Page 60 of The World Undone

He’d teleported. How?

Just as Greta stuck the needle into her own chest, Darius gripped her head in his hands, his eyes cold and feral.

I tried to scream, to stop him, but my body wouldn’t respond to me.

Before she could plunge my blood into her heart, he snapped her neck.

But he didn’t stop there. With a sickening sound, he ripped her head from her neck, bathing the ground in even more blood.

Wade crashed through the door, brows lifting in disgust as he took in the scene before him.

“What the fuck have you done?” his voice was thunderous as he shoved Darius against the wall.

No, I tried to scream again, this time to protect Darius. The word was caught in my chest, slow and stuck like molasses.

“She’s an old lady, she wasn’t in her right mind.” Wade gave him one more push, then abandoned him there, closing the distance between us.

His hands traced my body, looking for injuries, trying to identify the source of the problem, all while he took in the horror of the room.

I saw it settle over him, reflected in his eyes as his hands held my face.

“Fucking hell,” he said, the pain in his voice cutting through my ribs like a lance.

“She was dead already,” Darius muttered. He scooped me into his arms, cradling me. Like Wade, his hands and eyes roamed everywhere. “You’re more powerful now,” his eyes met mine, and it felt like he was convincing himself as much as me, “the venom should burn off more quickly than last time, but it looks like she used a lot.”

“I don’t understand.” Wade grunted, his hand gripping at his hair as his focus darted between me and what was left of my favorite nurse. “Greta’s been against us this whole time?”

No. No, that wasn’t right.

“That wasn’t Greta,” Darius said. His fingers dug into my flesh as he held me to him. The fact that I could feel his grip, even if just slightly, gave me hope that he was right, that this poison was wearing off. “I think it was a shade.”

I narrowed my eyes—tried to, anyway—since I couldn’t formulate the question stuck on my tongue.

“They can reanimate a corpse, briefly. Legend says, if you kill them while they’re possessing someone, before they can escape into a new host, they die.” He glanced down at where Greta lay. For once, I was glad I couldn’t move my head, that I couldn’t follow his gaze with my own. His brows furrowed. “Seeing as no shadow emerged from her, I’m guessing it’s true.”

A sob lodged in my chest, my body unable to perform even that small feeling of release for me.

His hand caressed my cheek as his focus turned back to me. Where his eyes were filled with wild violence before, they held only softness now. “Greta was already dead. I’m sorry, Little Protector.”

“A shade?” Wade asked, voice quiet as he bent over Greta. “Like from Max’s cabin that day?”

Darius nodded.

A series of crashes and yells ricocheted down the hall. He spun us towards the door where Dec, Atlas, and Eli were crowding through the doorway, eyes wide with the horror of the room, all caught in the terrifying alertness that comes with being woken suddenly from a deep sleep.

They ran to me, none of them so much as taking a breath until Darius assured them that I would be fine in a few minutes—that it was the same paralysis poison some of the people found in the labs had healed from.

Charlie’s calm voice sounded from above, mixed with Bishop’s low grumble.

My eyes caught on Eli as he scanned the room, his expression slipping into panic once again when he didn’t find what he was looking for.

“My dad?” He turned back to me, and if I were standing, I’d have been knocked to my knees from the depth of fear I saw in his eyes.

I was almost glad that I wasn’t able to speak the words, to voice the grim reality into life.

Wade gripped his shoulders, squeezing softly. “He’s missing.”

13

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