Read Chapter 12: The Stolen Healer

The cathedral's consecrated ground held. Through the narrow window slits, Dain counted three hours of silence before the creature moved.

It did not howl. It did not batter the walls. It simply withdrew, a great dark shape retreating into the rain-slicked street, and vanished between the crooked buildings of Ravensmoor.

"They say it's never left a hunt unfinished." Brother Aldous spoke from behind them, his voice thin as old parchment. He clutched the Canticle journal to his chest like a relic. "Not once. Not in four hundred years."

Elara leaned against the cold stone wall. Her hand pressed against her side, where the boy's wound had opened beneath her ribs. The bandage was soaked through. She looked at Dain with those steady grey eyes that seemed to see straight through his careful distance.

"So we have time," she said. "Before it circles back."

"Hours, maybe." Dain checked the crossbow's mechanism, not meeting her gaze. "It learns. It's armored itself now. Next time it won't be so easy."

"Then we go now. While it's still hunting us the old way." She pushed off the wall and swayed. Caught herself. The wound had stolen more blood than she could spare.

Dain watched her straighten her spine. The same stubborn set to her jaw he'd seen in Halworth when she'd taken that boy's injury into herself. When she'd looked at the monstrous thing outside and seen not a demon but a kind of sister.

"You can't run like this."

"I don't need to run. I need to reach the abbey archives. There's a folio—"

"You need to stop bleeding." He stepped forward, reaching for her arm. "Let me—"

"No." The word came sharp. She pulled away. Once, he would have thought it was pride. Now he knew better. It was fear. Not of him. Of what she might do. Of what she was already becoming.

The void inside her stirred when she used her magic. He'd seen it in her eyes. A flicker of wrongness, brief as a wingbeat.

"Fine," he said. "We wait until dawn. Then we move."

They didn't sleep. Dain didn't trust the silence. He walked the cathedral's perimeter twice, checking the barricaded doors, the windows, the shadows between the candle flames. Elara sat in the choir loft with Brother Aldous, reading aloud from the second folio in a low murmur Dain tried not to hear.

There was a word she kept repeating. *Cantari*. Healer. The name for what she was. And another word, older, that made his stomach clench every time.

*Eater*.

At the third hour past midnight, the candles guttered at once.

Dain was at the south transept. He heard Elara's sharp intake of breath from the loft above. Then nothing. No rustle of cloth. No footsteps. The silence stretched wrong, a held breath that wouldn't end.

He ran.

The loft was empty. The folio lay open on the floor, pages trembling as if caught in a draft. Brother Aldous stood frozen by the window, his face pale as bone, staring at the shattered glass.

"A hand," the brother whispered. "Through the glass. It reached through the glass and took—"

Dain was already at the broken window. Below, in the courtyard, the creature moved with terrible deliberation toward the lichgate. And in its grip, limp as a shattered doll, hung Elara.

Her eyes were open. Watching him. Her lips moved, and Dain knew the shape of the word she spoke.

*Run.*

The creature turned its head. For a moment, it looked up at him with eyes that were not animal. They were the hollow eyes of a creature that had once healed people, and something passed across them like regret. Then it was gone, moving through the gate and into the dark streets with Elara in its arms.

Dain didn't think. He vaulted the windowsill and dropped the two stories to the courtyard stones, pain exploding up his legs. He ran. Through the lichgate, into the winding streets of Ravensmoor, boots slipping on wet cobblestones.

He caught glimpses. A shadow moving between buildings. A flicker of pale hair. He pushed harder, corners sharp and violent in his lungs, his crossbow forgotten, his mind white with a single burning thought.

Twice he almost had her. Once he reached the mouth of an alley and saw the creature still holding her, its massive armored body bent impossibly to fit the narrow space. He lunged—

And found empty air.

The rain fell harder. The streets lay silent around him, wrong angles and dead ends he didn't recognize. He'd lost the way back. He'd lost them.

Dain stood in the rain for a long moment, breathing hard. Then he saw it. A glint of metal in the gutter, half-covered by a grate.

He knelt and picked it up.

Silver. Small. A locket, its chain snapped clean as if cut by a knife. He hadn't known it existed. She'd kept it hidden well.

Dain turned it over in his palm. His thumb found the catch, and the locket sprang open on its own.

Inside was a portrait—a miniature painting, faded with age. A woman's face. Brown hair coiled at the nape of her neck, a dark fall of curls he remembered. Eyes the color of summer hazel. A smile that held the same guarded warmth he'd seen once, years ago, across a crowded tavern and never again.

His hand closed around the locket until the edges bit into his palm.

The woman was his sister. A sister he'd buried alone nine years ago. A sister Elara had never once mentioned.

The rain kept falling. The city kept its silence.

And far away, in the dark, the creature carried its stolen healer deeper into the earth, and Elara's hands were cold as winter stone.