Page 26 of Unholy Bond (The Corruption of Evelyn Adams #2)

The catacombs beneath the palace were a rumor in the upper halls. An old joke about the first generation of Hell’s rulers, how they’d built their legacies on a foundation of tunnels and oubliettes that even Lucifer feared to audit.

I found the entrance behind a moldering tapestry of a war no one remembered, through a door disguised as part of the stone.

The hinges groaned against the attention, but otherwise the way opened easily.

The first steps down were steep, cut for someone taller than any currently living thing.

The torch I brought hissed in the damp. Its light caught on the ceiling and ran down the walls like oil.

With every pace, the world above receded, voices and ward-alarms and memory giving way to cold and black and the mineral stink of time.

My footsteps echoed a little too loudly for comfort, so I matched my breathing to them, tricking myself into a rhythm that felt like meditation.

The old nuns used to call it a vigilance trance.

A deliberate, methodical focus, where I became nothing but the sound of my own intent.

The Void liked it. Its presence circled my thoughts, not speaking but coiling in, sharpening the edges of sensation.

The tunnel forked twice, each time marked by a sigil carved into the rock.

Once a spiral, once a tight triangle. I touched the first with my bare hand, running a finger along the groove.

The residue bit back, the stone cold enough to hurt.

The black veins inside my skin responded with a tingle, a happy little shudder.

I took the left path, trusting the instinct that had never yet led me into a trap I couldn’t spring back out of.

The second corridor was tighter, the floor sloping until my calves ached.

Statues lined the way here. Crudely carved demons, all hunched and grimacing, some with stones jammed into their mouths to mimic the agony of a scream.

The torchlight gave their eyes a wet gleam, and for a moment I imagined them breathing.

It would have been a mercy. The first one that truly looked at me, I nodded to. The Void purred approval.

The air got colder. With every step, the black veins along the walls grew thicker, less like fractures and more like roots, or arteries gone wild.

Some had begun to creep over the statuary, digesting the ancient bodies in a slow, patient embrace.

When I touched the next junction, the stone pulsed once under my palm.

The Void spoke then. Not a word, but a pressure in the back of my neck, as if something inside wanted to pull my spine out through the base of my skull and use it to stir the air.

Yes, it said, or something like it. Deeper.

I followed.

The corridor funneled me down to a crawlspace, the ceiling so low I had to duck and shuffle sideways, the torch guttering against the roughness overhead.

Here, the veins were everywhere, writhing in silent progress, their black so absolute it drew the torch’s light into a flat, hungry shadow.

The old sigils broke up. Here a glyph half-digested by Void, there a cluster of runes rendered unreadable by the crawl of the black.

I ran my hand over them as I went, letting the Void taste each one.

It did not comment, but the heat inside me rose, buzzing under my breastbone like a nest of hornets.

At a sharp bend, the passage widened abruptly into a chamber.

The ceiling vaulted up, spanned by a net of black veins so tangled it looked like the inside of a fossilized lung.

The walls bulged with old bone. Femurs and ribs and the curved slats of some lost animal, each one fused into the stone at odd angles.

I knelt, setting the torch into a bracket someone had long ago hammered into the wall.

The black veins converged here, a nest at the base of the far wall, encasing what looked like an altar.

The altar was a squat block of stone, half-sunk in the floor and slick with condensation.

Three deep grooves ran across its surface, and at their intersection a single coin rested, too corroded to bear any image.

I brushed the coin away. It rolled to the floor and came to a stop at my bare foot.

I squatted beside it and waited for the Void to make the next move.

The pressure inside me built, slow and warm, a tide of wanting that pooled in my pelvis and trickled up the line of my spine. I let my eyes close, hands braced on my knees, and slowed my breath until it matched the faint, arrhythmic drip of water somewhere in the darkness.

At first, nothing. Then, a whisper, so faint I couldn’t tell if it was the blood in my ears or a thought I hadn’t yet had.

Open.

I opened my eyes. The veins on the wall bulged, then split, leaking a slow ooze of black onto the altar.

The liquid ran down the grooves, pooling at the center.

My mouth went dry. I reached out, pressed two fingers into the pool, and watched as the black soaked my skin, crawling up my hand in a spiral.

The cold burned, but the pain was pure, like the clean cut of a knife on a good day.

Open, said the whisper, louder now.

I took my hand back, touched the black veins on my forearm. They writhed under my touch, responding not just to contact but to intention. The Void liked to be courted.

Fine, I thought. You want more?

I set my palm flat against the altar and focused, letting the pain in my hand radiate up my arm, into my chest, out through every nerve ending. The world narrowed to a pinpoint: my hand, the altar, the black ooze.

The chamber responded. The veins on the wall began to pulse, sending thick drops of Void down the bone, over the stone, into the grooves.

The torch behind me dimmed, then flared blue.

The pressure in my head spiked, a slap to the base of my skull that drove me to my knees.

I gasped, and the taste of the air changed. Metallic, electric, sweet.

