Chapter Forty-Three Pax
Chapter Forty-Three
Pax
We hustled out into the bedlam that had taken control of the small town, keeping low as we weaved through the cars and trucks that had been left in the middle of the road, headlights still on and engines still running.
Doors had been left open where the slew of degenerate humans had crawled out to bend to the will of the wicked.
We slunk for the cover of the convenience store on the other side, the sky fucking alive and boiling with death above us.
A fissure ran straight through the middle of it.
From within, Kruen peered down, colossal, rising from vapor and amassing in their monstrous forms.
Their faces were void, innuendos of shape and holes for their eyes that led down into the eternal nothingness within them. A pit of darkness and despair. Fiery limbs stretching out to touch on the babel below.
They poured their inhumanities into the willing ears of the people who ransacked the streets.
Running wild. Lighting fires and bashing windows. Wielding weapons and throwing fists, unaware of who they were even attacking.
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.
The vitriol being spewed wasn’t even specific. It was just a command for complete destruction.
Some people’s skin seemed to bubble and palpitate, red streaks lighting up beneath their flesh. No question, they were fully possessed.
“They’re completely blinded. Taken,” Timothy said as we crept forward, hugging the gas station wall as we did our best to keep concealed.
“Yeah. And if we don’t do something to stop them, they’re going to pour all of this out into the rest of the world.”
Not that it already hadn’t started.
Not that we hadn’t seen it in the news reports and felt it the second we’d stepped out Dani’s door this morning.
But it would get worse. The entire world would be given to this.
“End her. She’s the one.”
Chills lifted the hairs at the nape of my neck when I heard the command uttered from above, raining down onto the heart of a man who’d been running parallel to us.
Suddenly, he straightened, rigid for one second before he shifted course.
Rising tall as he craned his neck and peered through the dingy haze that wafted through the street.
His attention immediately landed on Aria. Aria, who started to stand like she was going to handle him. I set my hand on her shoulder. “You need to conserve your energy.”
This one was on me.
I didn’t even hesitate.
I stood, lifted my rifle, and shot.
Took three bullets to take the bastard down, each piercing him in the chest, his lanky, tall form rocking as he struggled to keep coming for Aria before he finally toppled to the ground.
“Holy shit,” Keith said from beside me, and I sent him a glance.
One that warned him there was going to be a whole lot more of this. The threat was going to come at us from every direction.
“We need to move,” I said, and we all rose a fraction, still hunched over and gliding along the wall, our breaths shallow.
“End her. End her. She’s the one.”
This one came howling on the wind, and three degenerates who’d been running toward the epicenter stalled and turned in their tracks.
Two men and a woman.
They came our way like fucking zombies or some shit.
Aria stood and released her power before I had the chance to aim and take fire again. A flash of light streaked out and slammed into them. They flew back into the wall of a building on the other side. The bricks crumbled where they struck the wall before they fell in a mangled heap on the ground.
She gasped, and I could feel the exhaustion threatening to bring her to her knees. My hand shot out, gripping her shoulder, while Dani curled her arm around her waist from the other side.
In an instant, she straightened.
Buoyed.
Fortified.
“What the fuck was that?” Keith wheezed as he stared at Aria.
“She’s the one,” I said, because the Kruen were fuckin’ right. She was the one. The one who meant everything. To me. To all of us. The one who possessed the strength to see this through. “She’s the one who was sent to save us.”
“This way,” Aria mumbled, and we ducked out from behind the store and ran across the street to a strip mall on the other side.
It was the same here.
Chaos reigning.
People who’d been possessed wandering around and inciting whatever misdeed they could conjure.
But Laven were in the middle of them.
Fighting them.
Physically, because they didn’t possess any other power here.
One Laven woman screamed when a man suddenly pulled a knife out of the back of his jeans and thrust it into her stomach. Blood gushed when he ripped it out.
For one moment, she swayed before she fell face-first to the ground.
From behind, I clamped a hand over Aria’s mouth before she could release her own scream.
A shout of grief.
Besieged by the horror.
By the atrocity being meted out right in front of our eyes.
I pulled her against me, my mouth at her ear, words grinding as I said, “I know, I know, I know. But you can’t save them all.”
