DAGON MANSION

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DANGER DOES NOT COME ALONE

Scarlett clasped Mr. Bear to her breast as if the soft fabric might steady the world. The unicorn flashlight bobbed in her small hand, a pale led star that carved children's maps out of the dark. The corridor behind the wall smelled of old paper and sleep: the house's secret breath. It accepted her like a long-lost guest.

"Mr. Bear," she whispered to the toy, "it's very dark here, but I have a light. Don't be frightened."

The hole in the wood that led to the forgotten passages was narrower than her shoulders, but fear was thinner still. She wriggled through, knees scraping, and the tunnel swallowed her boots with welcoming cold. It uncoiled beneath the house like a sleeping serpent, carrying her past pipes and dust and relics of other lives. Doors leaned in the dark as if listening; stairways sighed.

At last she came to a great wooden barrier set like a heart within the ribs of the manor. A lock, rusted to the color of old blood, guarded it. Scarlett stood on tiptoe and pressed her tiny palms against the keyhole out of habit more than hope.

"It's time," she told Mr. Bear, the words jubilant and grave both. "I will use my power. Door, I want you to open."

Her palms warmed against the wood. A hush fell — the kind of hush that makes the house hold its breath. The hinges trembled as if the door had not been opened for a century and half. Then the lock rattled once, twice, as if the house were remembering how to move.

Light flared like a wounded star. The door lurched with a violence that belonged to the body of the world rather than the furniture of a house. Wood screamed. The lock exploded into dust and splinters. A shockwave rolled through the corridor — a silent thunder — and Scarlett's small limbs lost their anchor. The flashlight flew from her hand. The last thing she saw was Mr. Bear tumbling toward her, his button eyes turning to glassy moons, before blackness folded over her like sleep.

Kayda had been sitting beneath the apple tree, the day's dust still in the lines of her palms, when the sound came — not like a bang but like the tearing of the long memory of the house. The ground shivered beneath her sandals. She saw the boards lift where the garden met the wall and a cloud of dust and old light burst into the air.

She ran.

Scarlett lay in a small heap where the corridor met the garden, hair fanned like a dark halo, Mr. Bear clutched to her chest. Kayda's scream split the afternoon. Her voice trembled with something that was more prayer than alarm as she reached for her phone.

"Mrs. Mia!" she sobbed into the line. "You must come home. Scarlett is down. The wall — it exploded. I don't know what to do."

Mia's world contracted to a single point: the girl she loved. The road narrowed beneath her tires, and every light on the way burned red. She arrived as if she had flown. Kayda was waiting at the gate, hands raw and shaking, and at her feet — Scarlett, dazed but breathing, clutching Mr. Bear like a tiny knight with a stuffed banner.

"Kayda, tell me—what happened?" Mia asked, voice brittle with a terror she would never fully learn to name.

Kayda could only shake her head; her words came as sobs. "I don't know, ma'am. I swear I don't—"

Scarlett's eyes fluttered open. "It was me," she confessed, voice thin as a ribbon. "I wanted to go into the tunnel. The door wouldn't open. So I used my power."

Mia gathered her daughter up into an embrace that was half comfort, half apology.

"You promised me," Mia said into the child's hair. "You promised you wouldn't use them."

Scarlett made the solemn, childish concession of guilt. "I'm sorry, Mama. I'll never do it again."

Mia straightened, knuckles white on the stuffed bear. "We'll go to the hospital. They'll run checks. Kayda, thank you. Stay with us."

The following day Mia sat behind her small desk, the clinic smelling of lemon and antiseptic, and Randolf came through the door like a memory woken from sleep. He wiped the thin rain from his coat and smiled a little, the sort of smile that keeps its distance from panic.

"How are you?" he asked simply.

Mia told him of the night and of Scarlett's small confession. He listened without surprise, only with an acceptance that bore the weight of things not explained to polite society.

"I know someone who might help," he said after a while. "A child psychotherapist accustomed to... unusual histories. Georgiana Key. She works with families who live in the shadowlands of our world."

Mia drew in a breath, relief and apprehension braided together. "Thank you," she said. "I'll call her."

Randolf watched her over the rim of his cup, the café light catching his jawline into something like a carved totem. He was not merely a neighbor or a healer; he carried centuries of a different life like a cloak — the scent of the wild, an intelligence older than the news. When he spoke of Kalon Highfield and of the sunless courtyards of wampire legend, he sounded almost apologetic for his own history: a past that had been forced into stories.

"You're not like him," Mia said quietly, the question pulsing between her and the stranger at her table. "You're not the monsters I feared."

Randolf's glance softened. "We bleed the same red as you, Mia," he answered. "We only answer to other calls."

And for reasons she could not name, Mia felt the world shift a fraction toward a different gravity: toward him.

While the mundane world pulsed and repaired, something older opened its wings in a place where sunlight never learns the names of things. The Dark Dimension's sky hung bruised—red and black smeared together like a wound bandaged too late. The castle of the Custodes Sanguinis rose there, all broken battlements and stained glass that threw color as if to mock shadow itself.

Alexandra Dominy received the news like a woman tasting ash. Holstein Faulks — a pale thing she had tended and trained as a violet in her court — had died by human hands. His death was not bloodless to her; it was the careless stepping on a jewel.

She paced her private gallery, garments of shadow falling in perfect angles, and thought of Ryan with a venom that could be mistaken for longing. He had been hers in a way that was not simple affection: possession, devotion, a wound she had opened and bled into. The curse she had laid upon him was, to her, a beautiful geometry of revenge: an artful ruin.

To learn that a mortal woman — a frightened, clumsy piece of flesh named Mia Richardson — had cut down one of her votaries was both insult and offering. She allowed herself a small, cold amusement.

"So. The men who keep his head clear die," she purred to the empty room. "One less to tell him of the hunger. One less to call him home."

A pale hand traced the rim of a goblet. "He is mine — the pain, the worship, the ruin. And yet the world is full of accidents." Her lashes lowered. "Alexandra does not forgive accidents."

She considered the map of Glouminster as one of her minions would: roads like veins, houses like organs, the mansion a heart. The weak points presented themselves, sleepy and fragrant: Mia's love, Scarlett's fragile brightness, the shield that Theolinda wore like armor.

"I know where your weaknesses sleep," Alexandra murmured into the dim. "I will make you dream your own ending."

Outside her window, the bats rose like a living scroll unfurling. Within the castle, plots as old as hunger themselves took root. Plans needed to be patient, slow as ivy; revenge was a thing that lived on bones and time.

She smiled into the dark and let the sound of it be a promise.

"Soon," she breathed. "Soon I will teach them the cost of loving what should not be loved.