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“Shut the fuck up, or I really will kill you,” I grunted, punching him two times in the face before he managed to get a hit in to my side. I rolled away, the pain making me want to vomit.
“That’s what you’re best at, isn’t it, Cayden? What you were born to do. Just like me, you feed on the weak and grow stronger.”
“I’m nothing like you,” I gasped out.
“You fucking liar. Youareme,” Jack hissed, managing to move away from me while I was clutching my side.
I rolled onto my knees as he staggered to his feet, out of reach.
“You were born broken, and you’ll die that way. You destroy everything you touch, and that girl is no exception…you’re a cancer, a poison –a worm.”
I moved without thinking, the word a trigger that I’d never been able to control. With a roar, I closed the space between us and checked Jack hard, with all the strength that I’d use to send a defender into the boards on the ice.
But here, there were no boards to stop him as he flew backward. There was nothing at all.
His face was a picture of perfect surprise as he fell off the cliff. Time seemed to slow, and I knew I’d never forget that last look he gave me. I ran forward, acting on instincts that I didn’t know I had. I grabbed his hand and stopped his downward motion.
He swung from my grip. His hand was sweaty.
“Help us! Pull us up!” I called to my friends, and just like that, they were there.
We fell backward onto the grass, and Jack crawled away from us, coughing. Beckett kept an eye on him while I slowly gained my feet.
You fucking liar. You are me.Jack’s words sounded again and again in my head.No.I finally answered.I’m not.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” the man said from the darkness beside us.
He’d introduced himself as Nikolai. He approached, and it took everything in me not to take up a defensive stance. Trouble knows trouble, and this guy was dangerous like no one I’d ever met before.
Jack curled up on the floor, groaning with pain. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?” he spat at the newcomer.
“Just a concerned citizen and local business owner. I’ve heard all about you, Jack of Midnight Falls, a stain on the good reputation of this area. You see, I live here now, my wife lives here…my son lives here. I can’t have fuckers like you giving the area a bad reputation. And I really don’t like the competition. I have a simple solution for competition. Want to hear it?” He swooped down and grabbed Jack in a sudden burst of violent power that was awe-inspiring to behold.
He held him up by the neck. A dark tattoo on his hand spelled out a word in Cyrillic.
“Who are you?” Jack mumbled again, clearly trying to get his tiny mind around the fact that he’d just lost, maybe for the first time in his life.
“I’m thePalach– and I’m about to share with you my method for dealing with competition. Are you ready? Listen up, you can’t get this kind of hands-on practical expertise just anywhere.” Nikolai, thePalach, sounded amused by the entire scene.
Jack nodded, finally realizing just how fucked he was.
Nikolai smiled, and my blood went cold, then his arms exploded forward, throwing Jack backward, into the darkness and the nothingness beyond the broken fence. The world seemed to still for a long moment, and Jack was frozen in the air. His eyes touched mine, and the expression of surprise etched itself permanently into my mind.
Then he was falling, arms pinwheeling, into the inky darkness where the night met the black sea.
A scream pierced the air and was suddenly cut off.
I ran for the cliff edge, panic tearing through me. I paused on the crumbling edge and looked down.
There was nothing but raging dark waters below, crashing against midnight rocks.
Uncle Jack was gone.
“He’s finished, Cade, don’t fall, man,” Beckett’s commanding voice called to me, and then he was there, pulling me back.
The horror of the events of the evening washed over me, and the pain of my injury suddenly registered. I staggered to the side, and Asher was there.
We turned our shocked eyes to Nikolai, who picked a blade of grass off his cuff, seeming totally unconcerned.
