Page 22 of The World Undone

“It might be a little more difficult than that.” Charlie’s teeth snagged on her bottom lip as her eyes caught mine.

“What do you mean?” Eli asked, that muscle tic in his jaw was back again. He narrowed his eyes. “What aren’t you guys telling us?”

“Have any of you watched the news since the fire?” Haley asked, her thin brow arched. “Read a paper?” Her eyes met mine, widening slightly. “Checked social media?”

“Apparently not,” Darius said, his voice laced with gravelly impatience.

Charlie cleared her throat, turned to Bishop, then Evelyn, like they were deciding who was going to be the bearer of bad news. Because of course there was bad news. There was always bad news.

“The Guild controls most human governments.” Jace ran his thumb over his lips, as he fought for a way to frame whatever he was struggling to say. “In almost every way that counts anyway.”

I’d suspected as much, though no one had ever blatantly laid out the details as to how they managed that. Protectors and demons did a reasonably good job of hiding their tracks, but none of us were perfect. Having a hand in human governments would certainly help keep the supernatural communities flying under the radar. Especially in the age of the internet.

I nodded, urging him to continue as he locked eyes with Haley.

She exhaled, then turned to us. “Look, no use sugar coating it—you guys are all wanted.”

“Wanted?” I asked. “By whom?”

She snorted. “Take your pick. Literally everyone. You’re blacklisted everywhere—any camera so much as picks up a glimpse of you and they’ll know where to find you.”

I felt Darius tense behind me—it wasn’t a movement so much as lack of movement. It was in those moments it became abundantly clear that he was a vampire. It was the kind of stillness that came right before a predator chose when to strike.

“So leaving here is going to be a problem,” Haley said, her voice infused with a long drawl like spelling this out for us was going to prove more tedious than she’d anticipated. “If you leave, you risk bringing The Guild to our front door. That would jeopardize everything we’ve built here—everyone we’re protecting. We won’t have many chances to get this right, and once we go after one of them, we’ll have shown our cards.”

Eli shrugged. “Max can teleport. Unless the government is keeping some seriously advanced—and magical—tracking equipment secret, I don’t think they can catch her even if they wanted to.”

“You misunderstand. It’s not just your group.” Bishop scrubbed his hand over his face. I wondered how long it had been since he’d gotten a decent night of rest. I had a feeling he hadn’t had one since we barged back into his life. “It’s everyone who left that night—everyone who they think might have turned on them.” He shrugged, then shot me a quick glance. “You’re just at the top of what is a very long list.”

Charlie’s nose scrunched in sympathy. “One of the reasons the vetting process has been so extensive this week—we can’t let anyone you’ve brought in leave this place and then come back until we figure out how to handle the intricacies of all of this. There’s too much risk to the people we’re protecting here.”

“It’s propaganda, a corralling strategy,” Evelyn said. She shuffled some of the papers in front of her before stuffing them into a manilla file. She hadn’t looked at them once since we sat down. I had a feeling she had every word memorized, that she’d pored over every ounce of information she could get her hands on—she had that vibe about her. Reminded me a bit of Seamus in that way. “They’re hoping one person steps out of line and they’ll draw a perfect link back to you. Also makes sure you can’t recruit anyone else from any of the other campuses. You appear like bad guys to the world at large, and it will remain that way so long as The Guild maintains power of the media and humans in powerful positions.” She looked up at me, smiling that Eli smirk of hers. “They’re terrified of you, which is good, but it also makes them desperate. Desperation can be dangerous. We haven’t seen them pull strings to this level—” she considered for a moment, then shrugged, “well, ever, as far as I can tell. They control the human governments, keep an eye on things and make sure that the secrets of our world remain hidden, but they rarely intervene in any real way. But now, they’ve instituted a full-on hunt—with every arrow aiming for the target they’ve drawn on your back.”

