🩸 A CALL IN THE DARK
Chapter 10 — The Last Bell (Season 1 Finale)
The sigil under Adrian's skin was a drum that would not stop.
It beat against his ribs in time with the heartbeat from beneath the school — a pulse that had crawled up from the understone and now hummed in the very marrow of the city.
Adrian stood on the cracked asphalt outside Valencia High while the world slept with its eyelids stitched shut. Above, a smear of cloud had stained the moon red. The air tasted metallic and old. Adriana's fingers were cold on his wrist; she didn't speak. They had learned the language of silence the hard way.
"You feel it," she whispered finally, because something needed to be said aloud. "It's closer."
The Watcher's voice curled in Adrian's head from the broken crystal they'd carried since Lucas died — a silvered whisper that smelled like smoke and old paper. It watches. It waits. It will teach by taking and by showing.
Adrian swallowed the taste of iron. The sigil flared faintly beneath his skin — a living map pointing toward the bell tower. Inside the school, behind its boarded windows and shattered lockers, the bell waited: twelve notes already cached in the foundation, one more to finish the count.
Rin's absence felt like a wound. In the basement, where the Gate had been born from mortar and memory, the echoes of Rin's last chant still shimmered like embers. They had to break the ritual before the final toll — or whatever answered the bell would not only step through but claim everything left breathing.
They slipped through a service door like ghosts. The hallways smelled of bleach and blood. Somewhere, a radio played a lullaby that wasn't human. Doors bled light. Shadows clung to the ceiling and watched. Every floor tile thudded with the same slow heart.
"Split," Adriana said. "You go up. I'll hold the south wing."
Adrian didn't argue. They moved with a synchrony that had been hammered into them by fire and taste. He climbed the stairs alone, each step a tremor underfoot. The bell tower was a hollow tooth; the bell's sway had become a living thing, small veins of sigil-light crawling along its bronze skin.
At the tower entrance, the cultists were already waiting — teachers with faces carved smooth, the principal among them. Mr. Alden's eyes were bright coals; his mouth was a seam. He stood with a brass mallet in his hand like a priest prepared to bless a grave.
"You shouldn't have come," he said as if they were late to their own funerals. Around him, students — puppets with stitched smiles — knelt in concentric rings, their chests rising and falling with the bell's pending breath.
Adrian stepped into the hollow and smelled the ironlic syrup of ritual. The bell hummed, and each hum made the sigil on his chest ache.
"You think noise will stop a heart?" Mr. Alden asked. He tapped the mallet once, testing the air. One sound answered; it was small and hungry.
Adrian lunged. The fight was a blur of adrenaline and carnage — the cultists moved strangely, like marionettes learning the motions of rage. Adriana's shout cut from below; she was shredding through students with a grace that was almost funeral dance. The twins met in the tower like two halves of a torn rune: blade and whip, light and scorch.
The bell tolled once as a gust of cold air blew through the cracked window. Dust and ash became motes of drifting faces. The mallet was raised.
Then the Watcher spoke — not in Adrian's head, but through the crystal, projecting into the tower like a lit path. You are the key and the lock, it said. Strike or bind. Blood will choose.
Adrian understood with a sick clarity that smelled like the inside of a tomb: their blood was not merely power. It was the instrument of the Gate. The bell was a resonator; the mark in his chest was the tuning fork. Every toll would pull more of him — more of them — into its rhythm until nothing remained above.
"Adrian," Adriana shouted from the stairwell. Her voice fractured. "There are wards — seals — on the bell. If you smash it, you'll break the mechanism. But the seal is bound to the Caller. You can't break it from the outside."
Rin had taught them to break, to slash, to hurt. He hadn't taught them how to anchor what they loved when the world tried to take it.
A teacher lunged with a cruciform blade. Adrian countered, halting his movement with a strike that sent sugar-sweet blood spraying across bronze. The mallet fell, the bell rang — once, a small ring that sounded like a footstep into swamp. Part of the school convulsed.
"Now!" the principal bellowed, voice splintering into many. He struck again. The second note echoed like bones.
Adriana's whip wrapped around Adrian's ankle, hauling him back. "You can't—" she began.
"You told me to stop this," he said, and for a beat her eyes flicked to the sigil, to the glow in his veins. She saw, then, what he had been trying to hide: the mark was not just a burden; it was a door.
The Watcher, patient and terrible, offered them one last calculus: One of you must anchor. One must sever the bell's voice.
Adriana's mouth made a line. The twins had both been raised on the simple math of survival: together. This new equation had only one unknown.
"We do it together," she said.
Adrian laughed, a brittle sound. "I won't let you."
"You said you'd never leave me," she said.
He did not answer. The bell tolled a third time, and the world drew a breath that was not its own.
Adriana's plan was a knife-wrap: she would sever the bell's tongue with a blade of sigil-fire while Adrian fed the mark into the bell to confuse its resonance — to trick it into thinking its heart belonged to the Gate alone. They practiced the motion in their heads — her strike, his offering. The problem was the price. The more of the mark he bled into bronze, the more of himself would stay on the other side.
