She took a deep breath, setting down her gun, but keeping it within arm’s reach. “Just drink your sludge and shut up, Jack.”

We sat in silence for a long moment. She flipped through the tome, each turn of the page revealing more cryptic text and illustrations of arcane rituals.

“And then there’s this,” she said, her voice low. “A line about Nightstone. Says it needs to be taken in—absorbed. Can help stave off the change.”

I nodded. Infernum may have kept the lights on, but Nightstone—Nightstone was the city’s dark heart. Thick as molasses and twice as treacherous.

“Tell me, Cali,” I said, a wry smile tugging at my lips, “should I plug myself into a battery or suck on an exhaust pipe?”

“Neither,” she retorted, her tone cool. “That wouldn’t even slow your decay. You need the raw stuff—unfiltered, unprocessed.”

When I thought of Nightstone, I pictured what most people did—the oily sludge that dripped slow and heavy into the tray before it was bled into an engine. The process was filthy, and the stench clung to you like a guilty conscience, but it was the only way to keep a car running. The exhaust spewed rift soot into the air—a dark stain that coated everything it touched. You could always spot the drivers by the grime under their nails and the cough that never quite left their lungs.

But what we were dealing with here wasn’t the usual sludge—it was the raw stuff, glassy and dangerous. When Infernum was compressed too long and too tight, it hardened into a black, reflective stone. This pure form of Nightstone was volatile, a concentrated force that didn’t just power a car—it could tear one apart. And after it was burned out, the charred remains got repurposed into Shadefire coal, another form of controlled destruction.

That’s why I smoked—it soothed the lungs and gave me the illusion of control over the chaos. I grabbed a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep pull. But there was no relief, not even the familiar taste of ash in my mouth. The smoke just hung there, a hollow reminder of my recent choices.

“Great. So where the hell do we find raw Nightstone?”

She gave me a wry smile. “Where the city bleeds.”

Stolen novel; please report.

I stared at her, deadpan. “You don’t cross rifts on the best of days, let alone the worst, and now you’re telling me to walk straight into one?”

“I’m telling you to stay alive—and to avoid going berserk in some quiet town full of grandmas.”

“Never trust a sweet old lady,” I muttered.

Cali sighed, exasperated. “You’re edging closer to full undead, Jack. Sooner or later, there won’t be enough of you left to crack jokes.”

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves before continuing. “Here, on our side of the rift, the dead are supposed to stay dead. But the Otherworld? It’s more accommodating to your new... constitution. You know how Full Bloods lose their minds when they step through a rift?”

“It’s the only thing that keeps the Demon Lords out,” I said.

“You’re in a similar boat now. The more you feed, the closer you get to becoming ‘full blood,’ so to speak. But things from the Otherworld might, theoretically, slow that down. Buy us some time to figure this out.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure about this?”

She gave me a withering look. “Satan’s tits, Jack, of course I’m not sure. I got this book from a sketchy vampire in a dark alley at the Shadow Market. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise. Just be glad I took a year of Abyssal in college.”

“Okay, Cali, I get it. So, let’s say we get the Nightstone, then what?”

“Then you find somebody who knows what they’re doing. There’s a lot here that doesn’t translate, Jack. Look at this.”

She showed me the strange symbols bracketing the lines she just read. “There’s no translation. Nothing in any of the books I’ve got. We’re in uncharted territory.”

I glanced at them, and a sudden twinge of anxiety rippled through Frank. “I might be able to help,” I said.

Cali raised an eyebrow. “You studied ancient Abyssal?”

“No,” I replied, “but I know someone who did.”

I focused on the symbols, bringing Frank closer to the book. The ancient script twisted and turned, a dark, tangled language that seemed to writhe on the page. Frank went quiet for a moment, digging through the fragments of his memory.

He’d lost most of the important stuff when his skin was tanned and turned into a leather jacket, or so he says. You can never fully trust a demon, even one as... altered as Frank. But having him around had its perks. The only reason he hadn’t gone mad, as far as we could tell, was because he was already dead—a ghost trapped in his own skin. Creeps me out just thinking about it.

Let me use your eyes. Frank’s voice whispered in my mind.