Jericho. Jericho. Jericho.

I always told myself that I wouldn't be one of those Settlers. The kind that forget that the shapeshifting Shade before them was not actually someone they used to know. I always told myself I wouldn't be fooled, that I was too smart for such a thing. Sitting in lessons with Serah Mallory and my tutors, I had been forced to pour over whole anthologies that archived the different looks, skills, rankings, and abilities of all the known Shade breeds. My studies were full of warnings when dealing with such creatures, but I had scoffed at all the stories. Every single one of them. Because if you ever saw your Comrade murdered by an Obake Shade, how could you possibly hesitate in killing the murderous creature even if it had adopted your dear friend's face?

I was a fool.

Jericho.

The name hushes in an echo between my ears, bouncing back and forth.

Jericho.

But studies don't speak of the emotional upheaval such an event can cause. How rationale can get warped into a hope so strong that uncertainty settles in its place. Studies fail to make you realize the horrors you read about could happen to you. That invincibility is a myth, that knowing how you would react in any given hypothetical situation is a lie. Studying failed to teach me anything more than what I learn in this moment: that trusting someone, loving someone, creates fools out of us all.

Because looking into Jericho Crosse's amber eyes causes my heart to go blind to the demon that lies beneath.

"Thought it would be that easy to get rid of me, eh?" Jericho says, and his voice—for the love of the Orbs! I realize I've forgotten the exact tone to that voice. How precise each word is, the slight English inflection to the ends of his words, clipping them upwards into a polite period.

The tip of my vitrum blade retreats from my Comrade in the same stuttering motion my thoughts tumble from my tongue. "What are you—how did you—why?"

Jericho tips his head to the side, watching me patiently because he knows sometimes I need more time to form my words than he does. But I can't think past what's right in front of me, so Jericho grins tightly, filling in the space for me.

"Why is such a vague statement, Guinevere. Why is the grass green? Why do dogs bark?" He laughs in that dry way of his, his gaze steady on my face. "So, I have a more concrete question to ask of you."

His eyes gleam passionately, and they're hard to look away from even though I want to look at all of him. He takes a step closer. "Have you found the key, Guinevere?"

"The key?" I ask numbly, thoughts slow and brain even slower, slugging through the sludge that clutters me. "The Lost Key? But you never told me—"

"I told you; you just need to remember. Where is it, Guin?" He takes a steady step closer, palms facing outward, and that's how I see it: the red-inked number tattooed into his wrist. 767. A demon's tattoo. The recognition rushes in so quickly and leaves me reeling.

"You're not real." My hand shakes around the blade.

"Trust your senses."

His patient, instructor voice calls to me, threatens to consume me, like we're back in the Orbs Hall, and he's teaching me how to fight. His face moves so close to mine that I can make out the light freckle on the corner of his right eye. My blood pounds, ripping my skin apart, as his lips open.

"You can feel my breath—" His words brush against my cheeks, and my fingers twitch—"You can feel my hand—" My heart lurches painfully when his hand stretches out over it.

His eyes narrow knowingly when he glances back up at me. "Your body recognizes me, Vera."

Truth. The bringer of truth. I jerk away and yank my blade back into position, holding it before me. It catches the angry shift that slices Jericho's expression in its ethereal glow. "You're an illusion," I hiss, but my bravado doesn't reach my knees. They quiver unsteadily. "Jericho is dead."

"There was never a body," the demon urges, and I hear it now, the gravel hiding beneath the rhythm of the voice the Obake impersonates.

"And there won't be now."

The demon wearing Jericho's face laughs when I raise my arm to deliver the blow, his smile dangerously beautiful in its taunting. "You won't do it."

"I will."

But his posture only relaxes as my blade hovers.

"You can't," it argues calmly. "You're incapable of being responsible for my death again."

My resolve sputters and dies. Again? A feeling rises up inside of me, crowding my lungs and crushing my ribs. "What?" The question snaps out of me, a rubber band pulled until it snaps. "What do you mean?"

Jericho's hand smooths back his stiff hair, ensuring its perfection, but his tawny eyes smirk at me in an expression that is wrong on his face. "I mean what I say, Settler."

The blade is frozen above my head like the blood in my veins. "You don't know anything," I snarl. "You are not him, and the Void wants you back, Shade."

Obake-Jericho raises a golden eyebrow, the mannerisms so familiar I want to scream at it to stop. "You can see the portals now, can't you?" it asks, but it doesn't wait for a response, shifting into its next verbal grenade as seamlessly as it wrapped the portrait of my Comrade around its hellish existence. "My death was your duress, Settler, and you now have the Sight. I suggest you stop lying and tell me the truth: Where is the key?"

My knees knock together, buckling under the weight of the words rocking against my memory. The Sight. The Sight that my mother had. That I was meant to have. And it's Jericho I hear in my ears, his words I recorded in my journal what I see as a stare at the Obake:

What we need is something that will scare the gift out of hiding, a shock value. Duress.

