Pete kicked the chair so hard it skittered across the oak planks and slammed the wall, legs splintering like cheap bone. His pulse hammere in his ears, a war drum made of blood. The book—that book—felt heavier than lead in his fist, pages warped from the sweat of his grip.
He was already moving, boots pounding the runner carpet down the grand staircase of Blackthorn Hall, each step a gunshot. The banister trembled under his palm. Keys clinked in the foyer bowl; he snatched them without breaking stride.
"Pete?"
Her voice. Of course.
He froze at the base of the stairs, his jaw clenching.
Victoria's voice slid through the air like silk over a blade. She leaned in the parlor doorway, one manicured hand on the jamb, the other cradling a crystal tumbler of something amber and expensive.
Her eyes—those calculating emerald slits—widened in mock alarm. Perfect. She'd practiced that look in the mirror since the day she traded her escort heels for Blackthorn diamonds.
Victoria Rivers, well, Castellanos now, though she'd always be a Rivers in spirit if not in name, stood in the doorway to the sitting room, perfectly manicured eyebrows raised in that expression of calculated concern she'd perfected.
"Where are you going, darling?" Honey over venom.
He yanked the hoodie up, hood shadowing the snarl twisting his mouth. Where? To gut the bastard who'd sold him a grimoire full of blank parchment and lies.
Since when did she start to care? If anything, she'd be thrilled he was this angry if she knew what was going on. This woman knew how to insult him, how to remindi him what a disappointment he was to his father and the whole Blackthorn legacy, better than she knew how to take care of the old man upstairs.
She'd known her place when she first came into their lives—an escort, beautiful and eager. Pete had actualy liked her back then, when she was honest about what she was. But the moment his father married her; she'd shown her true colors. The mask had slipped, revealing the social-climbing viper underneath.
Whatever. At least she was hot as fuck. Good material for his imaginations whenever porn got boring.
"I'm going out," he bit out, brushing past her.
Victoria stepped closer, perfume—oud and crushed orchids—invading his space. "Your father—"
"Tell the old man to choke on his morphin," Pete growled, shoulder-checking her as he passed. Her glass sloshed; liquor kissed the marble like a sacrifice.
Outside, the estate sprawled in manicured arrogance: topiary beasts frozen mid-snarl, fountains pissing arcs of crystal into koi ponds.
His Lamborghin crouched in the drive, cobalt paint drinking the sun, a predator in carbon fiber. Hei threw himself behind the wheel, the book landing on the passenger seat with a meaty thud. The V10 woke with a guttural snarl that vibrated through his teeth, his spine, his balls.
The driveway curved toward the main gate, lined with cypress trees that cast long shadows. Pete gunned it.
Gravel exploded under tires as he launched down the cypress tunnel. Sixty. Eighty. The speedometer needle twitched like a dying insect. Wind howled through the open window, whipping his hair int his eyes, tasting of hot asphalt and cut grass.
Too fast for a residential driveway, but he didn't give a damn.
The curve at the gate loomed—tight, blind, lethal.
Then the sun detonated.
It punched through the canopy in a white-hot lance, no warning, no mercy. Light became shrapnel. His retinas screamed; the world dissolved into a magnesium flare.
For one moment—just one eternal, terrible moment—Pete couldn't see anything.
BANG!
The delivery truck materialize from nowhere—a rust-flecked leviathan barreling across the servicee road. No time. No sound but the wet roar in his ears. Three tons of pure force collided with the passenger side of the Lamborghini.
BANG!
The Lamborghini's passenger door folded like tin foil. Three tons of steel kissed carbon at ninety miles an hour. The chassis buckled with a sound like God snapping a spine. Pete's head whiipped sideways; the seatbelt sawed into his collarbone, carving a red grin across his skin. The windshield starred into a spiderweb of blood-flecked glass.
The car left the ground.
It spun—lazy, obscene—sky and earth trading places. Once. Twice. The book flew, pages ripping free in a white cyclone. Metal screamed as the roof peeled back like the lid of a sardine tin.
Pete's stomach lurched into his throat; centrifugal force smeared his cheek against the headrest, skin splitting on the seam.
The world exploded.
The blue supercar lifted off the ground like a toy, spinning—once, twice, three times through the air. The sound was apocalyptic: metal shrieking, glass shattering, the horrible crunch of engineered perfection being demolished by physics.
