Chapter 8 · Something Calls from the Well

The voice hit him three steps past the courtyard gate.

"Noah."

His legs locked. The name wasn't Lucan. It was his. The real one. The one nobody in this world should know.

Mira's hand clamped on his shoulder. "Keep moving."

He couldn't. The sound came from somewhere below, somewhere cold and deep and wrong. It threaded up through the cracked stone under his boots and wrapped around his ribs.

"Noah, please."

That was Ellie's voice.

His sister. The one hooked up to monitors in a hospital bed two thousand miles and one entire reality away. The one he'd been working double shifts to keep alive before a subway ceiling came down and dumped him here.

"What is it?" Mira's fingers dug in harder. She was scanning the walls, the roofline, everywhere except where the sound was coming from.

He pointed. Down. Past the training yard, past the outer wall. Where the ground dropped away into the old well shaft the servants said had been dry for fifty years.

It wasn't dry now. He could hear water moving.

And under that, Ellie. Calling his name.

Mira yanked him around to face her.