Her spirit flailed against that, no way for her to accept it. This burden that she’d been given.
“Ambrose. Ambrose is your goal, Aria. Your target. You end him, and you end all of this.”
She nodded frantically against my palm, and I released her and moved in front of the group. My attention darted in every direction to see if I could find a clear path to move deeper toward the middle of the town.
While shouts and screams lifted and rose. Explosions and gunshots. Complete mayhem.
“This way,” I said when I saw a break in the swell, and the five of us cut across the road and around the side of the strip mall.
Then we all froze when we saw it.
An old man wandering across the street. His body frail as he hobbled toward a woman who stood out in the middle of the turmoil on the other side.
My fucking heart seized.
Ellis.
And he was moving toward Josephine.
“Oh my God.” It was a whimper from Dani, just as Aria’s spirit thrashed.
A brand-new kind of fear tore through us as we watched him stagger in her direction.
A mutant turned, the human’s skin bubbling with the fire of the Kruen that writhed inside him, the monster going straight for Ellis.
“No!” Aria shouted just as a swell of protectiveness rose up inside me, so severe that it closed off my airflow.
I stepped out into the middle of the street, cold spikes of ice raining from the darkness that continued to pelt us from the sky.
“Ellis, get down!” I shouted as I lifted my gun and aimed.
He turned toward me, surprised by the call of his name, and I was running his way, throwing myself on top of him one second before the bastard got to him.
Curling my arms around him in the hope that I would protect him rather than hurt him as I took him down.
We hit the ground hard, and the second we did, two shots rang out.
One piercing the monster in the chest before the next struck him in the middle of his forehead.
He dropped to his knees, and I glanced back at where Timothy had stepped forward and taken the shots.
Relief surged between us, and the whole group came running as I carefully unwound myself from him.
Ellis.
The man who’d been my teacher for my entire life. The only real father I’d ever had.
I gripped him by both sides of his neck as he sat up. “Are you hurt?” I begged through my fear, though the words were harsh.
He nodded. “I am uninjured.”
Air heaved from my lungs.
“Thank fuck.”
Then Aria was there, throwing herself around him, weeping as she hugged him. “Ellis. Oh, Ellis. I can’t believe it’s you.”
Joy rolled out to clash with the alarm as she helped him to stand.
Then the energy shifted.
A whirring of warmth that blasted through the cold as he shifted toward Josephine, who’d come three steps closer.
For a few suspended moments, the two of them just stared at each other from five feet away while the savagery raged on around them.
Josephine’s stringy gray hair whipped around her weathered face. A face that was littered with a thousand scars.
The most gentle, beautiful woman. Battle worn.
The same as Ellis.
His thin, feeble frame downtrodden, flesh covered in the wounds from his years fighting the battles of Faydor.
But there was a strength beneath it.
A stoic ferocity that burned between the two of them.
Then they both stumbled forward and met in an embrace.
A fierce, unrelenting embrace as they hugged each other with the force of a thousand lives. An embrace that went on forever, no words said as they shared a moment that could only belong to them.
We surrounded them as they did, creating a barrier of protection, each of us facing out to ensure no one could get close to them.
When they finally parted, Aria and Dani moved, hugging them both and whispering their love and belief in each other.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Aria wheezed, the love she felt for them clogging her throat.
“We dreamed, too,” Josephine told her. She didn’t even need confirmation from Ellis to know that it was true.
“Many have arrived.” Awe filed Ellis’s voice as he stepped back, his expression carved in the wisdom he’d forever carried.
“More than we can count,” Dani said. “And they’re still arriving.”
“Not only our family, but I would imagine from every family that can reach us,” Aria added.
Emotion washed through Ellis, his nearly white gaze both pallid and uplifted.
The amount of time he’d spent believing we should be apart.
Living these meager lives in solitude. Without the ones we’d been purposed for.
He turned to Josephine.
His Nol.
And he took her hand. “Valeen has summoned us. Come, we must fight.”
“It’s not safe for you and Josephine to be here,” I spat. “You need to take cover until this over.”
It was bad enough when they fought within the bowels of Faydor. But this? This was on the plane of humanity. Where their mortal bodies could be defeated. Just as easily as that woman two minutes ago.