Page 148 of The World Undone

Huh. I’d unpack it later. No use getting Nash’s hopes up now if it was only a temporary reprieve.

She nodded to me once, clear understanding etched into her expression as her gaze shifted to the crowd of scrambling protectors. Not needing to be told twice, she took off, tearing into the one closest to her.

“Go,” Claude grunted, nudging his head towards the action. “We’ve got this.”

I narrowed my eyes. “You sure?”

Nash snorted. “Trust me, we’re more practiced at this than you are.”

There wasn’t much animosity in his tone though, just a stiff teasing, like he had to exercise the now-unfamiliar muscle.

I nodded, suppressing a grin as I ran back into the action.

I’d torn through four protectors before the woman, Peter’s companion, stood before me, trembling.

Her face contorted in fear and disgust as I bared my teeth.

“We had a deal,” she barked, voice raspy and trembling as she took a few steps back, vulnerable now that Peter lay in a crumpled heap at her feet, and the majority of her entourage had abandoned her for death. “Where’s your sense of honor?”

“My honor?” I gripped her by the neck, languishing the feel of her trembling in my hands. I nodded in the vague direction of where The Guild labs once stood and smiled. “I must have left it buried in my cage.”

I snapped her neck, savoring the sound.

Eli and Wade were finishing off the last scavengers.

When I scanned for the wolf, I saw him standing with the drude. He’d pulled the key from the demon’s handler, and rather than kill either of them, he…let the Nightmare go.

The girl’s body flickered between shadow and form as she studied him, her eyes rounded in surprise.

The handler at her side bent over, crumbling in on himself, hands clutched to his temple as a dark, ominous scream echoed around us.

Slowly, the drude looked more solid, less frail. And then, with a last glance at Atlas, she dispersed into a black shadow and fled from the scene.

Atlas studied the handler for a long moment—the last protector alive on the grounds.

“Should we—uh,” Wade studied the pair of them, “finish this off?”

“No.” Atlas met his brother’s eyes, something unreadable in his expression, though he looked less burdened than before. “He won’t be able to fight her power for long. He will be dead soon. She deserved to finish him off.”

“And, er,” Eli scanned the gruesome scene, hardly even flinching as Nika made her way over to us, drenched in blood and entrails, “Do we go after the drude?”

Atlas shook his head. “No, she had no control over her power in those cells. Let her go, she won’t get in our way. No one deserves to die in a cage.”

“This was certainly a much more dramatic meeting than I’d anticipated. But we’re one more council member down,” Eli said, nodding to Claude and Nash as they made their way over to us looking haggard and exhausted. “All good?”

Claude nodded, but Nash didn’t move his focus from Nika.

She was…relatively calm, minus the gorefest she was wearing. And while she was silent and standoffish, there was something different about her general affect, like she was more herself than I’d seen her.

I watched tempered hope sprout in her brother’s expression, hoping again, for his sake as much as hers, that this was not just a temporary reprieve.

Eli studied her with just as much hesitant interest.

Maybe it was the four of us together again, uniting through a portal, maybe Xavier’s power-infused blood had cured her, maybe it was nothing—just a passing calm from gorging on all that blood, a high from our success today. Only time would tell.

“You think it will actually work?” Claude cleared his throat, then turned to me. “That using your connection to Max will help you save her?”

The flutter of excitement in my stomach turned sour as I glanced at the others. I had no fucking idea. We’d either developed a plan that had the potential to save Max, or we’d all just effectively signed our death warrants along with hers.

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