Page 89 of The World Undone

The room was small, cluttered with long-ignored desks and random bits of furniture. Cobwebs collected along the windowsill, and the cloying, thick scent of stale air clung around us.

We said nothing, the four of us listening for the slightest sound or disturbance to suggest life on the other side of these walls.

All I could hear was the sound of our breath.

As one, we moved towards the door, walking quietly and quickly, with Levi leading the way. He apparently had heightened senses, so he’d be the first of us to recognize a protector’s presence.

The hall was equally abandoned, the sconces and lamps dark and dusty from disuse.

I devoted most of my energy during our relatively peaceful scavenger hunt looking for the shadow magic source.

Not that I actually knew exactly how to do that.

Max and everyone seemed so sure that we’d ‘know it when we found it’ but I had my doubts. She’d described what she’d felt when she saw the stone during Atlas and Reza’s bonding ceremony.

Still, it was hard to dig for a feeling I’d never felt before. I was just going off vibes.

But this was also our best and only chance at locating the fucking thing, so I didn’t have a better option.

I glanced at Dec, could tell that she was focusing too. When her eyes met mine, I knew she didn’t feel anything yet either. We didn’t need the mindlinks to read each other.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t here. Could just mean we weren’t close enough yet.

Either way, we weren’t leaving here until we found Amalia. If we couldn’t get the stone, the least we could do was take her out before she had a chance to reach out to the others and regroup. The base goal of these missions was to take out the council members, like dominoes, until we found the missing thing we were looking for.

I bumped into Levi, but swallowed the grunt of annoyance back.

His spine was rigid, unmoving. He had that sort of creepy stillness about him that Darius often invoked. The kind of stillness that no human or protector could ever believably achieve.

He nodded his head to the door on our left.

It took me a few seconds, but eventually I noticed a soft rustling. Then, voices, too quiet and far away for me to hear.

But this castle was clearly not as abandoned as it had initially seemed.

A spark of adrenaline flowed through me, from my head down through each of my limbs. Whether it was laced with anxiety or excitement, I wasn’t entirely sure. It didn’t matter.

We continued forward, making our way to the northwest turret, pausing inside empty rooms and closets every few minutes whenever we heard shuffled footsteps or muffled voices pass us by.

The air was thick with tension and I could practically feel the hair on my arms lifting towards it. Waiting. Too quiet. Too quiet. Too quiet.

Levi paused at the base of a spiral staircase, the walls nothing but dark stone with a few dim lights.

Dec’s eyes darted towards me, brows lifted as if to say, “This is it. Don’t die.”

I shot her a wink, a far too casual attempt at allaying her anxiety.

The climb was slow, with Levi at my front and Dec at my back.

My fingers flexed around the hilt of my blade, my other hand free in case I needed to call forward Max’s fire.

The air in the stairwell was stale and cloying. There was an almost metallic taste to it that had my spine tingling. And not in a good way.

Something was off here, wrong.

I didn’t feel the draw that Max said we would, but I could sense there was magic here, a twisted perversion of the electricity the bond to her emitted.

When we made it to a large, ornate room at the top of the narrow staircase, we filed in, slow and steady.

---