The moment Quinn was finally certain that the man standing in front of her was the real Darius Kane, the tension inside her snapped.
She rushed forward and wrapped both arms tightly around him, nearly crying from the relief of surviving two overlapping hallucinations without walking straight into Ozhin’s trap.
Darius stiffened for half a second before gently patting her back and letting her calm down on her own.
A short while later, Quinn stepped away, wiped at the corners of her eyes, and asked, “Darius, what exactly was I doing just now?” She remembered her mother, the darkness, and the fake voice telling her to leave, but she had no idea what her real body had been doing during any of it.
Darius glanced toward the window before quietly explaining everything.
While Quinn had been trapped inside the hallucination, the glow stick Darius was holding had suddenly gone dark.
He had instinctively shut his eyes for a moment to adjust, then reached toward Quinn to keep physical contact with her, only to touch empty air.
When he opened his eyes again, Quinn was already walking stiffly toward the nearest exit, her expression vacant and her movements unnaturally mechanical.
Darius immediately realized Ozhin wasn’t merely showing her images—it was actively guiding her real body toward the boundary while her mind existed somewhere else.
He tried to grab her, but an invisible force slammed into him and threw him backward several feet.
Fortunately, the impact wasn’t serious, and he recovered quickly enough to reach into his pocket for the emergency salt he’d kept there.
Darius scattered the salt across the spot where the invisible force had struck him, and whatever pressure was blocking him weakened almost immediately.
The result confirmed something important about Ozhin: because the demon still couldn’t physically cross the main ward, its influence inside the protected area was limited compared with what it could do outside.
The illusions were dangerous because they manipulated Quinn’s perceptions, but they weren’t completely unstoppable once Darius interfered from within the ward.
Even more importantly, Ozhin appeared almost obsessively bound by the curse’s rules.
It killed people whose countdowns had marked them, yet it avoided casually murdering unrelated bystanders even when doing so would have made its job easier.
That rule-bound behavior matched the movie surprisingly well.
When Quinn later tried to exploit Dr.
Sullivan as a way to break the curse by killing someone before his predicted death, Ozhin interfered rather than simply letting Sullivan die.
The demon’s goal wasn’t revenge, pleasure, or random slaughter; it existed to enforce the accuracy of the countdown.
In that sense, it behaved less like a wild monster and more like an executioner following a supernatural contract.
Darius almost found the idea funny.
A demon that occasionally saved someone because murdering the wrong person would violate its own rules sounded more like a deranged bureaucrat than an agent of Hell.
Once the invisible obstruction weakened, Darius rushed across the room and caught Quinn just as her fingers were reaching for the door handle.
He grabbed her wrist, pulled her backward into the protected area, and shouted until she finally broke free of the nested hallucination.
Hearing the explanation made Quinn’s stomach twist.
If the crucifix hadn’t snapped her out of the first illusion, or if Darius had been only a few seconds slower during the second, she might already have stepped outside and handed Ozhin exactly what it wanted.
She swallowed hard and whispered, “So I really was about to leave the house.” “Yeah,” Darius replied.
“Which means from now on, don’t trust anything you see without checking it first.” Quinn nodded quickly.
“Can it do that again?” “Almost certainly.” Darius checked the remaining time and frowned.
“We still have a couple of hours left before we’re completely clear, so don’t relax just because we survived one trick.
The defenses are still holding, and that’s the only reason we’re in control right now.” Quinn drew a slow breath and forced herself to focus on that instead of the fear.
The finish line was finally visible, even if Ozhin still had time to attack.
The two stayed inside the large protected symbol in the living room, constantly scanning the surrounding darkness.
Ozhin had vanished again after the failed hallucination, leaving no obvious sign of where it was hiding.
Quinn could no longer see the yellow eyes outside the window, while Darius had never been able to perceive the demon directly in the first place.
Still, neither of them believed it had given up.
Somewhere beyond the ward, it was almost certainly searching for another weakness.
Darius briefly considered how lucky they were that Ozhin seemed relatively restricted compared with some of the monsters Horror Town could have thrown at him.
Against something like Pennywise or Freddy Krueger, simple salt lines and religious symbols probably wouldn’t have been enough to keep them alive for hours.
Ozhin was terrifying, but its power was constrained by the rules of the curse, and rules could be exploited.
That was the only reason this plan had any chance of working.
Unfortunately, a rule-bound enemy could still be intelligent.
Several quiet minutes passed before Darius suddenly heard rushing water outside.
Quinn heard it too.
Both of them turned toward the window.
At first, the darkness made it difficult to understand what was happening, but then Quinn saw water spraying across the street and toward the yard.
A fire hydrant several yards from the house had somehow burst open, sending a powerful stream across the lawn.
The water struck the ground, spread outward, and began flowing directly toward the house.
Darius stared for half a second.
Then cursed.
“Damn it.” Quinn looked at him.
“What?” Darius pointed toward the water.
