But Jeremy wasn't alone.
Nyx's gaze panned upward, and the true scale of the slaughter hit him like a physical blow.
Hundreds of them.
The entire ship's manifest—the wealthy, the workers, the children—were all hoisted into the sky.
The woman's hair had bifurcated into thousands of jagged, needle-thin tethers. Each one a gallows, turning the sky into a forest of swaying, blue-fleshed fruit.
"Je—"
The name died in his throat.
He slammed his palm over his mouth, the iron-scented sweat stinging his eyes.
Every instinct shouted for him to howl, but the primal part of his brain—the part that wanted to live—clamped his jaw shut.
He stumbled backward, his boots sliding in the thickening gore on the deck.
He looked for an exit, a lifeboat, a hole in reality to crawl into.
That was when he saw the line.
On the port side of the ship, a silent, rhythmic procession was forming.
The remaining passengers—those not yet hoisted—were marching in a catatonic trance.
Their eyes were vacant, milky orbs, their feet shuffling in perfect unison to the beat of her mournful song.
They moved like livestock toward a slaughterhouse, waiting with terrifying patience for a strand of that black silk to descend.
He was the only one left awake in a world of walking meat.
His hands shook with a violent, uncontrollable tremor as he swallowed a mouthful of bile.
"What in the screaming hell is this?" he choked out, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"I'm dreaming. I have to be. This is the filth... the chemicals... they've rotted my brain."
He balled his fist and smashed it into his own jaw.The pain was sharp, electric, and agonizingly real.
He tasted copper as his tooth sliced his inner cheek.
He opened his eyes, praying for the nightmare to have dissolved, but the sky was still choked with the indigo-bloat of the hanging dead.
He looked at Jeremy's dangling boots.Logic had fled, replaced by a desperate, suicidal loyalty.
He couldn't leave him—not like that.
He scrambled forward, his boots skidding through the cooling blood of strangers, and leaped.
He caught Jeremy's stiff legs, his weight jerking the body downward.
The hair-tether groaned, stretching like a sinewy muscle.
Nyx pulled again, a feral growl ripping from his throat, his muscles screaming as he gave one final, violent tug.
Snap.
The strand parted with a sound like a whip cracking.
Jeremy's corpse hit the deck with a wet, heavy thud.
In that instant, the singing stopped.
The silence that followed was deafening—a vacuum of sound that made his eardrums throb.
Nyx froze, his hands still clutching the cold fabric of Jeremy's trousers.
He looked up.
The woman was no longer a statue of grief.
Her face had contorted, the ethereal beauty curdling into a mask of jagged, predatory rage.
She glided toward him, her white gown billowing like smoke over the sea of corpses.
Then, she screamed.
It wasn't a human sound.
It was a sonic laceration, a shriek of such concentrated frequency that the air itself seemed to shatter.
The shockwave hit **Nyx** like a physical hammer, launching him backward through the air.
He slammed into the rusted iron of the ship's bulkhead with a sickening crunch.
Warmth exploded from his ears.
He reached up, his fingers sliding into a slick, hot mess of ruptured flesh and blood.
The world went dim, the edges of his vision flickering.
Through the red haze of his failing sight, he saw her.
She reached Jeremy's body and knelt with a haunting, maternal grace.
She ran her marble-white fingers over his indigo throat, the black silk of her hair weaving itself once more around his neck.
She leaned down and pressed a tender, lingering kiss to Jeremy's cold forehead.
A soft, chilling farewell.
Then, with a casual flick of her head, she hoisted him back into the sky, leaving
Nyx broken and bleeding in the shadows.
Then, her gaze snapped back to him.
Her jaw unhinged, preparing for another devastating sonic assault.
Nyx's entire body convulsed.
He scrambled backward, desperately clawing at his ruptured, bleeding ears.
He tried to block a sound he knew would liquefy what was left of his brain.
"Damn it," he gasped, the taste of ash and terror coating his tongue.
"If she screams again, I'm done."
As her mouth opened wide, he squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the impact of her rage, ready to surrender to the darkness. He waited for the agonizing vibration, the explosive pressure.
It never came.
Nyx forced his eyes open, his vision blurry and strained. Standing between him and the monster was a pillar of shadow—a colossal figure cloaked in a black robe so deep it seemed to absorb the dim light of the deck.
Nyx blinked, unable to make out any features. Before he could even register the newcomer's presence, the figure moved with an impossible, blurring velocity. One moment he was standing, the next he had his hand clamped around the pale woman's throat.
He lifted her off the deck as if she were a doll made of air, her white dress fluttering impotently as she thrashed against his grip. The shadowy figure didn't seem to notice her struggle. Instead, he turned his head slowly toward Nyx.
"You can..." his voice was a grating, subterranean growl, raspy like tectonic plates grinding. "You can see her. Can't you?"