My Husband Dies Every Midnight

What Wakes Below

The ground shook again and harder, sending dust raining from the cracks in the ceiling. Elena pulled her mother close as the room cried around them, stones grinding together like bones.

Maris shoved against her shoulder. "Elena, we have to get out of here."

Nathan was already at the broken altar, one hand braced against the obsidian slab and the other mopping at the blood running down his ribs. His face was ashen in the gloom. "It's not... you said it would end when the debt was paid."

"I said the debt would be paid," Ingrid snapped, coming to her feet. Her normally perfect posture was off somehow, as if her spine was stiff with more than just tension. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, some of it stringy with blood, and a streak of it was darkened with her own blood. "I did not say what else might be due."

The reply came from deep in the heart of the building, a sound like a growl too distant to be heard but felt in the marrow. A sound that coiled around the edges of Elena's ribs and made her feel as if something enormous was settling in the room with them.

Maris's face had gone dead white. "No."

"What?" Elena asked, turning to her mother. "What is it?"

Maris's throat worked, her fingers tightening around Elena's arm. "The Warden was not the oldest thing down there."

A hush seemed to fall over the room as if something vast and heavy had settled inside the walls. The light seemed to dim.

Nathan turned toward them, but another jolt of movement sent fresh fractures widening in the stone floor. The blackness oozing from a widening crack along the floor hissed like steam escaping a valve. The space between the stones was not empty. It was not air. It was something hungrier than that.

Ingrid seemed to shrink back, and for the first time since Elena had known her, she looked genuinely frightened. "You said it was sealed."

"The miners found it first," Ingrid said very quietly. "Beneath Eldridge Hollow. Your people thought it was a deposit of silver, but it was a pocket of something else entirely. Something that breathed. My family was told that the Warden watched the place so that our bargain would not be breached." Her voice wavered slightly as she turned back to the widening fissure in the floor. "That nothing else would pass through the seal as long as every family honored their part of the agreement."

Elena stared at her. "What else?"

"I..." Ingrid's words were swallowed up by the sound of shifting stones.

The thing below them stirred.

Elena barely registered the movement in the crack. A long sinuous shape was sliding through the gap, pale and slimy and serpentine. But then there was another jolt, and the space between the stones grew wider, and the thing below them pushed against the stone and opened its mouth, and the smell came up out of the crack—a thick reeking odor of wet earth and rusted metal and something else, something sharp and acrid that burned at the back of Elena's throat. It was the smell of ages-old tunnels deep in some long-forgotten part of the world.

Nathan inhaled sharply. "We need to get out of here. Now."

Maris grabbed Elena's arm. "Listen to me," she said. Her fingers were colder than she'd ever been. "The ledger was not just a record, Elena. It was a lid. The Warden and the families made a bargain to keep the thing below the city from coming up through the crypt, but what they failed to realize was that the pact was keeping it down."

"It's down here now," Elena said, her stomach roiling. "Right underneath us."

Maris nodded. "And it's going to come up through this passage."

The room groaned and the obsidian altar split down the middle, one side toppling onto the stones with a sound like boulders rolling across the floor. The glow of the inscribed runes died as soon as the altar hit the floor.

Open.

The whisper curled around Elena's skull, and she dropped to her knees, fisting her hands around her ears, but the words slithered past the pressure and burrowed into her bones.

Nathan staggered back. "Did you hear that?"

Ingrid's jaw tightened. "Yes."

Maris grabbed Elena by the shoulders and pushed her toward the opening they'd used to get into the passage. "We need to get out of here before it gets up to the chapel."

Elena met her mother's gaze. "It's already in the chapel, isn't it? It’s coming after us?"

Maris went still for a heartbeat too long. "It's not safe." She glanced over her shoulder as another deep sound reverberated through the chamber, this time coming from deep within the building itself. The sound was almost like footsteps, but they had no rhythm, as though something with too many joints was walking along the very bones of the structure.

Something else answered. A sound like stone grinding against stone, but even thicker, wetter, like roots working their way through dirt.

Nathan cursed under his breath. "It's getting closer."

Ingrid gestured sharply at the broken altar. "Get it off the floor."

"That's your brilliant plan?" Elena snapped. "You waited until now to tell us that you and your precious ledger buried something beneath the chapel that wanted to come out?"

"I was told it could never rise," Ingrid snapped. "Not so long as the pact was honored."

"And yet," Maris said, her lips curling into something that was almost a smile. "Here we are."

