29: The Ritual Begins

The wind had teeth. It tore through the glen, screaming across the standing stones as Callum crested the ridge. Below, the circle lay open to the bruised sky—eight monoliths ringing a central slab where the tenth witness stone sat, black and gleaming like a wound in the earth.

Morag stood at its center.

She wore the old cloak, the one the keepers had passed down through generations, its hem crusted with soil and something darker. Her arms were spread wide, palms up, and the air around her rippled with heat that had no source. The Ur's minions flanked her—not the twisted root-things he'd seen before, but shapes that moved at the edge of vision, dark and fluid, as if they'd been stitched together from shadow and rot.

Callum's hand found the dirk at his belt. The true one. The weight of it felt different against his palm—older, hungrier.

"Callum." Morag's voice carried across the circle without effort, silk wrapped around a blade. "You're just in time. I saved you a seat at the table."

"You're not doing this." He started down the slope, Ishbel a step behind him despite the blood blooming through her bandage. "You're not feeding her. Not with me, not with anyone."

Morag laughed, and the sound scraped against his teeth. "Feeding her? Oh, Callum. You still don't understand." She turned her face to the sky, and her eyes caught the dying light—wrong, too bright, like polished coins. "I'm not feeding her. I'm becoming her."

The tenth stone pulsed. A low thrum traveled up through Callum's boots, vibrated in his sternum, rattled the old bones in his skull.

"Your father thought he could cut her out." Morag's voice softened, almost tender. "Poor Alistair. He bled himself dry on that stone and begged her to release him. But he didn't understand what she'd already taken. What she'd become *because* of him."

Callum's grip tightened on the dirk. "He didn't kill himself. You did this."

"I gave her what she wanted." Morag's shadow stretched behind her, longer than it should have been, reaching toward the monoliths. "I gave her everything—every scrap of pain, every stolen moment, every memory that burned too bright to hold. And you know what she gave me back?"

The shadows at her feet writhed. Faces surfaced in them—his mother's face, young and laughing, before it dissolved. His own face, years ago, screaming in a rainstorm he couldn't place. Pieces. Fragments. The Ur had been eating them all along.

"Power," Morag whispered. "The only thing that matters. The only thing that *lasts.*"

Callum stepped onto the flat ground of the circle. The thrumming grew louder, pressing against his eardrums, and somewhere behind him he heard Ishbel call his name as if from the bottom of a well. The tenth stone was burning now—not with fire, but with cold light that made his eyes water.

"I'm not performing the ritual," Callum said. The words felt thick in his mouth. "Whatever you planned—whatever you think I'm going to do for you—I'm not doing it."

Morag smiled, slow and patient. "Oh, Callum. You already are."

The shadows struck.

They came from every direction at once—tendrils of darkness that moved like muscle and bone, snapping toward his wrists, his throat, his ankles. Callum twisted, the dirk coming up in a wild arc, and the blade bit into one of the shadow-things with a sound like wet paper tearing. It shrieked—a thin, human-sounding shriek—and recoiled.

Hope. Sharp and sudden.

"Callum!" Ishbel's voice, closer now. He saw her at the edge of the circle, arm stretched toward him, her face pale and desperate. "The blade—cut her tie! Cut her tie to the Ur!"

Morag's head snapped toward her, and there was something in that movement that wasn't human—a jerk, a shudder, like a puppet whose strings had been pulled too hard. Her mouth opened, but the sound that came out wasn't hers. It was a low, grinding note that made the ground tremble.

"No more interference," Morag said. But it wasn't Morag speaking. The voice came from everywhere, from the stones, from the earth, from the black sky pressing down. "No more keepers. No more debts. I am finished with kneeling."

The roots burst from the ground.

Callum saw them tear through the packed earth—thick, black, glistening—wrapping around Morag's legs, her waist, her arms. Not restraining her. *Becoming* her. The shadow-women at her feet sank into the soil and were gone, drawn up into her bones, and Morag's body rose—lifted, suspended, her limbs stretching in ways that made something in his chest crack.

"Now." Her throat bulged. Her eyes were fully black. "Now he comes."

The tenth stone shattered.

Light exploded outward—not heat, not warmth, but a cold, blue-white brilliance that threw Callum's shadow against the trees and filled the glen with a sound like every bell in every cathedral in Scotland ringing at once. The Ur's minions scattered, dissolving into mist. The standing stones shuddered, and cracks ran through them like veins of lightning.

And from the center of the ruined stone, the thing that had been Morag began to open.

Callum didn't think. He ran.

The dirk was singing in his hand, vibrating with a purpose that felt older than the earth beneath his feet. Morag—or whatever wore her now—was ascending, her shadow stretching a hundred feet, her mouth open in a shape that had no business in human bone. But below her, at the base of her spine, where the root-stuff joined flesh, there was a seam. A join. A place where the Ur had stitched itself into her.

The tie.

Callum drove the dirk into it.

The blade sank deep, and every sound in the world stopped.

Morag's body seized. Her mouth snapped shut. The hundred-foot shadow flickered like a candle in a gale, and for one impossible moment, Callum saw her face—her real face, human and terrified and *young*, younger than he'd ever known her.

"Callum—" she choked. Blood from the wound, black and viscous, poured down the blade onto his hands. "Please—"

The Ur's voice, from everywhere and nowhere, drowned her out. "STILL YOUR HAND, KEEPER, AND I WILL GIVE YOU BACK WHAT I HAVE TAKEN."

Callum felt it—the offer, the promise, a flood of warmth washing through his mind. His mother's face. His first dog's name. Every memory he'd lost, held out to him like a key to a door he desperately wanted to open.

His grip trembled.

The wind howled. The stones groaned. Morag hung above him like a broken marionette, her hands twitching, her mouth spilling black.

Callum pulled the dirk free.