The fluorescent lights died.
In the sudden darkness, Rome's pupils fought to adjust. Then Amelia moved to the corner of the room and he heard the distinct sound of wood scraping against concrete. She was dragging something. Heavy. Deliberate.
When she returned, she carried a chest.
Not the kind you'd find at IKEA or some vintage furniture store. This thing looked like it belonged in a museum, behind bulletproof glass with little plaques explaining its historical significance. Black lacquered wood, polished to a mirror sheen. Mother-but-pearl inlays formed patterns across its surface that hurt to look at directly. Rome's eyes kept sliding off them, unable to find a point of reference. The geometry was wrong somehow, angles that shouldn't connect did anyway.
The casual playfulness had evaporated from Amelia's face. What replaced it was worse. That serene, focused expression doctors get right before they cut you open.
She set the chest on the small table beside his chair with the reverence people usually reserve for newborns or live explosives.
"You know what separates professionals from amateurs in our world?" Her fingers traced the lid, following those impossible patterns. "Proper tools."
The lock clicked without her touching it. Just a pulse of that violet energy from her eyes, and the mechanisms obeyed like trained dogs.
Inside, nestled in blood-red velvet that had probably cost more than Rome's entire wardrobe, lay three items.
First, a sheet of parchment. Except calling it parchment was like calling the Mona Lisa 'some paint on canvas.' The material shimmered with an internal light source that didn't exist. Iridescent. Alive. The surface caught reflections that weren't in the room, showing him fragments of images he couldn't quite focus on.
"Soul-Etched Vellum," Amelia said, her voice shifting into that lecturer tone. "Made from the spiritual membrane of an ancient phantom. One that achieved self-awareness and chose to dissolve its entire existence into this single recording medium."
She lifted it with both hands, treating it like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
"It doesn't just hold demonic energy. It remembers it. Every fluctuation, every nuance, every emotional resonance. Perfect spiritual fidelity."
Rome's throat had gone dry somewhere around 'dissolved its existence.'
Next came a crystal vial, maybe the size of his thumb. Inside swirled liquid silver. Actual mercury maybe, except it moved wrong. The fluid seemed to flow against gravity, creating spirals and patterns that defied the container's movement.
"Quicksilver Ink." Amelia held it up to what little light remained. The liquid caught it, fractured it into colors that shouldn't exist in nature. "Brewed from the waters of the Cocytus Spring. A place in the spirit world where time itself pools and stagnates like standing water."
She swirled the vial. The contents responded with a lag, moving a half-second behind the motion.
"The spring dried up over a century ago. What remains in existence is it. Once it's used, that's it. No more."
Great. Fantastic. She was about to use irreplaceable temporal juice on the guy who might be a serial killer. This was fine. Everything was fine.
The last item was a feather. Nine inches long, pristine white bleeding into gold at the tip. The quill had been sharpened to a point so fine it looked like it could pierce molecules.
"Phoenix feather," Amelia continued, her fingers ghosting over it without quite touching. "The only material pure enough to apply the ink without being corrupted by its temporal properties."
She looked up at him then. Those twelve-petaled eyes rotated in perfect synchronization, and Rome saw something in them that made his stomach drop. Academic hunger. The kind of expression scientists get when they're about to dissect something rare.
"Most of the Great Clans would wage a small war for this vellum. Kill entire bloodlines for the ink." She picked up the crystal vial, watching the silver contents spiral. "And I'm about to use it all on a stray I found in a warehouse."
She smiled. It didn't reach her eyes.
"Aren't you a lucky boy?"
That wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact delivered with the weight of divine proclamation.
She set the instruments on the table and turned to him fully.
Her gaze traveled down to his chest, then back up to his eyes.
"This is in the way."
Before Rome could ask what 'this' was, she hooked two fingers into his shirt collar and ripped.
The sound of fabric tearing and buttons scattering across concrete was shockingly loud. His shirt hung open, ruined, exposing his chest to the cold air.
Goosebumps erupted across his skin. His heart hammered against his ribs hard enough that he could see his chest moving with each beat.
The obsidian pendant lay stark against his skin, that tarnished silver chain suddenly feeling very inadequate.
Amelia's eyes locked onto the necklace. The lotus patterns in her irises slowed their rotation, focusing. Her expression shifted into something analytical. Clinical.
"There it is." She said it to herself, barely above a whisper. "The little stone that's caused so much trouble."
Rome wanted to cover himself. Wanted to demand she untie him, give him his shirt back, let him leave with whatever dignity he had left. The zip ties held firm and his voice had apparently decided to take a vacation.
She picked up the phoenix feather with her right hand, dipped it into the Quicksilver Ink. The silver liquid clung to the tip, defying surface tension. It didn't drip. Just hung there, suspended, waiting.
Then she leaned over him.