The thing below them gave another great heave, as if testing the give of the stones, and another length of it came up through the crack. Not a snake. Not something with the shape of a man. Something in between. Something that had too many fingers, too long and slender and flat, and skin like black wax. Long nails clicked against the stones as it searched for purchase. The thing's fingers, long and elegant, flexed from their outsized joints, and a shudder of revulsion rolled through Elena's gut.

Nathan grabbed her hand. "Come on."

They ran, the passage all but forcing them along at a steep angle. Elena's feet slipped twice before Nathan grabbed her by the elbow and gave her a shove. Behind them, Ingrid's heels clicked against the stone floor in sharp succession as Maris moved a little slower, her movements hobbled by exhaustion.

Open.

Open.

Open.

It was all Elena could hear. The whisper was like something pressing against the inside of her eyes, insistent and searching.

When they reached the stairwell at the far end of the passage, her lungs were burning, and the cold was pressing in around her, turning the air to something brittle and dry. Symbols carved into the rock glowed faintly as they passed. "Where do we go next?" Nathan asked, panting as he paused to catch his breath.

"Let me know when you find out," Elena said, shaking her head. "I only know the places my mother marked."

Maris gave her a long look. "Then you trust them."

They emerged into the basement of Saint Agnes just as another deep sound reverberated through the building. A shower of dust pattered down from the overhead beams, and somewhere above them, glass was shattering. In the crypt, candles had long since gone out. The air smelled of rain and smoke and something else entirely, something old and dry. The fragment of the ledger tucked into the pocket of her coat felt suddenly like an intruder.

Ingrid pulled up short in the center of the room. Her gaze swept over the space as if she expected answers to take shape in the gloom. "We need to find a way to seal it again."

Nathan laughed, but there wasn't any humor in the sound. "You think we can find a way to bind it again? To renew the pact?"

Maris braced herself against one of the sarcophagi. "We need to use the rest of the ledger," she said.

Elena turned to face her. "You said the debt had already been paid."

"It was," Maris said. "But payment and protection are two different things."

A hush seemed to fall over the basement as the weight of her words settled over them. The air in the room felt thick, as if the house itself were holding its breath.

Maris unfastened the lining of her coat and withdrew something wrapped in cloth. She unwrapped it very slowly, revealing three separate pages of aging parchment. The pages were covered in scribbled notes and strange symbols, but Elena's gaze was drawn to the singed edge of one particular page where a darkened stain had soaked through the parchment.

"The missing pages," she breathed.

Maris nodded. "I hid them before Ingrid's people found me. I thought that by keeping part of the ledger from you, the pact would be broken." Her gaze swept over the three tattered pages. "I was wrong. All I managed to do was weaken the prison."

"You were trying to free it," Ingrid accused.

"No," Maris said softly. "I was trying to keep you safe."

"I kept people safe."

"You kept a monster fed," Nathan countered. "You knew the truth and you buried it because it was easier."

"For once, I'm glad you're lying," Ingrid said, her voice low and bitter. "You think it matters what we do to protect the city? Does it matter to whatever that thing is down there? That being under this cathedral doesn't make it part of something far older and far crueler than your precious families?" Her hands trembled as she stared at the pages in Maris's hands. "We didn't bargain. We were handed a set of instructions. We followed them without question for generations. That is, until the last daughter of Saint Agnes was buried in a vault that opened to a crypt with no door."

Elena turned back to the pages in Maris's hands. Her heart was pounding in her throat. "I need to know how to stop it."

Ingrid hesitated.

That was enough to answer enough.

Maris stepped closer to Elena and lowered her voice. "The pages say the same thing your bracelet does. The charm wasn't only a token, it was also a key. A lock. A reminder." She touched the bracelet on Elena's wrist. "Your mother told you to remember."

"Remember what?"

Before Maris could say anything else, the door to the basement opened above their heads. Footsteps pounded against the floorboards. "Elena! Nathan!"

Elena turned toward the sound. "Lila?"

She barely had time to register the change before Lila appeared in the doorway, her face pale, her lips moving in some kind of silent prayer. She looked from Elena to Maris to Nathan. "I found you," she said, her voice shaking.

Lila's hands were clasped tightly around the strap of a camera dangling from one shoulder. Her camera. Her hair was tangled, her jacket torn, her cheeks streaked with something that looked suspiciously like tears. "I followed the directions. I took pictures of the places you found, but there was something else," she managed to get out, her fingers tightening around the black box. "Something in them."

She turned the camera toward them, and Elena sucked in a sharp, unsteady breath.

The image on the screen showed the crypt, but something was very clearly wrong.

Standing behind them in the picture was a door that none of them saw.

A door with words painted across its surface in some kind of thick, wet charcoal.

B R I N G T H E M O T H E R

The basement went completely silent. Then the knocking started.