Page 147 of The World Undone

Ominous, but whatever.

“Count of three?” I whispered, sliding closer to Claude and Nash. I stopped, glancing back at the others. “Oh, and Nika gets to eat whoever she wants, but no one leaves here alive—can’t give them an opportunity to move their base before we ransack it. Deal?”

They grunted their assent and I beamed.

To think, a few short months ago and they’d all been so squeamish about murder.

Now, they were hungry for it. They were coming along so nicely.

“One, two,” I grabbed Claude’s arm in one hand, and Nash’s in the other. He kept hold of Nika. “Three.”

I shifted the four of us across the grounds until we were two feet behind Xavier.

Claude sliced a thick line through his palm the moment he was steady enough to do it, before grabbing my hand and stabbing it with more force than was probably necessary.

Probably should’ve warned Eli about that.

Nash did the same, wincing when Nika lashed out from the pain.

It took less than a breath, but Xavier spun around, face contorted with rage. The moment he noticed Claude and Nash whispering—all of our palms held together a few inches from him, our blood somehow smearing and staining the air, a transparent and macabre painting—that rage morphed into the slightest twinge of fear.

“Oh no you don’t,” I tackled him to the ground just as he shifted, contorting and moving through space with him.

But while he was bloated with power that didn’t belong to him, he was less practiced in teleportation than I was, and clearly unaccustomed to having a passenger.

We flickered from location to location around Guild grounds, like a lightning bug visible only every few feet.

The shifts were uncomfortable and straining, and I struggled to catch a breath. The moment I started to feel my body again, we were off to somewhere new.

It didn’t take long before I wrestled him back to where we started, where a portal flickered in the air, an invisible flag in the wind.

“We’ve never made one like this before.” Claude studied it, the portal flaring and swirling now like a tornado was caught inside. “Not exactly sure where it will take him, what it will do to him.”

“Don’t care,” I grunted.

Before I could shove him forward, Nika sank her teeth into his neck, draining deep, thick pulls of his tainted blood.

The three of us tried to wrestle him from her grasp, but we were fighting her—in the middle of a feeding frenzy—in addition to Xavier’s erratic, desperate strains to get away from us all.

His face paled, the dark threads that had blown out his pupils, slowly dispersing, until all that I saw was the unguarded, feral fear. He was dying.

I had no idea what his blood would do to Nika, but she was ravenous over it, and no matter how much we fought to extricate her fangs, we couldn’t.

When she finally let go, he grew limp and heavy, like she’d drained more than just his blood.

Before he had a chance to heal or react, I shoved my hand deep into his chest cavity, savoring the feel of warm blood drenching my skin as my fingers closed over his heart. I ripped my arm back and maneuvered him towards the hungry portal. “He’ll be dead regardless, let the shadows decide his fate—they’re owed their own revenge for his crimes.”

Xavier’s eyes were wide and unseeing as he fell back, lips rounded in a noiseless scream as his stiff fingers tried to hold onto me now instead of push me away. Claude pulled back his hands, carelessly breaking several fingers in the process. In a single blink, he was gone, his limbs swallowed into the hole at angles that made me wince.

I held the steaming heart in my hand for a moment longer, before tossing it in after him.

The portal rippled with an iridescent flare, like the veil was extending its own form of gratitude for the sacrifice.

Nash and Claude were already working to close it, their brows caked in sweat from the effort.

“Go have fun, Nika” I said, moving to help them. My eyes locked on hers. “But the ones we came with are off limits.”

Her mouth hooked into a grin, her eyes narrowed with a different kind of thirst than I’d seen in their depths before now—she was hungry for revenge, no longer clouded by the feral bloodlust that had been controlling her. As if the council member's blood had sated what couldn’t before be sated.

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