3rd person pov
Almost a month had passed since Amiriah's brief, traumatic reappearance, and the Spellman mansion had descended into a state of barely controlled chaos. Each family member processed their grief and guilt differently, but all were united in one desperate mission: find Amiriah.
They had searched every corner of S City—the high-rise apartments and luxury condos, the underground clubs and hidden safehouses owned by the family. They'd combed the city's hospital records, security footage, and financial transactions. Nothing. It was as if Amiriah had vanished from the face of the earth.
Tonight, the desperation had reached a breaking point in the grand library of the mansion. Amara Harrington stood in the center of a complex ritual circle, surrounded by rare crystals and magical stones sourced from the farthest corners of the world. Her eyes glowed with an unnatural light as she channeled her storm powers, sending tendrils of electricity through the stones in an attempt to locate her daughter's unique magical signature.
The crystals shattered one by one, unable to withstand the force of her power—and her despair.
"It's not working!" she cried, lightning crackling around her fingertips as the last stone exploded into dust. "Something's blocking the location spell!"
Xavier approached cautiously, his own shadow space powers creating a protective barrier around him. "Amara, you need to rest. You've been at this for three days straight."
Her response was a bolt of lightning that barely missed his head, scorching the ancient woodwork behind him.
"Don't you dare tell me to rest!" Amara screamed, storm clouds literally forming at the ceiling of the library as her control slipped. Rain began to fall indoors, soaking the priceless books and manuscripts. "This is YOUR fault! YOU sent her to that... that place!"
Xavier's face hardened. "We made that decision together, Amara. The best psychiatrists in the country recommended GreayStone"
"I told you she was okay!" Amara hurled another lightning bolt, this one striking closer. "I told you she didn't need to be locked away! But you wouldn't listen! You never listened to me about the twins!"
The accusation hung in the air between them, heavy with years of suppressed resentment. Xavier's shadow powers expanded, encasing Amara in a sphere of darkness that absorbed her electrical outbursts.
"That's enough," he said, his voice deadly quiet. "Destroying the house won't bring her back."
Through the translucent wall of shadow, he could see his wife sink to her knees, the fight draining from her as quickly as it had come. When he released the shadow sphere, Amara remained on the floor, rain mingling with her tears.
"What did they do to our baby, Xavier?" she whispered. "What did we let happen to her?"
He had no answer.
On the other side of the mansion, Hayden Spellman stood in his private laboratory, preparing to leave for the night. His work in the underground economy—managing the more illicit aspects of the Spellman empire—had become his refuge from the emotional turmoil at home. Cold logic and business transactions were easier to handle than the raw pain of his sister's accusations.
"You're going out again?" Tara stood in the doorway, one hand resting on her swollen belly. Seven months pregnant, she had become increasingly concerned about her husband's extended absences.
"There's a shipment coming in that I need to oversee personally," he replied without meeting her eyes.
Tara stepped further into the room. "You're running away, Hayden. We all see it."
He stiffened. "I'm doing my job. Someone has to keep the family business running while everyone else falls apart."
"You used necromancy again last night," she said quietly. It wasn't a question.
Hayden's shoulders slumped slightly. He'd hoped she hadn't noticed. Necromancy—his particular magical affinity—was something he rarely employed. The ability to commune with the dead came with a heavy price, draining his life force with each use.
"I had to be sure," he admitted. "I had to know if she was... if we were looking for someone who was still alive."
Tara moved to stand beside him, taking his hand. "And?"
"She's not in the afterworld." His voice held both relief and renewed worry. "Which means she's out there somewhere, possibly still suffering."
Tara's mind flashed back to that terrible night—Amiriah's face contorted in terror, her body language that of a wounded animal. The sounds she had made... Tara had never heard such raw pain from a human being before.
"We need to find her," she said, squeezing her husband's hand. "Not just for your family's sake, but for hers. No one should have to carry that kind of trauma alone."
Hayden finally looked at his wife, his eyes haunted. "What if she doesn't want to be found? What if she hates us all for what happened to her?"
"Then you start by respecting her feelings," Tara replied. "And you offer help without demanding forgiveness."
The seedier districts of S City had become the hunting ground for Zuri and Zari Spellman. The twins moved through the shadows like wraiths, their shared shadow power making them nearly invisible as they tracked down former employees of GreyStone Psychiatric Hospital.
Tonight, they cornered a former security guard in his dingy apartment, their identical faces impassive as they employed methods they'd normally reserve for the family's worst enemies.
"Please," the man whimpered, blood trickling from his nose as Zuri's shadow tendrils constricted around his throat. "I was just a perimeter guard! I never even went into the restricted wing where they kept the special patients!"
"But you saw things," Zari countered, her voice soft but menacing. "You heard things. Nothing happens in a place like that without the guards knowing."
"There were rumors," he admitted, gasping as Zuri loosened her grip slightly. "About Project K. About experiments on patients with natural magical affinities."
The twins exchanged a look, their telepathic connection allowing them to communicate without words. This wasn't the first mention of "Project K" they'd heard during their interrogations.
