Page 16 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

Ian landed next, scraping his palms on the rocks as he tried to push up to his knees.

He didn’t bother dusting off his clothes, just grabbed a handful of the mud and smeared it on his bare forearm, using the mess to draw a rough grid.

He muttered under his breath, a litany of numbers and letters, like he was solving for X and the X was hidden somewhere in this mess.

Levi, of course, landed like a cat: on his feet, hair already retying itself, a smear of green on his cheek. He looked around, saw the gate, and immediately started circling it. “It’s bigger than I thought,” he said, not even a trace of awe. “Bet you ten bucks the hinges are fused.”

“Not hinges,” Ian said, “there’s a pivot here. The runes control the angle. If you force it, you risk—”

Levi snorted, pacing out a semicircle. “You always want to do it by the book. Sometimes you just have to pull the trigger and pray you don’t lose a hand.”

“It’s not your hand on the line, you dumb bastard,” Ian shot back, wiping rain from his face. “We mess up the sequence, and we’re stuck here. Or worse.”

I forced myself upright, the duffel bag a dead weight across my back.

Every muscle in my arms felt strung with barbed wire, but I got to my feet.

The heat was a living thing, sweat pooling at the base of my spine, my shirt already glued to my chest. The gate’s runes were brighter now, a faint pulse in the purple-blue between flashes of lightning.

I stalked toward the archway, ignoring the bickering. “Ian, you got the ward ready?”

He nodded, pulling a strip of parchment from his belt. “Yeah, but I still say we should probe for traps before—”

Levi cut in, reaching the base of the gate and running his fingers over the biggest rune. “It’s a simple override,” he said, grinning. “We just need a power source and the key.”

He turned to look at me, and I could see the greed in his eyes. “You brought the key, right?”

Levi held it up and I took it from him. I walked straight to the arch.

The closer I got, the louder the hum, a vibration that settled in my teeth and threatened to shake the fillings loose.

The central keyhole waited, half-clogged with vines and something that might have been petrified blood.

I jammed the key into the slot and felt it bite, the old mechanism shifting like a broken jaw.

The runes ignited, purple and green and sick with light.

The air pressure dropped, and the wind went silent, the rain stopping in mid-air like a scene from a busted video game.

Behind me, Ian was yelling something, but the noise was sucked out of the world.

I heard nothing except the voice of the gate.

Levi shouted, tried to grab my shoulder, but I shrugged him off and pressed my left palm to the activation glyph.

I could already feel the skin splitting, the sharp edges cutting into me, but I didn’t flinch.

I pushed harder, and the blood started to flow, thick and bright and perfect. The gate wanted blood; it always had.

The archway shivered, the stones vibrating, and the runes crawled up my arm, burning new patterns into my flesh. The pain was hot, almost sweet, and I leaned into it, baring my teeth and letting the old violence surface. “Enough arguing,” I said, the words lost to the void but spoken anyway.

The gate wailed. There was no other word for it.

The whole structure let out a sound like a newborn, like metal bent in a vise, like the last breath of an animal before the knife.

It rose in pitch, so high and sharp it cut through the jungle and left nothing but silence in its wake.

For a second, every insect, every bird, every living thing in a mile radius shut up and listened.

Then the air ripped open. The center of the arch liquefied, became blacker than any night, a hole that led straight through the world. The vacuum tried to suck us in, but I dug in my heels, wiped the blood on my pants, and reached back for Levi.

He tried to resist, but I had the leverage and the rage and the history.

I grabbed him by the collar and flung him through the rift.

He howled, spinning, limbs cartwheeling, then vanished into the dark.

I turned to Ian. He didn’t hesitate, just nodded and stepped through.

He disappeared with a pop, the smell of ozone following.

I looked up at the sky, let the rain hit my face, and thought of Lilith as I stepped through the gate.

We tumbled out on the other side, all three of us on our hands and knees on a floor that wasn’t floor at all but a river of black glass.

Above us, a ceiling arched so high it might have been sky, streaked with fire and shot through with ribs of smoking bone.

In the distance, lights flickered—yellow, orange, blue like a city’s worth of candles burning at the end of the world.

Levi was already up, dusting himself off, his mouth twisted into a grin that said he’d never been happier. Ian stood, wiped a smear of something from his cheek, and looked at me with something close to respect.

The pain in my left hand was still there, but now it throbbed with a purpose. The runes etched into my palm glowed in time with the heartbeat of this place. I flexed my fingers and felt the promise of violence, the certainty that this time, no one would be coming to save us.

“Let’s go,” I said. “She’s waiting.”

We moved as a unit, three monsters in a world built for monsters, and behind us, the gate shrieked shut, the echo rolling out and back forever.

It was going to be a good day.