Michael crouched slightly and brushed away a layer of ash and broken stone.
What lay beneath made him pause.
It was a hand.
A severed human hand, lying half buried in the ruined ground.
Michael stared at it in silence for a moment.
The fingers were long and slender, the skin pale but strangely intact despite the destruction that had consumed everything else in the area. The wrist ended in a clean severed edge, as though it had been cut away by an invisible blade.
Michael's brows slowly drew together.
"That shouldn't be here," he murmured.
The ritual circle had collapsed and the portal had vanished. Rui himself had been burned to nothing but ashes.
Yet this hand remained.
A realization slowly formed in Michael's mind as his eyes sharpened.
The summoning might have actually worked at the last moment.
If the portal had managed to connect for even a fraction of a second before collapsing, then it was possible that something had already begun to cross through.
