Chapter 28
Attacking my guys is one thing. Going after the girls we saved is something else.
I fall.
It’s faster than flying. I go metaphysical at every floor and let gravity do the rest, dropping through concrete and steel one layer at a time, air splitting past my ears.
I hit the ICU level. The three of them are already running for Hailey and Lila’s room. I land between them in a blink.
“What happened?”
The corridor is empty. I still can’t pin Rhea. Whatever she’s doing to mask herself, it’s working.
Cassian tries the handle. Locked.
“Get back. I’m kicking it open.”
“No need.”
I step through the wall.
Hailey is on the floor in the corner with her head pressed into her knees. Crying. I unlock the door, let the guys in, then grab the blanket off the bed and crouch beside her. Drape it over her shoulders.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
She lifts her head. Eyes wide and red at the corners.
“It’s okay. You can tell us. Where’s Lila?”
The mention of her friend snaps Hailey’s gaze sideways like she’s expecting something to come out from under the bed. Talon scans the room and shakes his head at me. She’s not here.
“Hailey. Did something happen between you two?”
She finally looks at me.
“She went crazy. I know she had her quirks. She never acted like this.”
My stomach drops.
“Like what? What did she do?”
Hailey unwraps her arms from her knees and pulls the blanket aside. There on her side is an angry slash cut straight through her clothes.
“Nathaniel.”
He’s already moving. Drops to her other side, opens his kit, peels the fabric back.
“Not deep,” he says. “You’ll be fine.”
“No. I won’t.” Hailey is sobbing again. “She wanted to hurt me.”
“Why?” I ask. “Tell me what happened.”
She steadies herself. Just enough.
“Everything was fine. Then she just started staring at nothing. Talking to someone who wasn’t there. Saying she’s not weak. That she’ll prove it.” Her voice cracks. “When I tried to help her, her eyes rolled back and she grabbed the knife.”
“What knife?”
“She’s been sleeping with one ever since you freed us. She never wanted to use it. She ust had it to feel safe.”
“Why was the door locked?” Cassian asks.
“She told me to lock it before she left. Said if I didn’t stay here, she’d kill me too.”
Kill me too.
I’m on my feet before the second word lands.
Cassian and Talon move with me. Nathaniel doesn’t.
“Go,” he says without looking up. “I’ve got her.”
The three of us hit the corridor running.
“Possession,” I say. “It’s the only thing that works.”
“If she could do that, why not one of us?” Talon asks.
“Strength of will,” Cassian says.
That tracks. Lila was already fractured. Exhausted, hypervigilant, hanging on by the thinnest margin. And right before she lost herself, she was arguing she wasn’t weak. Fighting it. Losing.
Rhea picked the most vulnerable person inside the wards and used her like a key.
“We need to get to the basement.”
I grab their hands and pull.
We land at the top of the stairs. Talon catches the wall. Cassian does the same.
Rhea is here. I can feel her crawling under my skin.
“Quickly.”
Before I reach the bottom step, something hits me. Not physical. Deeper than that. A shockwave of something supernatural that slams through my chest and knocks me clean off my feet.
My back hits the stairs.
“Skye.” Talon is on me in a second, hand at my shoulder, the other behind my head. “What’s going on?”
I look up at him. “You didn’t feel that?”
“Feel what?” Cassian pulls me up by the arm. He keeps his other hand at the small of my back even after I’m steady.
They didn’t feel it.
Whatever just happened, it happened on a frequency only I can reach. That’s not good.
I lean on them for the shortest moment, then push through the basement doors.
What I find makes bile climb up my throat.
A girl stands in the middle of the room with a knife in her hand. The edge is bloody. Blood runs down her arm and pools at her wrist. Between us, the wife slumps in her restraints, head loose against her shoulder. Down her neck runs a thick red line. Dark, gooey blood spills from it onto the floor.
She’s dead.
“You fucking bitch!” the husband screams. His restraints groan as he thrashes. Lila looks at him for one breath, then back at me.
That’s when it sharpens.
This isn’t Lila. Black smoke tendrils curl around her body like reins. Her eyes are solid black.
Rhea is wearing her like a suit.
“What have you done?” My voice barely leaves my mouth. “Rhea…”
“I did what I had to,” Rhea replies through Lila’s mouth. “And now I will finish what I started.”
She lifts the knife and steps toward the man. Grabs his head with one hand, blade at his throat.
I can’t let her. I can’t let her do that.
The fear and the anger and the sick horror of watching someone else’s body work like a puppet have nowhere to go except into my power. The scythe materializes in my hand before I think to call it.