The Void surged inside me, and I surrendered, just for a moment, letting the thing run through my veins and into the world.

The effect was instant. The black on my hand extended, shooting filaments out from my fingers, into the grooves, up the wall, until it met the main vein and burrowed deep. The altar trembled. The bones in the walls vibrated, humming a discordant chord I could feel in my teeth.

Now, the Void said, and this time the word was real, a sound in the room, not just in my head.

I withdrew my hand, and the black spiral on my arm remained, pulsing with the echo of my heartbeat. The pain was gone, replaced by a cool clarity, a sense of distance that let me see the whole chamber at once. Every vein, every bone, every drip of ooze mapped out before me, a perfect system.

I laughed, short and ugly. “You just wanted to show off,” I said, to the room, to the Void, to myself.

Yes, it agreed, purring with satisfaction.

I rolled my shoulders, shook my hand until the black faded to its usual state, then picked up the torch and pressed on.

The next stretch of tunnel was even tighter. My hair caught on the ceiling, my hips scraped the sides. In some places, the wall had collapsed, and I crawled on my hands and knees through mud slicked with more of the black ooze. The stuff clung to my skin, but I no longer cared.

At the third turn, I found what I hadn’t known I was looking for.

The tunnel ended in a circular chamber, twice the diameter of the last, the floor sunk in a shallow bowl.

At the center: a perfect disc of obsidian, cracked through with black veins, each crack leading back to the walls.

The ceiling rose high, lost in darkness, and above me, the veins webbed together until I couldn’t tell where they started or ended.

I stepped to the center, my boots sliding on the glassy floor. The obsidian reflected me, but not perfectly. The face that looked back was older, and the black veins in its arms were thicker, more pronounced. Its eyes glimmered with something I recognized and feared.

The Void inside me stiffened. For a moment, I thought it might retreat, but then it surged, filling my head with a new kind of light. Not black, but blue, so bright it hurt.

I reeled, staggered, then dropped to my knees on the obsidian disc.

My palms slapped the surface, and the reflection warped, splitting into a thousand shards that each showed a different version of me.

One wore a crown, surrounded by kneeling figures, the Void pouring from her hands in a show of brutal majesty.

Another sat alone in the dark, body crumbling to ash as the black consumed her from within.

Others wailed, or laughed, or simply stared with eyes gone empty.

The light intensified, and the images flickered, merging and splitting, faster and faster until I couldn’t tell which was real.

“Enough,” I said, jaw tight. I pressed my hands into the cracks, letting the black ooze bite my skin. “Show me what you want.”

The Void obliged. In a rush, it poured visions into me.

The palace, shattered. Lucifer on his knees, horns broken, the throne room a storm of Void and light.

Then my body, suspended in a cocoon of black, tendrils writhing from my mouth, my cunt, my eyes, while the world outside wept and burned.

Then the three men, Aziz, Levi, Ian, bowing before me, naked and marked, mouths pressed to my skin as they licked the black from every inch of my body. Their worship was agony and pleasure; their tongues were knives and honey.

A child, not born of flesh but of pure Void, growing in my belly, its heartbeat a siren song that called the entire world to heel.

Oblivion. The total, perfect silence of a world eaten by black. No pain, no yearning, just peace.

The visions snapped off, leaving me breathless, nipples hard, cunt soaked and aching. The Void was hungry, but not for sex, not in the way of demons or men. It wanted ownership. It wanted me to be not a vessel, but a weapon.

I pushed back, grinding my teeth, nails digging into my thighs. “You need me,” I said. “You can’t make anything alone. You never could.”

The blue light faded, replaced by the slow, familiar throb of black. The tension in my chest loosened. The Void didn’t answer, but it listened. We had reached an understanding.

I stood, wiped sweat from my brow, and traced the cracks on the floor with my toe.

The obsidian was warm where the veins converged, and as I touched the center, I thought of the visions again.

Not with terror, but with a curious excitement.

Both futures were possible. The only difference was who held the leash.

I left the chamber, and as I walked the catacombs back toward the world above, I practiced the new thing the Void had given me.

In the next junction, where the black veins crossed in a tangle, I placed my hand flat on the wall and willed the tendrils to move.

They responded, shifting under the surface, weaving together into a new pattern.

A spiral inside a triangle, the mark of both my old life and my new.

I pulled my hand away and watched as the pattern glowed, just for a moment, before fading.

I did it again at the next turn, and the next, leaving a trail of marks behind me. Each time, the power answered more readily, the pain less sharp, the pleasure more vivid. The deeper I went, the more the black in my veins felt not foreign, but mine.

By the time I reached the top of the stairs, the torch was dead, and I navigated by the faint, hungry shimmer of Void under my skin.

I stepped into the corridor, and the air there tasted sweeter. The world above was the same as ever—bickering, bleeding, pretending at order—but I was new, and the thing inside me purred with anticipation.

When I passed the old tapestry, I paused, traced the outline of the war scene, and smiled at the zero stitched at the edge.

Everything returned to zero, eventually.

I would make sure of it.