Page 144 of The World Undone

I nodded, not entirely sure what else to say. My feelings where Lucifer was concerned were a tangled mess that I had no intention of sifting through any time soon. “Did you find him? Michael, I mean?”

Saif’s jaw worked as he studied his calloused hands. “I spent over a decade searching for Sayty. I was certain that she was alive, that if she wasn’t, I would know somehow—that I’d feel it. We usually die together, when it happens. When the new generation of anchors takes our power. I think my connection to the magic disappeared when she did. But I remained. And though I felt different, I thought she might be out there still, that she’d simply found a way to bind the power—a difficult art that very few have perfected.” His eyes met mine before they dropped again, a sheepishness in his stare, a guilt. “I admit that I wanted it back. That kind of power, the connection to the world, it could be intoxicating at times. Very few people are born into this world with such a clear purpose—and it was all the more unsettling to have it ripped away. It was there, and then it wasn’t. But if she was dead, it shouldn’t have disappeared—it would have gone to the next line. And since she gave birth to only one child, it shouldn’t have passed to you.”

He grunted. “It took me many years to realize that you were likely the daughter of not one line, but two. That my sister likely carried Lucifer’s child. That maybe, because you are the daughter of the two lines, I don’t know—maybe it makes sense for it all to end with you. A singularity. The workings of our world are never as predictable or tidy as we often think, but in some ways, there is a kind of beautiful symmetry to your existence. To the world we’ve broken, collapsing around us.” His lips thinned into a rigid line. “It’s unfair, perhaps—that those who had no hand in destroying it must inherit the disaster. But such is the way of this world.”

“And now,” I cleared my throat, my mouth had gone bone dry. He’d stopped searching for her, she’d been missing far longer than the ten years he’d looked. I felt the small tendril of hope dissolve on my tongue. That could only mean— “and now you believe that she’s dead?”

Saif toyed with the empty bag that held his water for a moment before he nodded. He swallowed, studied a patch of the ground to his left before his glassy eyes met mine. “I’m sorry I did not heed her wishes sooner. I thought if I found her—” he pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, “but my apologies give you nothing. I’ve spent the last years of my life trying to find Michael. And with Sayty gone, it was more imperative than ever that the world think me either dead or missing. I couldn’t have anyone after me, after the power in our line, after you. The best hope was that they blame the fluctuations in the realms on the anchor power dying out—a natural end.

“So, to keep them from looking for me or my power, better that they think me dead. It offered a freedom I’d never had before. And I used it to fulfill her last wish.” He licked his lips, a frustrated bark of a laugh pulling from them. “But of course, I failed in that too. And now it is too late, and it is you who will pay that price. Perhaps we all will. If I had found him, if we could have reversed the spell cast in the creation of the realms with all four mirrors, the chances of you surviving such a ritual would be slightly less bleak.

“Lucifer, Michael, me, you—it would be an imperfect mirror, an echo, really—but a chance. The original set survived, and though our side of the power has weakened over the years, it’s not impossible to hope that we could too, in the undoing of the ritual. I searched for years, through pockets of shadow magic and portals, but I could not find him. I wasted years held captive in some offshoot of hell, but even when I escaped, I could not find anyone who’d seen or heard from him in centuries. He seems to have disappeared shortly after the realms were created.”

He slipped a hand in his jacket and tugged, pulling away a worn rope with a large stone dangling from the middle.

As if of its own accord, my hand reached for it, my eyes locked on the strange stone, the rest of the world falling into background particles. I held my breath at the sight of it.

Power, both familiar and not, washed over me, coating my skin, diving deep into the marrow of my bones, infiltrating all of my senses until it was all I could see. All I could feel.

“Shadow magic,” I said, feeling the almost familiar pull to it. With great difficulty, I tore my eyes from it to look at Saif. “But different, somehow.”

Saif nodded, his eyes unblinking as they bore into me. “Greta got word that you were here. That your power was growing. Things have sped impossibly in the last year—things that once put in motion, we can’t return from. The fabric of our reality is collapsing—and the choices of greedy men many years ago could spell death for every living being in this realm and all others. A bit ridiculous then, that with such high stakes, and all my time searching, this is the only thing I have to give. A pendant that belonged to Michael. A family heirloom I only just recently came by. All other trails to the man himself have dried up. It is said that his blood, a piece of his power, is infused in the heart of it. Perhaps you can make use of it, perhaps it will be enough to prevent the world’s undoing.”

“Greta?” her name came out as nothing more than a pathetic croak.

A wistful expression flitted briefly across his face, but melted as he studied me for a moment. “She’s gone too, isn’t she?”

I nodded.

He sighed, then cursed under his breath. “She was the only one I was in contact with, and even then, only very minimally. She didn’t know who I was, not fully. But she sensed the urgency, and agreed to become my eyes on you. Though I’m told you did not always make that easy,” his mouth bent into that fish-hook grin again, “like your mother in that way too, I suppose.”

Silence settled around us like a cold fog.

The euphoria at seeing him slowly dissolved into dark, echoless understanding. I couldn’t deny the flutter in my chest at the possibility he’d found a way to save me. A Hail Mary in the final seconds of the game. Instead, he brought a crushing certainty that the worlds were collapsing. That I would die. That even then, the ritual might only just keep things together—a fragile possibility.

Strangely, that mere whiff of hope had made the unsettling reality only more difficult to face. There might have been a way—a way to stay with Darius, Eli, Atlas, Wade, and Declan—but it was now gone.

“So that’s it then,” I said, closing my fingers around the stone, comforted, if slightly by the steady weight.

Saif took a deep breath, watching me again, though I couldn’t tell what he saw, what he was trying to read. “Are you very scared?”

The question was a deep, aching blow to the chest, but it also held relief, a balloon of tension popping its release.

Was I scared?

I hadn’t really let myself linger on this specific fear. I’d been close to death so many times, that adrenaline and fear were impossible threads for me to unwind.

But this was different than all those times before.

I’d be willingly going to my death—I would be my own cause of destruction.

I wouldn’t fight it, not knowing what I knew now, what could become of the world if I did.

And, honestly? I was fucking terrified.

As much as I wanted to be the kind of heroic figure who could just go into the darkest night, wearing a badge of bravery and honor, with no selfishness and fear braided into it, I wasn’t. I wasn’t some forged, selfless hero.

I was just a girl who’d been born into a specific past, just the end of a story and lineage of pain and sacrifice I only barely understood.

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