Page 54 of Consume
He lunged from across the room on a direct path toward me.
The Saelis females wailed. They ripped their four arms at him, each tipped with needle claws. They snapped their long jaws at him filled with even sharper teeth.
Nesbit plowed through them, though, like they were still made of smoke.
Red fought her way closer in a race with Nesbit, leveling me with her fierce all-black eyes. The bones in her neck protruded at wrong angles, making her head swing.
Across the room, the door crashed open.
And Saelises—live, pissed-off ones—swarmed inside.
Chapter Fifteen
Saelises’ nails clickedagainst the metal floor. Their eyes blazed with fury with me as their sole focus. They didn’t appear to see the ghosts of the females right in front of them as they funneled inside.
Nesbit was almost upon me.
Doctor Daryl’s soulless eyes swallowed me whole as he neared. He rounded behind me to tap the wall, the cold surrounding him bristling the hairs up my neck.
The Saelis males kept barging through their dead counterparts just behind Nesbit.
I took a breath, a shallow one because the weight of the next few moments pinched the air. The flimsiest of plans formed inside my head, nothing more than brittle bones of a skeleton, but it was all I had. Ghosts I could sort of handle. It was the giant Saelis males eating up the distance between us I wouldn’t be able to survive. Maybe I could deal with both at the same time.
I had a gift, one I hadn’t asked for, but a gift nonetheless that might just prove who and what I was to the Saelises. Maybe IwasFeozva. Maybe not. But I wasalwaysme.
Ghosts did what I told them. I had to hope this hereafter place operated the same way.
Nesbit’s empty eye sockets filled my vision, nothing but angry, red craters above his bloody mouth where he’d torn out his own tongue.
“Hereafter,” I demanded, my voice wholly mine once again. “Come to me.”
A brilliant yellow light rose up behind my back, throwing the entire room into a blinding glow.
The Saelis males stopped running. Nesbit kept going.
“Go in,” I said.
