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“Get over yourself. Whatever the two of you may have had years ago, is not what it is now. If she remembers anything, it’s over for us,” she seethes.
A distant shriek captures their attention, stealing them away from the cave until the sounds eventually fade into the trees and only the hiss of rainfall and the rhythm of our mingled breath remain. Christian hugs me, his presence a steadying force in the chaos. Even soaked through and equally as bloodied at the edges he radiates an unsettling calm.
“We should get back to gathering Immorcantem,” he sighs.
“What about splitting up? I find the relic, you continue on the hunt. We meet here when we’re done.” Water drips from the ceiling in slow intervals, each drop echoing like a heartbeat.
Christian simply stares at me. “This is all my fault. I never meant for this to be the place you happened upon. I shouldn’t have been so brazen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I will show you, come on. We have to get back to the clearing where we left the basins.”
“But the relic?”
“Wrong question. More like, how am I going to help you rid this world of its true demons?”
“Okay—” I step back and cross my arms against my chest. “How am I going to help you rid this world of its true demons? And which world are we sending it back to?”
“I can only assume it’s the one we’ve come from.”
Until this very moment, it hadn’t truly dawned on me that this was a place where the dead lingered for eternity.
“Wait—is this really Hell? I thought it was just a metaphor for some shitty town.”
There is no time for comedic relief.
His lips twitch, the smallest crack in his composure. “There is an old legend in Devil’s Bay,” he begins, voice weaving itself into the moonlit gloom. “A legend that says the land beneath the house was not formed by any natural force. Not by earth or erosion. But by the dark things that lay beneath it. And what lays beneath it is a direct path between living and dead.”
A chill crawls along my spine.
“They say Hell lies below the estate,” he says. “A tear in the world sits under our feet, older than any of us. Kieran’s family originally built the house to guard it. Or to contain it. No one agrees which.”
“And…the creatures in the forest?”
“Are born of that rift,” he finishes. “Or twisted by it. They were human once. Most things here…were human once.”
“And me?” I ask, voice low. He looks at me, truly looks, and something like awe or fear flickers in his eyes.
“You survived falling into the place that has taken everyone else,” he says. “That is not ordinary, Marisa. I think the fault beneath us—now above us—has…marked you.”
The cave feels suddenly smaller. “And what does that mean?”
“It means,” he says, thumb brushing my cheek again, “that what ties you to this place may be stronger than anything that tries to pull you away. Even me.” He leans in again, breath mingling with mine.
My heart thuds with a wild clarity.
“I don’t want you to leave,” he murmurs. “But you are free. Always, even as I force you to gather blood like a heathen. You are far too innocent for this dark world.”
He’s afraid that if we return, things might change. A rift between worlds can erase the little moments we’ve had. But he wasn’t even sure about the mechanisms of this Hell. No one is knowledgeable about anything that’s happening to us. That’s why no matter how much power Kieran holds, it will never be enough to combat whatever is truly toying with us.
I tilt forward, closing the distance, choosing him with the simplest, boldest movement of my body.
“Why would you want to stay here?” I ask him, sure he could have figured out a way out long ago.
The cave hums.
“To make sure you get back home safely.”