“It’s going after the salt.” Quinn’s expression changed immediately.
Salt was excellent for forming a supernatural boundary, but it had one painfully obvious weakness: water.
The glue would help keep the lines physically attached to the surface, yet enough running water would still dissolve the salt and destroy the protective concentration that made the barrier effective.
Ozhin couldn’t cross the ward directly, so it had chosen to attack the environment instead.
Darius had to admit the demon was smarter than he’d hoped.
Quinn’s voice tightened.
“What do we do?” “Nothing.” She stared at him.
“We abandon the outer line.” Darius pointed toward the protected area beneath their feet.
“Do not go outside and try to stop the water.
That’s exactly what it wants.
We still have multiple internal barriers, so let the first one fall.” Quinn immediately nodded.
Once she thought about it, the choice was obvious.
Going outside to shut off the hydrant would expose one of them directly to Ozhin, while staying put merely sacrificed a defensive layer they’d already expected might fail.
Darius and Quinn therefore remained where they were, watching as the water continued spreading across the property.
Minute by minute, the flow reached the edges of the house and began washing over the exterior salt lines.
The glue slowed the process but couldn’t stop it forever.
Salt crystals gradually dissolved into the water, leaving thinner and thinner patches along the boundary.
Quinn suddenly stiffened and pointed toward the window.
“It’s back.” Ozhin had reappeared outside, those yellow eyes glowing with what looked almost like satisfaction.
For the first time all night, the demon seemed to know it had found a method that was working.
It reached toward the window and tested the weakened barrier.
A burst of sparks flashed around its hand.
But this time the reaction was much smaller.
Quinn immediately reported what she saw, and Darius understood the meaning without needing to see Ozhin himself.
“The line is weakening.” Outside, the demon withdrew its hand and somehow intensified the broken hydrant’s spray, sending even more water flooding around the house.
Within minutes, the shallow stream around the foundation had risen enough to wash over several more sections of the salt boundary.
Ozhin tested it again.
Only a few faint sparks appeared.
Then the figure vanished.
Quinn barely had time to gasp before a black shape passed straight through the left wall of the house.
Unlike before, there was no violent flash throwing it backward and no barrier strong enough to stop it.
Ozhin had finally entered.
Quinn instinctively grabbed Darius’s hand.
Her palm was cold and slick with sweat.
“It’s inside.” Darius didn’t need to see the demon to feel the sudden shift in the room.
“Where?” “Outside the inner ward.” That was something, at least.
Ozhin floated to the edge of the large salt symbol in the living room and stopped.
The outer line was gone, but the second defensive layer remained intact.
The demon couldn’t simply cross it, so it hovered several feet away, watching Quinn and apparently considering how to destroy the next obstacle.
“Use the prayer,” Darius whispered.
Quinn snapped out of her fear, raised the crucifix, and brought up the Latin exorcism text on her phone.
At the same time, Darius grabbed a handful of chocolate from the table and threw it toward the spot Quinn was staring at.
The pieces sailed cleanly through Ozhin’s body and scattered across the floor without producing even the slightest reaction.
Darius couldn’t see the failure directly, but Quinn’s expression told him everything he needed to know.
“Nothing?” “Nothing.” “Yeah.
Thought so.” The plastic wrap was almost certainly useless too.
Whatever ridiculous supernatural logic inspired those ideas clearly required far more than ordinary household materials.
Darius had never truly expected them to work, but with so little reliable information available, testing a harmless backup hadn’t cost them anything.
Quinn barely made it through the first few lines of the exorcism prayer before her phone screen suddenly went black.
She pressed the power button.
Nothing happened.
“Darius…” He immediately understood.
The prayer was far too long for Quinn to memorize after reading it only a few times.
Darius had anticipated electronic interference and printed a paper copy as a backup, but with the house lights dead and the glow sticks fading, the text was difficult to read.
The crucifix still offered some protection, but without the prayer that had previously amplified its effect, Quinn had lost their strongest offensive tool.
For the first time that night, Darius genuinely didn’t have an immediate answer.
Quinn stared at him desperately.
“Do you have another idea?” “Of course.” Darius smiled as though everything was under control.
Internally, his thoughts were moving at full speed.
Chocolate is useless.
Plastic wrap is useless.
The phone is dead.
The printed prayer is practically unreadable.
What the hell do I have left?
Then his eyes landed on the table.
The sealed container of rooster blood.
Darius almost laughed.
He’d bought it as one of the most speculative backups in the entire collection and nearly forgotten it existed.
There was still a decent amount left inside.
He had no idea whether it would do anything to a demon like Ozhin, but at this point, “probably useless” was still better than “nothing.” Darius grabbed the container, opened it, and stepped toward the edge of the ward.
Quinn looked at him.
“What are you doing?” “Testing Plan C.” He poured some into his hand.
Then threw it directly toward the place where Quinn said Ozhin was standing.
(End of Chapter)