The graveyard was a forest of leaning stone and choked ivy.
Akeno Himejima stood amidst the tilted headstones like a funeral monument brought to life. The yellow lightning dancing between her fingers made the morning air smell of ozone and burnt hair. It was a sharp, clinical scent. It did not belong in this place of decay.
Ren felt the weight of Raynare's arm around his waist.
He leaned heavily into the wooden crutch. His left leg was a dead weight of pulsing fire. The splint, made of Raynare's shredded leather, dug into his skin with every ragged breath. He was sweating despite the biting cold. The fever was gone, but the weakness it left behind was a physical wall.
"Step away from the human, Fallen." Akeno's voice was a low, melodic threat.
She did not look at Ren. Her violet eyes were fixed on Raynare with a focused, predatory hatred. The polite, smiling girl from the clubroom was dead. This was the Priestess of Thunder.
Raynare's black wings flared out. They were ragged. Several feathers were bent or missing from the night before. She tightened her grip on Ren's hip.
"He is not your property, Priestess." Raynare spat the title like a curse.
"He was found on Gremory territory." Akeno took a slow step forward. The grass beneath her shoes blackened and curled. "That makes him ours. You, however, are an intruder. A parasite. A thing that crawls in the dark and steals what it cannot earn."
Ren felt the vibration of Raynare's anger through his own ribs.
He looked at Akeno.
His vision was beginning to tunnel. The hypoxia was back, a cold gray shadow at the edges of his mind. He saw the lightning. It looked like the jagged cracks in the truck's windshield. He felt a sudden, violent urge to vomit.
He swallowed the bile. He forced his right hand to grip the handle of the crutch until his knuckles turned white.
"Akeno." Ren spoke. His voice was a ruined rasp. It barely carried over the wind.
The girl's eyes flicked to him for a fraction of a second. The lightning dimmed.
"Go back to your President." Ren dragged oxygen into his lungs. He stopped. He waited for his heart to find a rhythm. It didn't. It just stumbled. "I am not a prize. I am a man with a broken leg. Leave us."
Akeno's expression did not soften. It hardened into something brittle and dangerous.
"You do not understand, Ren." She used his name like a brand. "The world you have stumbled into does not have an exit. You are a Blank. A void in the registry. You are a threat to the balance of this town. If you will not come back to be studied, you will be erased."
She raised her hand.
The sky above the graveyard darkened. A massive bolt of yellow lightning tore through the clouds. It struck the iron fence of the church with a deafening crack.
Ren's body reacted before his mind could.
The trauma of the accident violently overwrote the present. The sound of the lightning was the sound of the metal pillar crushing the roof of the car. He didn't think. He didn't strategize.
His knees buckled.
He collapsed toward the wet earth. Raynare caught him, her wings wrapping around him in a desperate, frantic shield.
"Ren!" She screamed.
Akeno did not hesitate.
She unleashed the strike.
A jagged arc of electricity hissed through the air. It hit Raynare's right wing with the force of a battering ram. The smell of burning feathers filled the graveyard.
Raynare let out a choked, strangled cry. She went down on one knee, her body shielding Ren from the worst of the discharge. Her skin was smoking. The black feathers on her wing were scorched and curling.
Ren stared at the blackened earth.
He saw a small, pale hand reaching from beneath a pile of rubble.
Sarah.
The memory was a physical weight. It was the forty-seven minutes. It was the silence.
He looked at Raynare. She was gasping for air. Her head was bowed. She was trembling with the effort of staying upright. She was taking the toll for him. She was paying the price for a man she barely knew.
Something deep inside Ren's chest snapped.
It was not a bone. It was the lock.
The system roared to life. It was not a screen. It was a sensation of absolute, unyielding iron.
[ RESONANCE OVERLOAD: 40% ] [ THE TOLL IS DEMANDED. ]
Ren reached out with his right hand. He didn't touch Raynare. He didn't touch Akeno.
He slammed his fist into the wet ground.
Ironhold.
The activation was not a flash of light. It was a vibration. A low-frequency hum that shook the very foundations of the church. The ground beneath his fist solidified into something denser than diamond.
