Page 71 of Soulmarked

“So what's the play?” Lex asked, serious now. “We go in quiet, gather intel, then what? Because if they're really doing blood rituals...”

“Then we stop them.” My smile felt more like baring teeth. “Permanently.”

“And if we can't?” Cade's voice carried an edge I was learning to recognize, the fed wrestling with hunter methods.

“Then we die trying.” I met his gaze steadily. “Unless you've got a better idea? Maybe we can reason with the blood-sucking monsters, talk about our feelings?”

The challenge hung between us, heavy with everything we weren't saying. Finally, he nodded slightly. “Lead on, hunter.”

We split into teams, Lex taking the east wing while Cade and I approached from the west. The asylum's halls stretched before us like open wounds, decades of pain and madness seeping from the walls. Our boots made no sound on broken tile, but every step felt watched.

“Place feels wrong,” Cade whispered as we cleared another corridor. Moonlight painted strange patterns through broken windows, making shadows move where they shouldn't. “Like it's alive.”

“It probably is, in its way.” I kept my voice low, tracking movement at the edges of my vision. “Places like this, they soak up suffering. Hold onto it. Makes them perfect for the kind of magic Phoenix is playing with.”

“You sound like you've seen this before.”

“Once or twice.” I didn't elaborate. Some nightmares were better left unshared.

We found the first sign we were right in what had been a treatment room. The floor was carved with intricate symbols that seemed to shift and writhe when viewed directly, angular sigils intertwined with curved glyphs that resembled broken vertebrae and shattered ribcages. The grooves pulsed with anobsidian liquid that absorbed rather than reflected the light, too dark and viscous to be paint.

“Skye,” I subvocalized into my comm. “You seeing this?”

“Whatever they're doing down there, it's interfering with my equipment. Be careful.” Their voice crackled with interference.

Cade moved to examine the symbols, and I had to fight the urge to pull him back. His fascination with supernatural elements would get him killed one day.

“These markings,” he murmured, crouching to study the wet grooves. “They're older than what we found at the church. More... primal somehow.”

“How'd you know that?” The question slipped out before I could stop it.

He tensed slightly, then shrugged with careful casualness. “Research.”

“Right.” I didn't bother hiding my skepticism. “You got a PhD in freaky symbols I don't know about?”

A scream echoed from below, human, terrified, cut brutally short. We both moved instantly, weapons ready, falling into sync despite everything.

“That came from the basement level,” Cade said, already moving. “We need to?—”

“Stick to the mission.” I caught his arm, ignoring how the contact burned. “We're here for intel, not rescue.”

“There are people dying down there!” His eyes flashed with that righteous anger I was coming to recognize.

“There are always people dying.” I kept my voice hard, professional, though it killed me to do it. “But if we don't stop whatever they're doing, more will die. Sometimes you gotta make the hard call.”

I saw the struggle in his face. He nodded, though the tension in his jaw said this wasn't over.

We moved deeper into the asylum's guts, where the walls wept old pain and the shadows had teeth. Every corner held potential death, every room another piece of the horror Phoenix was building.

“This is wrong,” Lex's voice came through our comms, tight with tension. “East wing is covered in sigils too. They're not just preparing one ritual site, they're turning the whole building into some kind of focal point.”

“Makes sense,” Cade muttered, checking another corner. “The asylum sits on a confluence of ley lines. All that old pain, all that stored energy...”

“When did you become an expert on ley lines?” I couldn't help asking.

His look was answer enough: another time.

Movement ahead froze us both in place. Shadows shifted wrong, flowing like oil against the asylum's decaying walls. The sound of chanting drifted up from below.

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