Page 43 of Hellbound

What. The. Fuck?

But before Marian could find the words to express her horror, a familiar sound made her chest cave in. Whispers trickled through the alcoves like millions of skittering insects. Dread coiled around her, throat tight, and suddenly nothing else mattered but escaping this place.

Tori looked up at Marian, eyes wide. “Please tell me the Remnant didn’t find us. Please tell me there’s another reason you look like you just shit your pants.”

“It would be a lie.” Marian’s heart slammed into her ribs. “We need to leave. Now.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They tried to backtrack, but fear and haste muddled Marian’s memory of the way they’d come. Soon they were hurtling through the abyss, sprinting through dark tunnels, turning unknown corners away from dead ends, anything that allowed to keep running from the nightmare at their backs.

They couldn’t have been running all that long when the tunnel turned perilously narrow before it spat them out into an enormous cavern.

Pressure mounted at her back as a noxious combination of dread and terror corroded what rational thought she still possessed. The Remnant had fallen silent, but Marian knew it was there. She’d never mistake that feeling again.

A curtain of mist fell up ahead. Before them stretched a sea of fog, spanned by a flat, narrow bridge. Erie green light emanated from below the surface.

Marian had no compass here. Instinct and intuition both devolved into garbled noise in the back of her mind.

The cavern erupted with a profound bellow. Like broken whale song, it reverberated through her very being with its haunting echo. Again, terror twisted her thoughts, ever the thief of reason: the Remnant had found her. The Remnant would always find her.

“The devil knows your name, Marian.”

“Can you go back to your body yet?” Tori raced up beside her as they sprinted toward the bridge. The traveler’s voice cut through the viperous whispers in Marian’s head and expunged enough of their poison that Marian could think. She looked inward as they ran, searching for the pull between her ribs that meant rescue was close. But there was only slack.

Marian spat a string of curses as the discordant song rang out once more. It was getting closer. Shit, shit, shit.

“No,” she shouted back.

“How much longer?”

“I don’t know,” Marian snapped, panting.

The blood-curdling sound of shattering rock sent another boulder of fear tumbling into Marian’s stomach. The bridge ahead was gone, now a pier hanging over the foggy sea, bringing their escape to an abrupt end. Marian skidded to a stop with a few feet between her and a sharp drop. Tori came to a stumbling halt beside her.

“Is this a lie, too?” Marian hollered.

“No, it’s real,” the traveler cried.

The cavern shook with a deep, terrible moan.

Marian didn’t turn around; she didn’t need to. She knew exactly what she’d find in the mist behind them. But seeing her own fear mirrored in the traveler’s face when she looked at Tori set loose a strange urge inside her.

She spoke without thinking.

“Tori. Look at me,” Marian said with uncanny steadiness that was incongruous with the terror in her heart. On Earth, she’d made Tori promise to stay with her if the Remnant arrived, that she wouldn’t bail at the first sign of danger.

Tori kept her word as she stood beside her. There was nowhere else to run. Marian was fucked.

But Tori didn’t have to be. Marian couldn’t make her stay when the traveler had a way out. Her conscience, the shriveled-up thing that it was, wouldn’t allow it.

“Forget what I said at the bar. Get out of here.”

“What?” Tori’s head snapped to Marian. “No, I’m not leaving you now. I can’t—” Tori pressed her hands to her scalp instead and pulled at her iridescent tuft of hair. “We could jump.”

“It’ll follow us. Revival is the only escape.”

“Then how do we speed that up?”