Chapter 7: A Brother's Ghost

Chapter 7: A Brother's Ghost

The guard shack was no longer a sanctuary; it was a cage. Rainwater dripped from the leaking roof into a coffee mug on the floor, each plink a maddening counterpoint to the frantic drumming of Leo’s own heart. They were both soaked, shivering less from the cold and more from the aftershocks of the Horned King’s fury. The memory of the raw, physical power, the splintering stone and the screaming, harmonic light of the ward, had been branded onto their minds.

Leo stood by the small, grimy window, staring out into the dripping darkness in the direction of the North Gate. The faint, sickly pulse of the damaged ward was no longer visible from here, but he could feel it—a wrongness in the air, a discordant note in the cemetery’s grim symphony. Alistair Finch’s words from the journal echoed in his head. The Seals will hold. But they hadn't held. Not entirely. A fracture, a hairline crack in the prison wall.

He was the Keeper now. The title was a lead weight in his gut. This failure was his.

“What was that thing?” Thomas’s voice was a ragged whisper from the other side of the small room. He was slumped in a chair, his face buried in his trembling hands. “What in God’s name was that?”

Leo didn’t turn. There were no words for what they had seen, and even if there were, he wouldn’t speak them. He had already violated the first rule once tonight, his involuntary cry at the Weeping Bride’s torment a catastrophic lapse. The entity had tasted his memory, his grief. He would not give it, or any of the others, another opening.

He pushed away from the window, his mind racing. A thought, cold and sharp as a shard of ice, pierced through his shock. The attack was on the North Seal… but what if it was a distraction? Or what if the impact resonated through the entire system? This wasn’t just a collection of haunted spots; the journal had made it clear this was a network. A wound held shut by interconnected stitches.

He grabbed his heavy flashlight from its charging port and strode to the door.

“Where are you going?” Thomas asked, his voice rising in panic. “We can’t go back out there!”

Leo paused at the door and looked back. He didn’t offer a word of comfort. He simply met the boy’s terrified gaze and gave a single, sharp jerk of his head. We have to. He was the Keeper. He had to know the extent of the damage.

Reluctantly, looking like a man being led to his own execution, Thomas pushed himself to his feet and followed.

Leo didn't lead them back north. He took the winding southern path, his boots squelching in the mud. This was the direction of the South Gate—the Seal of Whispers, according to Alistair’s map. The air here was different, not heavy with primal rage, but thick with a sorrowful, cloying energy. It was the place where the cemetery’s voices were the strongest, a constant, overlapping murmur of regrets and pleas that usually washed over Leo like white noise.

As they neared the gate, Leo’s flashlight beam cut through the gloom. The gate itself looked untouched. No bent bars, no fractured stone pillars. A wave of relief, so potent it almost made him dizzy, washed over him. Maybe the damage had been contained.

He stepped closer, his beam tracing the solid, unblemished iron until it settled on the lock.

And then he saw it.

It wasn't a gaping wound like the one on the North Seal. It was finer, more insidious. A spiderweb of tiny, luminescent cracks spread across the face of the lock, emanating from a central point. They pulsed with a faint, violet light, like veins of poison spreading through the ward’s metal skin. The Seal of Whispers was compromised. It was weaker, more vulnerable, than it had ever been.

The sight seemed to shatter the last of Thomas’s composure. A choked sob escaped his lips.

“It’s my fault,” he whispered, the words tumbling out of him in a desperate, broken torrent. “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have come here.”

Leo turned to him, his expression grim. This was not the time for a breakdown.

“It wasn’t just a job,” Thomas continued, his voice cracking with years of buried grief. “The money… I needed it, but that wasn’t the reason. I had to know. I had to see.”

He fumbled inside his soaked uniform jacket, his fingers clumsy and shaking, and pulled out a small, plastic-wrapped object. It was a wallet. He flipped it open to a clear sleeve containing a faded, dog-eared photograph. He held it out to Leo, his hand trembling so violently the image blurred.

“My brother,” Thomas choked out. “His name was David. Five years ago… he disappeared. The police said he ran away. My parents believed them. But I knew. I knew where he went.”

Leo took the wallet, his gaze dropping to the picture. It was a school photo of a smiling, confident teenager, maybe seventeen years old, with the same lean build and restless eyes as the young man standing before him.

“There was this stupid dare back then,” Thomas said, his words catching on his sobs. “All the kids were talking about it. The Midnight Run. They said if you could make it to the North Pavilion and back, you were a legend. David… he was always reckless. Always trying to prove something. The night he vanished, he told his friends he was going to do it. He was going to run.”

The pieces clicked into place in Leo’s mind with horrifying clarity. The dead boy in the pavilion. The rune on his phone. The Harbinger cult from Alistair’s journal, sending their children as sacrifices. David Finch hadn’t just run away. He had been an offering.

Leo felt a pang of something he rarely allowed himself to feel: pity. He looked from the hopeful face in the photograph to the shattered wreck of his younger brother. He understood now. The boy’s bravado, his recklessness, his deep-seated need to see what was inside these walls—it was all part of a desperate, five-year search for closure. A quest for a ghost.

He handed the wallet back, but Thomas shook his head, pushing it back towards Leo. “Look at him,” Thomas pleaded, as if forcing Leo to bear witness would somehow lessen his own burden. “Please, just… look at his face.”

To appease the boy, to ground him, Leo took one last look. He let his gaze settle on the teenager’s features: the shape of his eyes, the slight crookedness of his smile, the small scar just above his right eyebrow.

And then the world fell out from under him.

Recognition hit him not like a soft dawn, but like a physical blow, knocking the air from his lungs. It was a face he knew. Not from a missing person’s poster. Not from a memory of the living world.

He knew that face from the other side.

Every single night, for the last three years, in the desolate patch of ground between the sorrowful weeping of the Bride and the silent rage of the King, he saw it. A young, tormented spirit, translucent and flickering, forever trapped in a loop of confusion and terror. A boy who clawed at the air, trying to escape something no one else could see, his face a mask of silent screaming. A ghost Leo had always catalogued as just another piece of the Hollow’s tragic scenery.

He stared at the photograph, his blood turning to ice water in his veins. It was him. It was David Finch.

And as the full, horrifying truth crashed down upon him, he remembered the most chilling detail of that particular haunting. The one thing that had always set that specific spirit apart from all the others.

It was the single, spectral word it constantly whispered into the cold, silent night, a desperate, longing call for someone who would never come.

“Thomas…”