Page 173 of The Blood Rites

The longing in his eyes makes me shiver, but it isn’t real.

He moves closer, his body shedding dust with every step, forming a storm behind him. He puts his hands on my shoulders, fingers digging in. There is something sharp beneath the skin. His grip tightens; the pressure is bruising.

“Why do you force me to hurt you?” the voice asks, but it uses Kael’s real voice now, hers only an echo beneath it.

I want to answer, but I can’t. Black dust swirls inside my mouth and up my nostrils. I try to scream, but it fills my throat. The false Kael’s hands are still on me. He throws me to my knees and yanks my wrists above my head. Invisible shackles lock me in, and my shoulders flare with a sharp, animal pain.

His face is inches from mine, but it no longer resembles Kael. The features are wrong, melting like wax, eyes and mouth stretching wider and wider. The voice is hers, and it screams.

“YOU ARE MINE.”

I try to twist free, but the shackles only tighten. The pressure on my wrists is so crushing I feel the bones begin to splinter. I choke on the scream before it can escape.

The world collapses in on itself. Dust spirals down my throat until I am choking on nothing but her. I want to shout Kael’s name, to call him out of the blackness, but I can’t find the air.

Hands burn against my face as black fire races under my skin, burning me alive from the inside out. The dust-figure convulses and explodes, the blackness peeling away from me in sheets, leaving me falling and falling and—

I wake up screaming.

The scream dies before it even gets out.

The cavern walls don’t echo. They just clamp down on the noise, suffocating it, so the only sound is the snap and groan of my own breath. The air sears the inside of my mouth. My tongue already feels swollen, and blood salts the cracks in my lips.

I can’t move. My arms are wrenched above me, wrists locked in manacles bolted straight into the cave wall. I’m barely touching the ground—only the tips of my toes can find purchase on the uneven floor. My shoulders feel wrecked, like I’ve been here too long, bone grinding on bone, threatening to tear from their sockets if I slip any lower.

Kael isn’t here to put it back in this time.

My fingers have gone numb, the joints crackling every time I twitch. I know the manacles are not the Inhibitium bands. I know that. But that doesn’t stop the feeling from settling in—too familiar, too deep. My body doesn't care about facts—it can only remember the times it was held like this. Times it couldn't fight. Times I couldn't get free.

The cave is sweating; beads of moisture roll down the stone, sizzling to nothing. The walls pulse with the same red and black rhythm as my dream. Every heartbeat is louder than the last.

Pull, my body screams. Get out.

So I do. I lurch my weight downward, trying to rip my hands free, and the manacles bite into the raw skin at my wrists. The flesh splits, and the blood that drips down my arms is almost cold compared to the heat of the metal. I pull again, the pain worse this time, but I don’t stop. Something in me has given up on reason.

The walls begin to fracture, fine cracks racing up from the floor and branching in wild patterns around the chamber. The cracks widen, the cave shuddering with each one, sending a low rumble through the soles of my feet. I’m shaking everywhere now, not just in my arms. My pulse is so fast I can barely hold a thought.

Jets of fire erupt from fissures in the wall, orange and red burning the air and showering the floor with sparks. A few catch in my hair, brief pinpricks of heat before they are gone. I hear the sizzle of fabric fusing to my skin at the wrists. The stench turns my stomach.

I reach for my Mana, and it comes, but not how it should. It’s sluggish and heavy, a trickle where there should be a river. I can’t summon enough to do anything useful. Certainly not enough to get me out of these fucking restraints. I pull and pull, but my wrists only bleed in earnest.

I want Kael. I need him—not as desire, but as a plan. An instinct. I want him to phase through the cave wall and break these chains before I lose myself.

But he isn’t here. He’s somewhere else, probably fighting for his own life. Or maybe he’s coming for me, like he said. But right now, for the first time since the Rites began, I’m all alone. The thought almost makes me black out.

I force myself to stop pulling. To stop moving. I drag a breath through my nose, feel it scald all the way down, and then exhale, slow and deliberate. The world shrinks to a single point of focus: my wrists, the metal.

Above, I hear a wet noise.

Drip. Drip.

I tilt my head back and see a thread of glistening white-yellow liquid, like molten metal. It oozes from a crack in the ceiling, wavering for a moment before it splits and the first droplet falls.

It sizzles through the air and lands on the stone a few inches from my feet. The stone hisses and pops, the afterimage of the drop burning into my vision, perfect and round.

I wait as another drop forms, larger this time. It falls, landing closer.

The next one is going to hit me.