The Cursed Key

Excerpt 9

My boots scuffed across gritty ground, and darkness enveloped us. I held my hand up and let the magic warming my veins twist around my fingers. The light of it dimly glowed on the surrounding rock walls, though not as brightly as it should, as if the cold stone was leeching the brightness away.

A path of steps led downward. My footfalls echoed around us. Kael's padded feet were silent as he walked beside me, and his ears twitched back and forth, as though listening for any danger.

I stepped off the bottom and onto a flat floor with smooth stones. Behind us, a loud grinding noise shook the dark space.

Kael growled, and I wheeled around. A massive stone door settled into the floor with a puff of dust, blocking us from the steps.

I pushed uselessly at it, then noticed a keyhole. "Locked."

Kael stared at the door with lifted lips, his scrunched face revealing sharp teeth.

"I think the only way out will be to find the relic," I said.

I put my back to the door to study our surroundings. I hissed in a breaththrough my teeth. I hadn't noticed the skeletons, at first. There were dozens of them, most yellowed with age, but some fresher. Apparently, we weren't the only ones who had tried to find the key and become trapped down here.

I never planned on becoming nothing more than a pile of dusty bones in a ruin, and I didn't plan on starting, either.

Carefully, so as not to trod on any bones, I stepped across the floor with Kael trailing me. The whispers started again, beckoning me forward, tempting my soul and pulling me across the stones. Where were they coming from?

A snarl ripped through Kael. I pivoted to find the bones of the surrounding skeletons scraping across the rough stone. My startled cry bounced off the rock around us. The skeletons shifted as they stood upright, their thin and tattered clothes that draped across their frames drifting on a breeze that wasn't there.

Pale, mottled skin began to materialize and wrap around their bones, stretching on their faces like wet paper as they opened their mouths and screamed.