Her hair brushed his shoulder. White strands catching what little light remained, creating a curtain that blocked out the rest of the world. Her left hand came to rest on his collarbone.
The touch was steadying and possessive all at once. Like she was claiming ownership of the canvas she was about to paint.
The first stroke of ink on his skin was agony.
Not heat. Cold. Searing, burning cold that felt like she was injecting liquid nitrogen directly into his soul. It didn't feel wet. It felt like frozen fire, if that was even possible. Rome's back arched involuntarily, straining against the chair.
"This isn't just a drawing, Rome."
He didn't give a fuck what it was. This shit hurt.
"It's an arcane circuit. A metaphysical motherboard."
The brush moved in slow strokes. Circling his left pectoral. Dipping down toward his sternum. Each line was a fresh wave of that agonizing cold.
"The Quicksilver Ink acts as a conductor, not for electricity. For temporal resonance." Another stroke. Her fingers on his collarbone traced idle patterns that would've been soothing if this entire situation wasn't twelve kinds of wrong. "It will attune your soul to the frequency of the demonic energy signature we found at the warehouse."
"Once the circuit is complete, I'll place the vellum over it. The vellum acts as both focusing lens and amplifier."
This is psychological warfare, Rome thought distantly. She's breaking me down. Mixing pain and proximity and that voice and her hands and oh god I need to think about literally anything else right now.
"That faint frequency gets boosted into a signal your soul cannot ignore." Another stroke. Lower now. Following the curve of his ribs. "Your consciousness will be forcibly dragged along that thread of resonance. Back to the moment of its creation."
He tried to focus on her words instead of the sensation of her fingers, her breath, her presence invading every sense he had.
"You won't be remembering, darling." The brush completed another circuit. "You will be experiencing it. Present tense. No filter. No protection."
The final line connected.
The silver ink on his chest flared with soft, cold light. It pulsed in perfect synchronization with his heartbeat, creating a rhythm he could feel in his bones. The geometric pattern looked like a cross between a circuit board and some ancient summoning circle. Lines and curves that formed a cohesive whole he couldn't quite understand.
Amelia straightened slightly, admiring her work with the same expression an artist gets when reviewing a canvas.
"Beautiful," she murmured. "Now for the amplifier."
She picked up the Soul-Etched Vellum with both hands. The material shimmered in the cold light emanating from his chest, creating interference patterns in the air between them.
"This will hurt."
Thanks for the warning. Super helpful.
She placed it gently over the glowing circuit. The moment the vellum touched his skin, it adhered like it had always been there. A second layer of flesh. The light intensified, flooding his torso with that bone-deep cold that made his teeth chatter.
From somewhere in her jacket, she produced one final item.
A sliver of polished obsidian. Black as void. Unlike his pendant, this thing hummed with contained power that made the air around it vibrate visibly. It looked like a shard of his own necklace, except alive. Furious.
Hungry.
She leaned in close. Her lips brushed the shell of his ear, and Rome felt the words more than heard them.
"This is the part that will feel like dying."
Her breath was warm against his skin. The contrast to the ice in his chest made him shudder.
"A necessary pain to facilitate rebirth." Her hand came up, the obsidian sliver held between two fingers like a cigarette. "Try not to scream too loud."
She paused. He could feel her smile against his ear.
"It's unbecoming."
Then she pressed the talisman to his forehead.
Not a tap. A brand. Firm. Deliberate. Like she was nailing it into his skull.
The world exploded.
Reality fractured into a million pieces of corrupted data. Rome watched Amelia's face, those violet eyes wide with predatory curiosity, splinter into fragments. Her image broke apart like a corrupted JPEG, pixels scattering across his vision in patterns that defied geometry.
Sound hit next. A deafening roar that felt like standing inside a jet engine. Underneath it, the sound of a thousand VHS tapes rewinding at once. Layered over that, demonic whispers in languages he shouldn't understand but somehow did. The shriek of metal tearing. Glass shattering. His own heartbeat amplified into a war drum.
Then the sensation spread from the talisman on his forehead through every nerve in his body.
His consciousness was being ripped from his skull, pulled through a wire far too thin to contain it. He was being compressed. Folded. Stretched. Every atom of his being screaming in protest as it was forced through an aperture the size of a pinprick.
The cold from the vellum and ink became heat. Then cold again. Then both at once in a paradox that made his brain want to shut down just to escape the contradiction.
This is dying, some distant part of him thought. This is what it feels like to stop existing.
He couldn't stop. Couldn't pull back. The ritual had hooks in his soul now, dragging him backward through time along a thread of his own demonic energy.
For one perfect frame, the static cleared.
Rome saw the café. Java Junction. The colors were too vivid. Like reality had been turned up to eleven and then pushed three clicks past the breaking point.
Jake sat across from him, mouth moving. Rome couldn't hear him. Couldn't hear anything except that deafening roar.
Then the image shattered.
And he fell screaming into his own past.