Page 158 of The World Undone

No.

He couldn’t have them. He couldn’t take them from me too.

“We shouldn’t have left. I’m sorry. It was reckless, and we fucked up, Max.” Wade studied me, expression filled with an anger that was a mirror to my own. “But it wasn’t for nothing. And now we think we might know where they are. We can get a team together in an hour, maybe two, prepare?—”

I shook my head, not letting him finish.

No.

No planning, no waiting. I was done waiting.

This was a desperate, poorly crafted trap that Jarrod had set for me, but it would work as effectively as he’d hoped. Of course it would.

If Jarrod wanted me to come to him, that’s what he would get. And he would watch me tear him—and any followers power-hungry enough to get in my way—to shreds.

No more negotiating, no more pretending this ended in anything but death.

I was going after them. Now.

And after I brought them back, we were going to end this once and for all, before anyone had the chance to stop us again. Before there was a chance for second guessing anything.

No more hesitation. The stakes were too high.

I took one last look at the lake, frustrated with myself that it had taken me so long to realize the truth. It seemed so impossibly obvious now.

A perfect mirror to The River Styx.

The nexus.

Power flooded my veins, my body pulsing with it, now that I was finally letting myself embrace it—giving myself over to it.

I was a vessel, if I allowed myself to be. Nothing more.

The puzzle shifted into place.

Now, it was time to collect the final piece.

32

DECLAN

The first thing I felt was pain.

The second, a strange, uncomfortable stiffness in my arms. Like they were made of some kind of thick metal, and not flesh and bones.

I blinked, or at least I tried to. My eyelids were impossibly heavy and though I’d just woken up, my body was already begging me to fall back into the painless depths of sleep.

Only, it was a ruse, because my sleep had been anything but painless. Nightmares, more real than any dream I’d ever experienced, had plagued every corner of my sleep.

I whimpered at the brief flashes of them licking at the peripherals of my memory.

Flashes of gore painted my eyelids, and my head pounded with the echo of horror-stricken screams—some of them mine, but not all of them.

I forced my eyes open, desperately fighting my body’s demand for rest. My skin ached, the touch of fabric from my shirt pure agony where it lay against my torso, every nerve rubbed raw.

There were thick tubes shoved into my arms, liquid apparently streaming both in and out of my veins.

What the fuck. Where was I? What happened?

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