Page 75 of Tethered In Blood

The bile in my stomach churned. I turned back toward the collapsed soil, to the thick, sludgy remnants of whatever foul magic had been at work. The ground still bore the scars of what had just happened, yet it looked undisturbed. It had swallowed its secrets whole.

“Then whoever was buried here—”

“—is long gone,” Oberon clipped, his voice hard. The tension in his shoulders hadn’t eased. He wiped his gloved hand on his trousers, stiff and measured, as if trying to rid himself of something unseen.

A lump formed in my throat. “If someone was buried here, then this wasn’t just a grave.” I turned to him. “This was a sacrifice.”

Oberon went still, but a muscle in his jaw twitched. His gaze lingered on the sigils for a long, weighted moment before he spoke. “Yes.”

That single word sent a pulse of dread rippling through me. I swallowed hard, my eyes trailing over the crude symbols carved into the stone. They weren’t failed protections nor remnants of a forgotten ward. They were far worse. Someone hadn’t just died here. They had been bled dry. Erased.

This wasn’t just a desperate offering to unseen gods, an ill-conceived ritual lost to time. It had been calculated and purposeful. Someone had buried a body beneath this field for a reason. I fought the urge to retreat into instinct—to take notes, document every detail, and make sense of the horror we had just uncovered. The twist in my gut told me there was more to it.

A low, pulsing hum resonated just beneath the threshold of hearing.

The air shifted as a ripple of unseen magic crawled over my skin, raising every hair on my arms. Unseen fingers dragged through the air, scraping the ends of my awareness.

Oberon pushed to his feet, moving beside me while his gloved hand wrapped around the hilt of his sword.

The sigils ignited with a pulse of raw energy, surging up from the ground. Dust and debris exploded into the air. The wind howled as if the ground itself had exhaled. The force sent me stumbling, my boots sliding against the loose dirt.

Whispers, low and urgent, slithered through the wind in a language I didn’t recognize but felt. The sound didn’t just echo, it sank into me, curled through my ribs, and seeped into my bones. They were pleading.

A choked noise clawed up my throat as I lurched back. Oberon’s hand clamped around my wrist and hauled me away.

The whispers twisted into raw, shattered, and endless screams. Their agony split the air apart, tearing through the unnatural wind—throughme.

I had heard suffering in the dying, in the grieving, inmyself. But this wasn’t just grief, it was rage. Whatever had woken up was furious.

The ground heaved beneath us. A deep, resonant crack ripped through the clearing when the sigil-covered stone fractured. A fissure tore through the dirt, gaping wide, and from its depths poured a wave of pure rot. The smell of death, ruin, and power buried too long beneath the ground crashed over me.

Oberon’s grip on my wrist tightened. “Move!” A hand erupted from the ground. My stomach lurched at the blackened flesh, peeling in ragged sheets, clung to exposed, gleaming bone. The fingers twitched, curled, and searched.

I couldn’t move.

Couldn’t breathe.

Another hand punched through the dirt. A wet, sickening rip followed as the ground split apart. The ground convulsed and cracked wider as bodies spilled forth from the gash in the ground. One after another, they clawed their way free, limbs tangled, movements jerky and unnatural. The dirt heaved them up from a wound that had split open.

A shallow breath escaped me as my eyes locked onto their hollowed faces—jaws slack, sockets empty. The stench coated my tongue. The decay was so strong that it blurred my peripheral vision. I wanted to scream, but the sound stuck, trapped beneath the weight of horror that pressed against my chest as it sank its claws into my lungs.

The metallicshhiiingof Oberon’s sword carved through the air as he drew it from its sheath, the blade gleaming in the dim, shifting light. I forced myself to swallow against the bile that rose in my throat. My chest tightened. My skin crawled.

“Sinclaire, what is this?” I rasped.

Oberon’s silver-flecked gaze flicked between the writhing corpses and the glowing sigils beneath them. “Necromancy.” Quiet fury edged his tone. His grip on his sword tightened. “And it’s old.”

This hadn’t been a fresh summoning. It had brewed and festered beneath the field for Gods knew how long.

The dead had been waiting.

And we had just woken them.

The tallest of them—a woman—let out a rattling, gurgling shriek. Her head lolled, her jaw hung too wide, her bones cracked and popped as she turned toward me.

I swayed as my legs threatened to give out beneath me. She looked at me. Not Oberon. Not the field around us. Just me.

My mouth ran dry. The horror in my chest twisted and became colder, crueler.

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