"What kind of experiments?" Zuri demanded.
"I don't know the details! I swear! But some of the high-security patients would scream for days afterward. And sometimes..." he hesitated, terror evident in his eyes.
"Sometimes what?" Zari pressed.
"Sometimes they didn't scream anymore. They just... stopped being people. Like something hollowed them out from the inside."
Zuri's shadow tendrils tightened again. "Was Amiriah Spellman part of Project K?"
The man's eyes widened in genuine confusion. "I don't know that name. The special patients were only referred to by numbers in the restricted wing."
Another dead end. The twins left the man unconscious but alive, their frustration mounting. Every lead seemed to circle back to this mysterious Project K, but concrete details remained elusive. Someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to erase all official records.
Kario Spellman, had taken a different approach to the search. As night fell over S City, he and his handpicked team of shadow-wielders combed the streets, following the faint magical residue left by Amiriah's flight from the mansion.
They had traced her bloody footprints halfway across the city before the trail abruptly vanished—not faded, but disappeared completely, as if she had been plucked from the physical world.
"It's like she stepped into a pocket dimension," Kario explained to his team as they regrouped in an abandoned warehouse. "But the energy signature isn't consistent with standard shadow travel."
"Could be a safe house with magical wards," suggested one of his team members. "Powerful enough to mask all traces once she crossed the threshold."
Kario considered this. "If that's the case, she's not alone. Someone helped her set this up. Someone with resources and advanced magical knowledge."
The realization brought both relief and concern. Relief that his sister might have allies, people who cared for her. Concern about who these people might be and what they might want from a traumatized Spellman with potentially unstable powers.
"We keep searching," he decided. "But we change our approach. If we can't track Amiriah directly, we look for anomalies—unusual power draws, specialized equipment purchases, anything that might indicate someone setting up a magically warded safe house."
As his team dispersed to begin the new search parameters, Kario looked out over the city lights. "We're coming, Miri," he whispered. "Just hold on."
In her private quarters, Lenna Spellman sat surrounded by holographic displays, her fingers flying over multiple keyboards as she dug deeper into the encrypted files she'd managed to extract from the hospital's hidden backup servers. Three weeks of relentless hacking had finally yielded results—a heavily corrupted file labeled "Project K-A7."
Her heart had nearly stopped when she opened it to find videos and documentation of experiments performed on her twin. Now, as she watched the footage, bile rose in her throat.
Amiriah—thinner than Lenna had ever seen her, strapped to a metal table, surrounded by masked figures in lab coats. And in the hands of the lead researcher, a glowing black spear covered in ancient runes—the Spear of Darkness, an artifact of terrible power that had been lost for centuries.
"Subject K-A7 shows natural affinity for darkness manipulation," a clinical voice narrated as the footage showed the researchers cutting into Amiriah's chest. "The integration of the Spear of Darkness fragment should amplify this ability exponentially."
Lenna watched in horror as they inserted a sliver of the Spear into her twin's body, directly into her heart. Amiriah's screams were unbearable—raw, animal sounds of agony as darkness erupted from the wound, crawling across her skin like living ink.
"Make it stop!" Amiriah begged on the screen, her voice hardly recognizable. "Please! It burns! IT'S BURNING ME FROM INSIDE!"
Purple smoke began to emanate from Lenna's body as her own power—dark matter manipulation—responded to her emotional state. The furniture around her levitated, suspended in a haze of violet energy. Her rage was becoming tangible, a force that could tear the mansion apart if unleashed completely.
But it wasn't just rage she felt. It was guilt—crushing, overwhelming guilt. While she had been here, protected and pampered despite her supposed death, her twin had been subjected to torture beyond imagination.
As the video continued, Lenna caught a glimpse of someone observing from behind a glass partition—a familiar face that made her blood run cold. Luke Blackwood, her step-cousin. The Blackwood family was distantly related to the Spellman through Amara's cousins second marriage to Kara , and Luke had always been polite but distant during family gatherings but he always followed Lenna around. Everyone new Luka had a crush on Lenna.
Now she understood why. He had been part of this. He had provided the cursed artifact they used on Amiriah.
With shaking hands, Lenna paused the video and initiated a search for any information on Luke Blackwood's current whereabouts. Her goal was no longer just to find Amiriah—it was to find Luke and make him pay for what he had done. She would kill him slowly, using her dark matter to disintegrate him molecule by molecule while he remained conscious.
She didn't tell her family about the files or what she had discovered. They were fragile enough already, and this information would destroy them. Besides, vengeance was a personal matter. Luke Blackwood had betrayed her twin—had betrayed the sacred bond between them—and that made it Lenna's right to exact justice.
"I'll find you, Luke," she whispered, her eyes glowing purple in the dim light of her room. "And then I'll find you, Miri. I'll make this right. I swear it on our bond."
Outside her door, the household continued its descent into disarray, each family member searching for answers in their own way. But Lenna alone knew the terrible truth—that the darkness that had swallowed Amiriah hadn't come from within her. It had been put there. And someone would pay for that with their life.