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Chapter 6 - The Bloodline's Whisper

Emily didn't sleep. Not really. She drifted in and out of shallow dreams, each one thicker with shadows than the last. When she finally closed her eyes, she wasn't in her room anymore.

Stone. Smoke. The taste of ash.

She stood in a chamber carved from rock, air heavy with rot. A statue loomed—inhuman, disgusting. Its body was twisted like a centipede forced upright, its face an eyeless hollow. At its feet lay the diary, bound in black leather, waiting like an animal in a cage.

A girl knelt before it, trembling. Emily recognized her face, though she'd never seen it before: an ancestor, blood of her blood. The girl's lips moved in frantic prayer. Then, with shaking fingers, she touched the book.

Chains snapped. The statue seemed to breathe.

Emily's hands burned. She looked down and saw blood dripping from her palms onto the stone. She screamed—

—and jolted awake in her own bed, chest heaving. Morning light slanted across the room. Her hand stung. A thin cut traced her palm, fresh and red. She hadn't cut herself.

The diary sat on her desk, closed, but a sentence was pressed into her head as clear as if someone had whispered into her ear:

Write, and seven days are yours.

By evening, Margaret arrived. She looked older than yesterday, as though the weight of decades had pressed on her in a single night.

"I told you not to look for him," Margaret rasped, sinking into a chair. "But it's too late. The Watcher has marked you."

Emily hugged herself, teeth chattering though the house was warm. "I dreamt of her… a girl in the temple. She touched the book. Was that—"

"Your great-great-grandmother," Margaret interrupted. "She found it. She should have left it where it lay, but curiosity is in our blood. She wrote in it, at first by mistake, then because she thought she could control it. Every name fed the book. Every death chained us tighter."

Emily's throat dried. "But there must be a way to stop it."

Margaret's eyes flicked toward the diary. "Once opened, it doesn't stop. The only choice left is whether you let it take who it wants… or you write. A name buys time. Refusal invites its hunger."

Emily stared. The words from her dream echoed again: Write, and seven days are yours.

The next day at school, the hallways were colder, narrower. Students still glanced at her, some with fear, some with disgust. Jason wasn't there—still in the hospital, ribs fractured—but his absence felt louder than his taunts had ever been.

Lily was waiting by her locker, offering a half-smile, soft but strained. "Ignore them. Rumors fade. They'll find someone else to talk about in a week."

Emily nodded, pretending to listen, but her mind churned. A week. Seven days. The diary's voice slithered behind her thoughts: Unless you write.

She looked at Lily—her only friend left. For a fleeting second, her stomach turned with dread. What if the diary chose her? What if tomorrow, Lily was the one with her name written in jagged black ink?

No. Emily shook the thought away, horrified. She couldn't even imagine it. But still…

If someone had to be taken, why not one of the others? Jason, or his friends, or anyone who already looked at her like she was a curse. Wasn't it fairer, safer, to choose?

She hated herself for thinking it. And yet, that night, when the diary opened by itself and the blank page gleamed faintly in the dark, Emily's hand hovered over the pen.

She didn't write a name. Not yet. But the thought was there, coiled, waiting.

And in the silence of her room, the diary hummed like it approved.

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