"Do it," Adrian murmured.
They moved like a single shadow. Adriana vaulted, halberd falling in a furious arc. Sparks cut the air; the bell screamed but did not break. Adrian pressed his palm to the bell, feeling beneath the bronze a living hunger. He screamed the name of his mother, then Rin, then something older — the syllables the Watcher fed him. The sigil in his chest peeled like skin under flame and poured—poured—into the metal like hot lead.
Pain curved his vision. The mark's light threaded through the bell, twin-winding itself into the mechanism. For a second, the bell sang a new song — not the Gate's keening but a note of binding.
Adriana's halberd hit true. Bronze cracked. The bell shuddered. For an instant, the sound inverted — a note that tried to heal instead of rend.
The tower convulsed. Chains of demonic light snapped. The cultists howled. The mallet shattered.
They had bought themselves a moment.
But in that moment Adrian felt something inside him leave: a pressure, then the sensation of a door easing open. He tried to pull his hand back. It wouldn't come. Her fingers gripped his like iron, but the pull was deeper: a tug into cold stone and older dark.
"No!" Adriana screamed, and for the first time she was unsure of which of them she loved more: her brother or the promise that their bond could hold against the world.
"Get me out," he gasped. He felt air shift — voices from the Underrealm, like the chorus of the dead, pressing their mouths to his ears. Come. Guard. Rule. Feed. Among those voices, Rin's cut through — a single thread of memory, saying nothing, saying everything.
Adriana lashed out, severing a chain that tethered him. She pulled with every scrap of muscle, tendon and will. The tower shook. The bell split free of its mount and fell silent, its ring snuffed to a wet thud.
The Watcher's golden eyes blinked as if amused. Temporal success, it whispered. But not salvation.
Blood slicked the stone. The wards around the bell pulsed and then lay inert — delayed, not destroyed. The Gate's heartbeat slowed but did not die. The scar in Adrian's chest was a hollowing now, an opening edged in sigil-iron. He felt it: a corridor leading down.
"Adrian," Adriana begged, voice raw. The world narrowed to the rope of his fingers.
He smiled, and it was a small, terrible thing. "I can feel it," he said. "I can hear Rin… and something else that wants a name."
Adriana's hands shook. She felt in the marrow of her skin the promise he made earlier — that he would never leave. And now the city wanted to take him for a role she could not play.
"If we close it," Adrian breathed, "I'll be inside. I'll keep it from waking. I'll…"
"Don't say it." Her voice broke.
He looked at her, at the crimson smear on his palm where the mark used to be, at the bell cracked on the tower floor. Far below them, under stone and root, a heartbeat thinned into a cautious whisper.
"I'll find my way back," he promised.
Adriana's eyes shone like knives. "You better."
And then he stepped forward.
He was not dragged. He did not scream as they took him. Instead, with deliberate movement, Adrian pressed his forehead to Adriana's and let the rest of himself flow through the hollow in the bell. The Watcher sang in the crystal; the Gate inhaled; the tower rattled its teeth.
For a breath that lasted an eternity, the world stood on a knife's edge. Then the pull reversed itself, and the hole closed with a sound like a throat swallowing.
Adriana collapsed on the floor. The tower was suddenly quiet in a way that was not peace. The bell was a broken thing at their feet. Outside, the city's lights flickered as if someone upstairs had turned out a thousand candles at once.
The Watcher's voice circled laughterless. He will hold the seal. He will learn the other side. He will not be alone.
Adriana crawled to the bell and pressed an ear to the cold bronze. From inside, a faint sound came — not a human voice but a rhythm that might have been his heartbeat answering a new drum. It was distant, and it was not a sound she could stop.
She understood, with a sickness that tasted like bone, that they had slowed the Gate. They had not stopped it. The Watcher had not lied: the mark had chosen a guardian. The choice had been theirs and not theirs both.
She raised her head to the red-clouded sky and shouted until her throat was raw.
"Answer me!" she screamed to whatever slithered beneath the city. "Adrian—come back!"
The only answer was wind that smelled like old coins. The city slept on, but dreams had shifted. In a dozen homes, mirrors cracked. In a dozen mouths, new words formed that were not human.
Above the tower, somewhere beyond the torn clouds, a small, golden eye opened for the first time and looked. It blinked slowly, like a predator checking the weather.
Below, in a place where stone and shadow met, Adrian woke to a field of pale teeth and darker stars. The Walls spoke to him in a language older than guilt. And in the black distance — a silhouette with the shape of Rin's coat — stepped forward and bowed. Its face was unfamiliar. Its voice held a memory.
"Welcome," it said. "Guardian."
Adrian's hand closed around something cold and bright. He tasted promise and iron.
Outside, the last bell hung silent, waiting for the next season to toll.
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TO BE CONTINUED — SEASON 2: THE DEVIL WITHIN