Page 146
ECHO
Something inside the cavern is beating. Not the screaming guardians or the dead things still dragging themselves out of the dirt around us. This is deeper, buried somewhere beyond those black stone walls, a heavy pulse that catches against my siren hearing every few seconds.
Thump.
Too steady to be part of the fight.
Thump.
Too deep to be anything standing out here with us.
I drive my voice into one of the dead bastards coming at me from the side and send it flying backward into two more.
Another pulse rolls through me, stronger this time.
My head snaps toward the entrance.
Whatever Malgrave has built inside that place, I can already hear it working.
A roar tears across the hillside before anyone can answer, followed by the heavy rush of bodies coming straight for us.
Carnage turns first, his hellhound already pushing through as he takes off toward the fight again. Sentinel is right behind him, wings breaking free as he launches into the air, while Raze and the others scatter across the hillside to meet whatever is coming.
Within seconds, the space around me is empty.
And underneath everything, suddenly crashing through my senses…
Carnage.
His hellfire cuts through the rest, distant and distorted in a way it shouldn’t be when the actual hellhound is only twenty feet away.
I glance back and find him already tearing into an infernal guardian, his massive black-and-purple body driving it backward as hellfire pours from his open jaws. Sentinel drops beside him in a burst of gold, his blade ripping through the guardian, while farther down the hillside, Raze sends ice and dragon fire tearing through the creatures closing in on the Kings.
They’re keeping the worst of it off me, giving me a path, so I turn back toward the entrance as another pulse hits. This one catches somewhere behind my ribs.
Carnage is behind me, but part of him is in there.
That realization gets my feet moving faster. I duck beneath the reaching arm of another corpse, hitting it with enough siren song to snap its head backward, then scramble over the broken ground toward the black stone entrance.
The closer I get, the louder that second trace of Carnage becomes.
Hellfire with Sentinel’s Grace tangled through it. Malgrave’s power wrapped around both. And somewhere underneath all three, that ancient pull I wish I’d never learned how to hear—the Devil.
I’m still ten feet from the entrance when the next pulse punches through me hard enough to make me stumble, and my hand hits the stone beside the doorway.
Jesus.
Whatever the fuck Malgrave is doing in there, he’s already started.
The pull gets stronger the farther I go. I follow it down the corridor, my boots slipping once on something wet coating the floor that I make the very deliberate decision not to look at too closely.
Another pulse hits. I take the next turn, and the walls narrow around me, forcing me sideways through a gap barely wide enough for my shoulders. The air gets hotter as I descend, thick enough that every breath feels harder than the last.
Fuck, how deep does this place go?
Another set of stairs takes me farther underground.
The sound is everywhere now.
