Page 91 of The World Undone

But it wasn’t just the fact that we were sharing the garish room with a zombie that had me tense. The isolation of the castle, the general offness of this place made the hair on my arms stand up. Something was very, very wrong.

There was a strange stench that I couldn’t quite name or describe.

When I took a step closer to her, it only grew stronger.

“The shadow magic,” I glanced briefly at Dec, not fully willing to take my eyes off the woman desperate to eat us, “I can smell it in her blood. I think that’s what I’m sensing, anyway.” This was all absurdly new to me and my body was still adjusting to the boost it got from being bonded to Max. “It’s twisted and rancid.”

In other words, nothing like the intoxicating thrum of magic that connected us to Max that I now seemed to crave as desperately as air.

This was a perversion of it, a distortion that rearranged and snarled it into something entirely wrong.

The stone wasn’t here, but it had been. I was sure of that, though I couldn’t exactly explain how.

Or else Amalia had been near it. Had been infected with it, somehow.

“What—” Levi’s question was cut off by a soft thud followed almost immediately by a small gasp.

I spun around, and my eyes met Evelyn’s. They were wide with shock, with a desperate realization I hadn’t quite grasped yet.

Time stood still as my brain caught up with the shift in the atmosphere.

A man stood behind her, a few inches taller.

“The dead,” he whispered, his voice cold and hollow, “should remain dead, don’t you think?”

Evelyn’s black shirt grew darker in the center, wet. And then started to move, like her heart was beating outside of her ribs.

No, not her heart.

Those were—fingers.

With a loud, wet crack, the man pulled back.

Evelyn’s knees fell to the ground, the shadow of surprise on her face, just a leftover ghost as she collapsed face down onto the rug.

The man held her heart in his outstretched hand. Her blood painted splatters up his wrist and seeped obscenely through his fingers as he studied us.

A dark, deep, almost soundless gasp ripped from Levi as he rushed the man, but the man merely teleported, from the bloody patch of carpet on which he stood, to the other side of Amalia’s bed.

Levi’s arms grasped nothing but air as he crashed into the doorway and regained his footing.

“You must be Xavier?” Declan asked. Her jaw was tight, her hands clenched into fists at her sides as she fought to keep her eyes on the man, and not on my mother’s corpse at her feet.

Amalia’s moans and wails grew more aggravated at Xavier’s nearness, and she crawled over her bed sheets, trying to get closer to him.

His lip curled as he spared her a brief glance of disgust, then he took a few steps to the left until he was just out of the reach allowed by her invisible cage.

“And you,” he glanced at Dec, scanning her from head to toe with a small grin that made my stomach turn, “you reek of power.”

A flash of greed sparked in the black pools of his eyes.

Like Amalia, he’d clearly been experimenting with the shadow magic. But he seemed far more collected, in control of himself.

Levi moved towards him, ready to attack again, but Dec’s arm reached out to stop him. She shot him a dark look, her order clear—stand the fuck down. We have work to do.

It was typical protector protocol. When one of us was lost on a mission, the rest were meant to go on. To buckle back the pain of that loss until the mission was complete and we’d been debriefed. Only then, in the privacy of our own cabins, in the company of our teams, did we ever dare to let that grief seep from our pores.

But Levi didn’t grow up around our kind. And now that I was so far removed from The Guild, I could see how callous, how impossible that request really was.

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