Callan tugs on my hand, slowing us as he murmurs over his shoulder. “If things go badly—you know where to go.”
Silence. And then Esme swears. “I can’t remember.”
“Stay close to me,” Rio mutters. “I’m not going anywhere without you anyway.”
Matthias says nothing.
Ahead of us, the shadows linger outside a doorway. “That’s it.”
I feel the pull again. A tugging sensation, even as dread crawls over my skin, prickles at the back of my neck. “Whatever is in there, I don’t think it’s anything good.”
My voice is hoarse. As desperate as I was to come down here, I now find myself more desperate to turn back around. To go back upstairs, out of the temple and into town. But my feet do not move.
Callan steps in front of me, looking back over his shoulder. His eyes glimmer. “I’m going in first.”
There’s a quiet scuffle behind me. Esme steps up to my side. When her hand replaces Callan’s, squeezing my fingers, I can’t help but squeeze back.
I can’t breathe. I don’t want to go in there. But I’m equally—no. More certain that I don’t wantCallanto go inside that room. “I should go first.”
He looks back at me. “Because you need to, or because you’re worried?”
My silence is enough. His fingers brush my chin. “Stay close. But I’m going in first.”
“Maybe it’s locked,” Rio says hopefully. “Best option, I think we can all agree.”
“More noise when Callan kicks it down, though,” Matthias mutters. He shifts to my other side, leaving Rio to bring up the rear as Callan approaches the door. My palms sweat, but he grips my hand anyway. “It will be alright.”
The silence is stifling. Such a deep blanket of thick silence that our voices sound strange. Muted.
Callan listens at the door before he reaches for it. I catch a glimpse of light as it swings open easily enough, all of us tensing.
He holds his sword out as he steps into the doorway.
His body stills.
And I know, with a sudden, terrible clarity. Iknow—
I push past the others. Callan turns, his face ashen as he tries to stop me. “You can’t see this, Selene. Stop—”
My shadows slam into him. They push him aside, pinning him to the wall as I dart past.
It is not grief that fills my throat as I see them.
It’s rage. Such a terrible, awful rage that the scream ripping through the air is unrecognizable, as if an animal has made it.
The two figures on the tables should be unrecognizable. Yet they are not.
I stumble, and fall. My knees crash into the floor.
I scream again. It bounces off the walls as I slam my hands into the ground.
Again and again, I roar, around the pain and theagony.
They desecrated them.
They took my sisters.
They took my Nyx, and my Celeste, and they buried them beneath the ground, far away from the light of the moon and any hope at all, and they hurt them. Over and over again. The brutal, deep, jagged marks crisscross their bodies in so many vicious patterns, carved andburnedinto their skin that I hear someone behind me violently lose the contents of their stomach.
