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Another blaze of light fills the air, and a hiss I think is the phoenix’s reaches my ears.
“Nadia!” I yell as I crouch down to make myself an even smaller target. I don’t think reasoning with the girl who was once my friend is going to work, but I can’t stop myself from trying. “Don’t do this. You don’t want to hurt even more people.”
Cutler lets out a vicious laugh. As I blink furiously, I catch a glimpse of him hurtling toward another column to ram the thick blades that’ve emerged from his shoulders into a crack he’s already opened up there.
I try to focus on him and aim my shriek, but spots are still swimming across my eyes. He charges out of view.
His sneer rebounds off the high ceiling. “You care so much about saving the assholes who do nothing except hurt ‘monsters’ like us. You’re as bad as they are, trying to exterminate us. But we were ready for shit like this.”
“What are you talking about?” Jacob snaps. There’s a thud, and then a resounding crash as yet another column falls. The shudder of the floor throws me off balance.
The flames from the incinerated corpses are dwindling, but smoke clouds the room even more thickly while my vision clears again. I brace my hand against the floor and sputter a cough as the haze prickles into my lungs.
A spurt of fire lances through the wafting clouds, but if it connects with any of our opponents, I don’t see or hear any sign of it. I slink along the wall, my ears pricked and my muscles braced.
I don’t think there can be more than three or four of the rogues left: Cutler, Nadia, and one or two others who haven’t shown themselves in any identifiable way. We’re so close to ending this catastrophe—we have to see it through.
My heart thuds painfully hard against my ribs. I ease past one of the fallen columns—and a boy leaps over it, straight at me.
My shriek bursts from my throat with a startled hitch. The boy’s arm jerks as a bone fractures while he collides with me.
I roll to the side the second I hit the ground, tossing him off me. Before I can make another sound, the boy’s head wrenches backward with a snap of his spine.
My gaze darts up to find Jacob several feet away. His expression is taut and the purple, poisonous spines protrude from his forearms through his shirt.
But for once he looks completely comfortable with his ferocity. He simply nods at me and spins around to search for the next threat.
One of Cutler’s supernatural roars reverberates through the walls. The doorframe shudders in its fused state.
“You might as well give up,” I yell in the direction the bellow emanated from. “You’re not getting out of here, not alive.”
The tattooed man lets out a scoffing sound, somewhere by the smoking remains of the mock weapon now. His voice travels as he prowls through the smoky room.
“It doesn’t matter whether I get out. We left a few friends behind, along with our maker’s serums and pills and instructions. If we don’t come back, they’ll raise up a whole new army of monsters to rain hell down on you—and everyone else who deserves it.”
My heart lurches. Oh, fuck, no. Unhinged shadowbloods creating even more shadowbloods and roping them into their psychotic cause?
I don’t even want to think about how much worse things could get.
We can’t kill Cutler. Not right away—not before Andreas or Ajax can search his mind to find out where they’ve left their back-up stash so we can destroy that too.
As my mind scrambles for an answer, the former inmate heaves out another room-shaking holler and yet another. With the second bellow, the doorframe jolts a few inches, pushing back from the cement of the wall.
He’s trying to crack the whole frame right out. We can’t let him run away from us either.
An idea starts to formulate in my head. But I need my allies on board with it.
“Let me deal with him,” I shout to wherever Jacob and Sorsha are now. “Don’t burn him or—”
“As if they even could,” Cutler interrupts, and throws his voice into another booming roar. At the same moment, Nadia floods the room with dagger-sharp light.
My vision whites out, and metal groans in concrete. With my pulse thundering through my veins, I hurl out a shriek just ahead of the last place I heard Cutler.
I assumed he’d run toward the door as it starts to fall—and I was right. My scream latches onto a figure in mid-stride.
His lips part. I’m not sure I can hold him firmly enough to stop him from heaving one of his bellows at me. He could shattermybody like he has the wall.
I focus all my attention on the cord running up his spine and twist it right at the base of his skull.
