Page 91 of Amethyst Flame
Had Adley figured out how to salvage this shitshow yet?
“You want me to hold your hand, you big baby?” I asked Will. “I swear, you catch one little virus, and it’s the end of the fucking world.” Please don’t hurt anyone.
“They don’t have the solution, Mo,” he told me.
“Well, they sure as hell can’t find one unless they have us.”
“They want to use us.”
I smiled. “And we want to use them.”
“It’s a two-way street,” Oluwa said at his side, clearly quoting Adley.
But Will ignored her and kept talking to me. “They wantto controlus.”
By now I wasn’t sure who was operating his mouth—him or his many evil riders. I’d put all my money on the latter.
Although…they weren’t wrong either.
“No,” Adley said. “Not control. We want a partnership. We want collaborators.”
There was that sketchy word again. She kept talking but I heard only “blah blah blah” because my blood was pounding in my ears. A familiar electric buzz snapped along my nerves, concentrating in a dense hum of energy at my palms. But my belly quivered with a cold sludge of old, rotten hysteria, left over from the last time I’d had to blast my way out of here.
This was all wrong. Trapping him here, now,like thiswould be a disaster.
Adley was obviously confident in her recruiting abilities, but she was misreading him so badly that her calm assurance seemed pretty fuckin’ arrogant to me now. But then, she would’ve needed a massive ego to build a company like BantaMatrix.
“Will,” I said, speaking over Adley. “Let go of Oluwa.”
Adley’s inspirational monologue broke off with my interruption.
Will shook his head. “You’re the one who did this, Mo.Youbrought me here.”
“And lookit,” I said. “I’m here too. With you. Now let go of the mean lady.”
He stared at me for a long-ass moment, and I wondered—was it just one brain working inside his skull or a lot of little ones?
“Okay,” he finally answered.
And then he disappeared.
Oluwa fell to the floor as if shoved by an invisible force.
I glanced at Adley to find her mouth opened, brows down, as if confused.
Shit.He had a fucking invisibility cloak. Or at least that was what it was called in Legendelirium, where I often died in combat against anyone concealed by one.
Forewarned, I whipped back to the empty space where Will had been. I swiped my hands to command my butterflies to [map].They’dfind him.
“Imogen…” Adley said, her voice as smooth as ever. “I don’t like this.”
She was talking to the wrong person.
I raised my voice. “What the fuck, Will!”
In my vision, a thin mist of shimmering amethyst butterflies permeated the room, and there—right there!—I found a strange, vertical ripple, like a wake of movement in the sea of light and—there!—a hollow form of a tall male stalking toward Adley.
Fuck!With a [block], I shoved at him, sending a curling whirl of energy through my swarm.
