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My confidence is proven right.
Dev is clawing at the monster with a head that looks like a face smashed onto a tissue box and eight snakes for limbs, the same monster who pulled him through the door. My beast mate's massive nails are ripping through the other bastard's scales. Two heads are already hanging limply, half detached—probably the limbs that wrapped around his neck. A giant centipede-shaped monster charges at him, but he backhands it and sends it onto its back, where its legs uselessly struggle and squirm.
A gunshot sounds, and a purple monster whose body looks like a bunch of grapes falls from the ceiling and smashes into the floor. Chase doesn't make eye contact with me, just spins and shoots at another.
Tesq is crushing the skull of a short monster with leopard-print skin. His hands are on either side of the monster's face, and I watch in satisfaction—and a sliver of desire—as his hands smash together. Goddamn, he's strong.
Meanwhile, Uni stands in the doorway we rushed through, not fighting but whispering frantically at one of his dolls, his gaze darting in every direction.
A sliver of worry creeps into my chest that he's about to betray us, but a monster that's shaped like a heart barrels toward him. Uni’s tentacles scoop it off the ground, squeezing until it turns an ugly shade of blue reminiscent of a bruise.
Fuck, yes. We're kicking ass!
I feel confident that we'll blast through each floor of this 102-story building until we get to Barnabas and take him out.
But then a red cloud rolls across the ceiling of the room and descends on us in very unnatural columns, shooting down to engulf each of our heads. Instantly, the second I inhale, a mindless sort of anger fills me, and a psychotic craving for blood coats my mind.
I lash out at whoever is nearest to me, and that happens to be Chase. My mind doesn't register that fact, overridden by a strange, foreign need to kill that chokes out everything else. My palms ice over, and I shove cold into his arms.
Bam.
His gun goes off, and I feel a burning sensation in my left shoulder. Pain ricochets through my body and distracts me momentarily, but the all-consuming need to destroy soon rears its head and roars inside me. Almost as if it insulates me from my senses, the pounding trauma of my shoulder wound disappears, and that hunger for violence resurges.
I shove an icy hand at Chase's cheek and feel an ice spike start to form in the center of my palm. A vicious smile carves my lips upward as I anticipate blood. Lots of blood.
A surge of heat like I've never known fills the room along with an orange glow. In under a second, a river of lava surges out of Tesq's body and crosses the floor. An agonized, high-pitched yowl sounds…and the red fog around me clears. Evaporates.
The ice dagger that I nearly used to stab Chase melts, dripping down my palm as I stare, horrified, into his bright-green eyes.
His blond hair is plastered to his forehead, and his slack-jawed expression is just as distraught as he takes in my bullet wound.
"What the fuck was that?" I whisper.
His head jerks slightly, and his expression changes. He goes from wrecked to matter-of-fact in moments.
Em's taken control.
"That was a rage monster," he states simply.
I blink.
All the confidence that I just had vanishes.
I'm not sure we're going to make it through this after all.
36
ALIANA
Forty floors.We make it up forty floors, fighting through each one.
I'm sagging. My thighs are burning, and my arms are aching, and my ferocity is flagging. The wound in my shoulder doesn't bother me as much as I expect, perhaps because it was a glancing wound or because I touched my hand to it and numbed it with a coating of ice crystals that haven't melted off.
Whatever the case, it doesn't ache or throb unless I try to lift my arm, which I don't. I've tossed aside my crossbow and focused on weapons that I can use one-handed. Namely, magic and that mysterious bag of jewels. The pouch at my hip is now empty save for one final emerald, which I finger through the material of the pouch.
I cleared the entire tenth floor tossing a diamond at a group of monsters that shrank them to the size of ants that Creep took pleasure in stomping. A ruby turned the walls of one room into giant spikes, and we barely made it out of there before we were pierced through. If Tesq wasn't made of a substance as hardas stone…I can't even bear to think about the way the spikes scraped against his back as he escaped.
Jewel after jewel helped us this far…but we still have so much farther to go.