His death was my duress.

I really do scream then and hurl the glass blade like a spear. The Obake cackles and shifts, its entire left side blinking out of existence so that the sharpened edge of my blade passes only through shadow. For a moment, I see only half of Jericho, my eyes straining to find the truth amidst all the lies, and then the demon reaches out to me, its missing body parts reforming, and the smell of its growth is suffocating. Long fingers extend from the shadowy stump of its arm and wrap around my wrist. The touch burns as its nails tear into my skin, and I slam the palm of my hand up into its face.

I hit nothing but shadows.

The Obake's demon tattoo burns into my skin as its flesh meets mine; the burn howls hungrily as it nips up my elbow from beneath my suit. I wrench my entire body backwards away from the pain. Because I've spent years training alongside Jericho, I know his every movement and what will throw his momentum into a detriment, and even though this thing isn't Jericho, it's still his body. One of my legs hooks around a thigh, directly above the knee; this had always been Jericho's soft spot due to a childhood injury. I yank my leg, taking his with me as I fall, unbalanced. The Obake screeches as it collapses to the ground, and I roll to a stop, watching as its form flickers in and out of existence. I scramble for my vitrum blade; it emits a soft glow, so I find it easily amongst the night's darkness and lunge for it.

I'm mid-leap when my ankle rips out from beneath me. A high pitched shriek escapes me. My forehead bashes into an exposed root, and as the Obake leans over me—Jericho's beautiful face marred by a feral grin—I'm not sure if the blackness I see is the Shade, or if it's my own consciousness fleeing from me.

"Scent to her. She to key," it says again, and the voice belongs to the Void once more. My head swims through it, but it gets lost on a wave of nausea. I try to stretch an arm out to my fallen blade, but it's so far...

"Scent to her. She to—"

The Shade howls an unearthly sound and throws itself off me. Dazed, I watch it collapse in a heap, writhing on the ground. I clamber backwards on my hands and feet until my fingers wrap around the cool iron hilt of my blade. The demon still shrieks, clawing at its chest, which is nothing but a void of darkness now. Dizziness clings to my agility as I leap to the creature's side and hold my blade with both hands. A single arrow juts out from the demon's chest right where a heart should be, but I don't give myself any time to investigate further before my glass blade arches down.

There's a sizzling sound as the vitrum cuts through the wrist, right where its demon's tattoo stands out like a sore. Now it will have to be rebranded, so it shouldn't be able to reenter the Peripherals for another generation, at least. The Shade curses up a storm, its voice flickering between its hellish grating sound to Jericho's precise intonation. Its stolen limbs and features flicker, disappearing, and reappearing in different colors and shapes. My blade comes down for a second time.

"Duress," it cackles through the black venom dribbling from its mouth.

"Send my regards to the Void," I clip before I cut through its throat.

The Obake disappears in a mist of shadows that stings my eyes and nostrils, but my ears ring the most, and I grit my teeth against the pain.

The silence that remains drags me down. I drop my forehead against my knees, breathing deeply as I attempt to steady myself. The tears are pinpricks, and I blink against them. I want to take Peroxide to my eyes, burn out the images that will cling to them for years to come. Inhale. E-ex-exhale. My suit smells like burning rubber, but it also holds a scent of Jericho, and I think I'm going to be sick. I suck down breaths, choking on the smell, on the questions that chase themselves around my brain, on the doubts that plague my beliefs.

The demon claimed that I have the Sight. I screw my eyes shut, stomach churning. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, then Jericho—he—

Duress.

My fingers pick uselessly at the grass, ripping up roots so savagely that my nails crack, and then my hand rolls against something slim and metallic. For a second, I hesitate over the object, but then I grab for it and throw my attention at it with such force I half expect it to shatter. The object rolls across my palm. The arrow that impaled the Obake and knocked it from me. The shaft is smooth and black, the fletching composed of three green plastic feathers like a decorative piece advertised in a Garden & Gun magazine. It looks rather elementary, the type of device that would be bought at Dicks Sporting Goods to use for shooting lizards in backyards. But there's one aspect to the weapon that causes me to pause.

The arrowhead is tipped to a deadly point, made of pure iron. One of the only Peripheral elements that acts as a demon's kryptonite. Though it had been a magnificent shot, it wouldn't have killed the Obake. But it had given me enough time to finish it off. Almost like someone had known I needed the assistance. Humans can see Obake Shades when such hellish creatures wear human skin, but how had a human seen me? I was Disillusioned, my ring hiding me from Peripheral sight, so how had anyone known that I had been trapped beneath that demon in need of help?

I find my blade and hold it close across my chest with one hand, the arrow held in the other, peering into the quiet park.

There had been another Settler out here tonight, and he or she may have saved my life.