Chapter 28 · The Bell Rings Backward

Cass woke up with blood in his mouth and Mara's hand still pressed against his chest.

Not the soft kind of touch. The kind that kept him pinned to the stone floor while she checked if he was breathing. Her fingers were cold. The seal behind them was colder.

He coughed. Tasted copper and something worse.

"Don't move." Mara's voice came out flat. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the door.

It was still there. Still shut. The carved sigils along the frame flickered between gold and black, like a candle about to go out. The air around it hummed, low and wrong, the kind of sound that made his teeth ache.

Cass tried to sit up. His ribs screamed at him. "Did it work?"

"For now." Mara pulled her hand back. Her palm was smeared red. His blood or hers, he couldn't tell. She wiped it on her pants without looking at it. "The seal's holding. Barely."

"Barely's better than not at all."

"Is it?" She finally turned to him. Her eyes were too bright, the kind of bright that came before someone either cried or broke something.