The pale hands shot upward from the crack in the floor.
Mira screamed as they wrapped around her ankles and dragged her down. Their fingers were freezing cold, bone-thin, and impossibly strong.
"ARIN!"
The possessed Arin twitched.
For one second, pain crossed his face.
Then the black-eyed thing inside him smiled again.
"Too slow."
Kael tore the stone spear from his shoulder with a roar and leapt forward, slashing at the hands with his broken blade. Sparks flew as metal met bone.
Several hands were cut away.
Dozens more replaced them.
Arin's father, still bleeding heavily, shouted from the wall.
"Mira! The knife!"
She reached blindly across the stone floor until her fingers touched the silver blade.
The monster towering above them laughed with a hundred mouths.
"Children playing with relics."
Its shadow stretched across the chamber like living tar. Wherever it touched, the dead cult members began to move again.
Bodies rising.
Eyes empty.
Bones snapping back into place.
Mira stared in horror.
"They're standing up…"
Kael cursed. "It's using the corpses."
The possessed Arin looked upward at the giant creature.
"You dare command the dead in my presence?"
The monster replied calmly.
"I command what you abandoned."
Suddenly, Arin's body bent backward unnaturally.
His chest glowed beneath the shirt.
A dark symbol burned under his skin.
Mira remembered the father's words.
The mark I gave him as a child.
She crawled toward him, dragging herself free from the remaining hands.
Kael blocked two reanimated cultists and shouted, "Now!"
Mira lunged and slashed Arin's shirt open with the silver knife.
There it was.
A black circular mark over his heart.
Three cuts through the center.
The same symbol as the key.
The same symbol as the cult.
The same symbol everywhere.
Arin's father closed his eyes in shame.
Mira looked at him in fury.
"You branded him?!"
"I sealed him," he replied.
The possessed Arin grabbed Mira's wrist before she could stab.
His grip was iron.
Their faces inches apart.
Black eyes stared into hers.
Then tears rolled from them.
Arin's real voice whispered from inside:
"Please…"
The grip loosened.
"Do it."
Mira's hand shook violently.
"I can't…"
The giant monster roared.
The entire chamber collapsed further. A massive stone pillar crashed down toward them.
Kael jumped in front and took the impact, thrown across the room.
Blood covered the floor.
"KAEL!"
The possessed Arin suddenly screamed.
Not in rage.
In agony.
Cracks of red light spread across his body.
The two souls inside were tearing apart.
The giant monster extended a hand toward Arin.
"Come back to me."
Arin's father shouted the words Mira feared most:
"If you don't stab him now… everyone dies!"
Mira raised the silver knife.
Arin looked at her with human eyes one final time.
And smiled.
Then she drove the blade down—
But another hand caught it midair.
Cold.
Huge.
The giant monster had reached them.
And it spoke in Mira's mother's voice:
"You always choose the wrong person."
To Be Continued…