The feedback hit Ren instantly.
A hairline fracture spider-webbed up his right forearm. The radius and ulna ground together with a sickening crunch. His shoulder dislocated with a wet pop.
Ren did not scream. He couldn't. His throat had closed up.
The resonance rippled outward.
Akeno's next bolt of lightning hit an invisible wall of static pressure. It didn't dissipate. It shattered. The electricity was forced back into the ground, grounding harmlessly three feet away from Ren.
Akeno stumbled. Her connection to the lightning was severed by the sheer physical density of the air around Ren.
"What is this?" She whispered. Her mask was gone now. She looked at his arm. She saw the bone protruding slightly under the skin of his wrist. She saw the blood dripping from his ears. "You are killing yourself."
Ren looked up at her. His vision was a red haze.
He used his left hand to grab the crutch. He forced himself up.
Every movement was a catastrophe. His broken leg shifted. His dislocated shoulder screamed. His fractured arm hung uselessly at his side.
He was a ruin of a man. A collection of splinters and bleeding tissue.
He took a step toward Akeno.
The wooden crutch hit the stone of a grave with a hollow, rhythmic thud.
Raynare tried to reach for him. "Ren, stop. You will die. Your body cannot handle the resonance."
"I am." Ren stopped. He coughed. A spray of dark blood hit the front of his shirt. He dragged a breath through the fluid in his throat. "Already dead."
He took another step.
The resonance intensified. The iron fence of the church began to twist. The stone headstones cracked and crumbled under the pressure of his presence. He was a gravitational anomaly. A man who refused to move.
Akeno raised both hands. Her eyes were wide with a terrifying mixture of horror and fascination.
"You are a monster." She hissed. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. "You would rather destroy your own soul than let someone help you."
"Help." Ren whispered. The word was a bitter poison.
He stopped five feet away from her. The pressure was so intense now that the grass around them was being pressed flat into the mud.
He looked at Akeno's face. He didn't see a demon. He saw a lonely girl holding a weapon she didn't want.
"You." Ren's voice was failing. He was losing consciousness. "You are like her."
He looked back at Raynare.
"You carry a weight that doesn't belong to you."
Akeno froze. The lightning in her hands flickered and died.
The silence that followed was heavier than the resonance.
Ren felt the world beginning to tilt. The graveyard was spinning. The sky was falling.
He looked at his right hand. The fingers were blue. The bone was broken.
He closed his eyes.
"Sarah." He whispered to the wind.
He fell.
He didn't hit the ground.
Two pairs of hands caught him.
One was hot, smelling of burnt feathers and ozone. The other was cold, smelling of rain and the expensive perfume of a high-class devil.
Raynare and Akeno stood over his unconscious body. They were inches apart. Their hatred was still there. Their factions were still at war.
But they were both holding onto the same broken man.
Akeno looked at Raynare. The lightning sparked once, weakly, between them.
"He is coming with me." Akeno said. Her voice was shaking.
"If you take him." Raynare hissed, her wings flared out in a final, desperate stance. "You will have to kill me first."
Akeno looked down at Ren. She looked at his fractured arm. She looked at the blood on his lips.
"He is already dying, you fool." Akeno whispered.
She reached out and touched Ren's forehead. Her fingers were trembling.
"The Gremory will save him." Akeno looked at Raynare. A strange, twisted understanding passed between them. A covenant of the damned. "And you will come with us. If the President sees you are protecting him, she might let you live long enough to watch him wake up."
Raynare hesitated. She looked at the church. She looked at the sky. She knew the Grigori were coming. She knew her life as she knew it was over.
She nodded.
Akeno raised her hand. A massive crimson magic circle began to form beneath them.
"Forgive me, Ren." Akeno whispered as the light swallowed them.
The graveyard was empty.
Only the twisted iron fence and the shattered headstones remained to tell the story of a man who refused to be moved.
In the distance, the first siren of an ambulance echoed through the morning. It was a human sound. A sound of forty-seven minutes.
The toll had been paid in full.