Inside the car...
Inside the car:
Time stretched like taffy, every millisecond expanding into eternity.
Pete's hands flew up to protect his face as the world became a kaleidoscope of chaos. The car rotated—up became down, left became right, the earth and sky trading places in a sickening dance.
He hadn't buckled his seatbelt.
His body became a ragdoll. His shoulder slammed into the door frame—crack—something broke. His head whipped sideways, connecting with the window pillar with a sound like a bat hitting a melon. Blood sprayed across the interior, painting the beige leather crimson.
The car continued its grotesque pirouette through the air.
Pete's ribs crashed into the center console. The air exploded from his lungs. The steering wheel caught him across the chest. His knee hyperextended against the dashboard. Each impact was a burst of white-hot agony, and they came faster than his brain could process them.
Spin. Impact. Spin. Impact.
Glass rained through the cabin like deadly snow, each shard catching the sunlight, turning the interior into a glittering snow globe of destruction.
But then—
The book.
Pete's vision, blurred and tunneling, caught something impossible.
The ancient tome had been thrown from the passenger seat by the initial impact. It should have been tumbling through the chaos like everything else. The water bottle was spinning. His phone was cartwheeling through the air. Fragments of glass were dancing in slow motion.
But the book...
The book floated.
Perfectly still. Perfectly centered. Suspended in the middle of the cabin as if held by invisible hands.
A piece of the shattered windshield flew toward it—a jagged triangle of glass that would have skewered straight through the ancient leather.
Ting.
The glass bounced away. Repelled by nothing. By empty air.
Pete's phone spiraled toward the book—and was batted aside like it had hit an invisible wall.
The water bottle, his keys, chunks of plastic trim, droplets of his own blood—everything spun toward the floating tome in the zero-gravity ballet of the crash. And everything was pushed away, as if the book existed in a bubble of its own reality.
Everything except—
The metallic water bottle ricocheted off the windshield frame and caught Pete full in the cheek.
His head snapped sideways with brutal force. His cheekbone shattered. Blood erupted from the gash, spraying outward in a crimson arc.
Three drops.
Three perfect spheres of blood.
They flew through the air in slow motion, tumbling end over end, catching the fractured sunlight filtering through the destroyed windshield. They sailed past the debris, past the spinning fragments of his former life.
Toward the book.
The invisible barrier that had repelled everything else...
...didn't stop them.
The drops passed through as if the forcefield recognized them. Welcomed them.
The first drop touched the cover.
Then the second.
Then the third.
Everything stopped.
Not physically—the car was still spinning, still hurtling toward the ancient oak tree at the edge of the property. But time itself seemed to hold its breath.
The book began to glow.
Golden light, warm as sun on honey, bright as the ichor that once flowed through divine veins. It pulsed once, twice, building in intensity.
Then it began to spin.
Faster than the car. Faster than the debris. Faster than physics should allow. It rotated on its axis like a dying star, the ancient leather becoming a blur of motion.
The cover flew open.
Pages whipped past in a hurricane of parchment, each one no longer blank but filled with golden-red script that blazed like fire. Words in languages dead before Rome fell. Symbols that predated writing itself.
And there, on the first page, burning brighter than all the rest, a single phrase materialized in letters that seemed carved from sunlight:
BOY FROM BEYOND
The glow intensified. Blinding. Overwhelming. The pages tore through themselves, flipping faster and faster, hundreds of them, thousands, more pages than the book should physically contain. Each one blazed with golden-red light, illuminating the spinning chaos of the destroyed Lamborghini interior.
Pete tried to scream, but no sound came out.
The light became everything. White-gold radiance that erased the car, the blood, the pain, the world itself.
CRASH!
The Lamborghini slammed into the oak tree with the finality of a coffin lid closing.
Metal crumpled. The engine block punched through the firewall. The tree's trunk split down the middle from the impact. Steam hissed from the destroyed radiator. Fluids leaked onto the grass in rainbow pools.
Inside the wreckage, Pete Castellanos's body hung at an impossible angle, held in place by the twisted metal of what used to be a quarter-million-dollar supercar.
His chest didn't rise.
His eyes stared at nothing.
And of the ancient book—The Cucking of Gods: A Forbidden Chronicle—there was no trace.
It had vanished.
As if it had never existed at all.
As if it had taken something with it when it disappeared.
Pete Castellanos's soul had left his body.