Chapter 23 · Living Altar

The pull stopped.

Evira hit stone. Hard. Her shoulder cracked against something that felt like a step, and the air smelled wrong—copper and rot and something else, something that made her teeth ache.

She rolled, trying to get her feet under her, and her hand slipped in something wet.

Blood.

Not hers. Too much of it. The floor was slick with it, pooled in the cracks between old stone tiles, and when she finally got her eyes to focus she saw the room.

Small. Low ceiling. No windows. The walls were covered in marks—some painted, some carved, some that looked like they'd been scratched in with fingernails. All of them were the same symbols she'd seen on her wrist, the ones that had dragged her here.

And in the center of the room, chained to a metal frame that looked like it had been bolted together from scrap, was Felix.

He was conscious. Barely. His head lolled forward, and his shirt was gone, and his back—

Evira's stomach turned.

His back was covered in marks. Fresh ones. They weren't tattoos. They were cuts, shallow and precise, arranged in the same spiral pattern that had been on her wrist.