“How…flattering?” My brain felt like it was working a mile a minute, trying to understand and outline all of the myriad ways this would make our next mission even more impossible than it already was. I suddenly felt very claustrophobic, knowing that I’d lost anonymity, that I’d be watched—hunted—wherever I stepped.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got your back and we’re working on ways around this. Just might take us a while,” Haley said, her tone strangely calm, like this was just another day, just another run-of-the-mill meeting and reveal. Oddly, it helped ease some of the anxiety unfurling in my gut. “We’re mostly telling you so that you don’t just leave on some secret heroic mission that will just get everyone killed—yourselves included—and because we’ll need your help calming those recruits who followed you here. We can’t have them balking now that their names and faces are plastered on every local news channel with the label ‘dangerous’ printed above their heads.” She gave me a stiff nod and smile—but a smile on her looked more like a promise of violence than friendship. She tilted her head. “I have ways of keeping them docile if needed, but I prefer saving those particular skills for the enemy.”

I found myself deeply invested in making sure none of us ever ended up in that “enemy” category of hers. She wore that same edge of violence that Darius often donned—only where it excited me on him, on her, it only reminded me how acutely dangerous vampires were.

Jace ran his hand roughly over his jaw. “We’re sheltered from a lot of things here, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t getting worse. There’ve been unexplained earthquakes and other catastrophic events happening weekly at this point. Things are not going well for humans—the secrets of our world are growing more and more impossible to keep hidden. People are disappearing, ending up dead, attacked by creatures they’ve only encountered in movies and nightmares, caught in territory wars and fights for freedom.”

My stomach clenched with a new wave of fear. I’d been so focused on my team, The Guild, hell, demons. I’d hardly given humans more than a passing thought, but of course they were affected by what was happening. How could they not be?

“Not to mention the increasing number of tears between realms that have been cropping up around the world,” Jace continued, “unregulated portals that will have consequences we can’t even begin to imagine. We probably only know about a very small fraction of them as it is. Humans are finding themselves confronted with supernatural powers and demons who are only trying to learn how to exist in this realm after escaping hell. Humans may not know about our world, or have the language yet to understand or explain what’s happening, but they’re not unintelligent.

“Even they can feel the magic changing in the air. It’s static, electric. Time is not on our side. We don’t have the resources to fight what’s coming while protecting their gentle sensibilities and world views.” He folded his arms in front of his chest, the jovial humor now gone from his expression, revealing some of that lethal power incubi kept tightly latched. He was just as dangerous as Haley—but that was the power of incubi. They pulled you in close with smiles and promises, so when the time came to strike, you were almost begging for it, laying your neck out to be sliced.

Instead of finding myself terrified by these two new acquaintances, I was excited. They were a formidable pair to fight alongside—and the stronger they were, the better their chance of survival.

“So,” Haley continued, “to protect themselves, The Guild will do everything it can to mobilize humanity against you. Humans tend to react poorly to fear. In some ways, they become even more dangerous than supernaturals. They need a target—someone they can hate when they are afraid. Right now, that target is you. And The Guild is taking care to paint it with as much precision and detail as possible.”

Eli snorted. “We’re the ones who are trying to save them—to keep the realms from literally collapsing in on themselves.”

“Yes,” Charlie tilted her head to the side, “but they don't know that. And we don’t have the power or ability to spell it out for them en masse. The Guild does. And history’s shown time and time again that those who wield that kind of power shape reality.”

“We start planning immediately then.” I clasped my hands together, trying like hell to keep the panic coursing through my body from revealing itself in the soft trembling of my fingers. I needed to be strong—this fight would be too big to tackle if I let the odds of our success weigh too heavily on my mind. “The more time they have to get ahead of this shit, to mobilize the human world and the rest of the protectors against us, the more impossible this mission will become.” I turned to Evelyn, steeling myself. I had no idea if my powers were at the level Lucifer needed them to be for his ritual. But we couldn’t wait much longer. And in the meantime, we needed to locate the stone and the nexus. “The information you have on those three council members—gather it. The more we know about them all, the better our chances. Finding that stone needs to be our number one priority. And maybe we’ll stand a better chance if we strike before they even realize we’re looking for it.”

She didn’t blink as she studied me, her expression unreadable. After a long, drawn moment, she nodded, her fingers tightening around the edges of the folder in front of her. “Once we hit them, we lose all element of surprise, so we’ll need to be strategic about where we start as well. The more time and room we give them to hide what we’re after, the more infinitely difficult this will become.”

---