I appear behind her and bring it down in a high arc, aiming for her wrist.
And then I see Lila’s skin under the smoke.
That’s not Rhea’s arm. That’s Lila’s.
A girl who has already survived enough to break most people ten times. And I’m about to take her arm off because someone else parked herself inside her body.
The scythe wavers.
Rhea doesn’t.
Lila’s arm snaps forward and the knife sinks deep into the man’s throat.
Blood sprays.
“No!”
His body jerks against the restraints. Heels scrape uselessly against concrete. His soul flares bright and panicked, already loosening, already slipping.
He’s gone before I can reach for him.
Somewhere at the edges of my consciousness I realize that Mark is here too. He’s grown so small in his seat that he’s almost invisible. I couldn’t pay him any mind, though. Not when red blood is on my own clothes and hands.
I had the scythe in my hand and I let a man die because I couldn’t bring myself to hurt the girl wearing the body.
Fuck.
I look at Rhea, still inside Lila’s body. She’s smiling. Eyes closed, lashes fluttering, like she’s caught in the most beautiful dream she’s ever had and doesn’t want it to end.
“What have you done?” I repeat, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking. Those black eyes find mine. There’s no regret in them. Not even a shadow.
“I made things right,” she says.
My heart drops. Because even before she finishes the sentence, that smile starts stretching wrong. Pulled too thin, like Lila’s face is pushing back against whatever is wearing it. Then the shaking starts, and dark smoke curls up from the floor at her feet.
“What is happening?” Rhea’s voice. But Lila’s lips aren’t moving.
I know what’s happening.
Every single thing I tried to tell her outside is true, and she didn’t listen, and now it’s eating her from the inside out.
Right in front of me, Rhea is becoming a wraith.
“Guys!” I scream, stumbling backward.
Cassian appears at my side instantly, stepping in front of me and raising his dagger.
“Get back, Skye,” he says. “Behind me.”
Rhea screams. But the sound tears through Lila’s throat, and it comes with so much force that the girl’s body convulses.
Her spine arches backward at an angle that shouldn’t be physically possible, and for a second I’m not in a basement anymore.
I’m watching some shitty horror movie. Except the screen is three feet in front of me and the girl on it is real.
Lila’s hands claw at her own face. Nails dragging red lines down her cheeks. For one horrifying second I am absolutely certain she’s going to try to rip herself open from the inside out.
“No.” I lunge forward.
Cassian’s arm shoots out and bars me at the waist.
“Don’t touch her. She wants you. Not Lila.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. But watching Lila’s body thrash like a ragdoll while something monstrous writhes inside her makes every nerve in my body scream.
“I’m not done!” Rhea shrieks, slamming Lila’s fists against the concrete floor so hard I hear something crack. Whether it’s the floor or Lila’s bones, I don’t know. Both options make me want to throw up. “Skye. It’s all your fault.”
Lila’s skin is going grey at the edges. Dark veins are pushing through, crawling up her neck like ink instead of blood.
Like those white flowers you put in colored water and the petals show you exactly where the lines run.
Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. Two voices come out of it now.
One is Rhea’s, jagged and sharp. The other is small and broken and still human.
“We need to do something!” I shout.
But there’s nothing I can do.
My power is right there. I could call the scythe in less than a heartbeat. It would be useless. The scythe cuts souls. Right now Rhea’s soul and Lila’s soul are knotted together so tightly that if I cut one, I cut both.
Rhea slams Lila’s head against the wall.
The girl drops.
Black smoke pours out of her in a thick column. From her mouth. Her nose. Her eyes. It rises and gathers and takes shape above her body. Or what’s left of Rhea takes shape, anyway.
I’ve seen a wraith before. I know what they look like.
I remember the cold of being near one. This is worse.
Because under the smoke and the distortion and that hollow nothing of a presence, I can still see the outline of the girl who sat with me in the back of that van.
Who told me her story. Who helped me put my soul back together when no one else could reach me.
“Rhea.”
The second my voice reaches her, I know.
Whatever is in front of me, it isn’t her anymore.
Cassian moves before I do. He lunges while the wraith is still settling, trying to use the suspended moment to land first. Talon flanks wide, dagger up, circling left.
The wraith doesn’t give them time.
She moves the way the Candy Maker moved. One moment she’s hovering above Lila, the next she’s at Talon’s throat. He ducks and slashes upward. The blade connects, slicing through the smoke, and she recoils with one of those sounds that buzzes in my teeth.
She used to be his friend.
Now she wants to gut him.
He and Cassian rotate without speaking. Talon goes in from the side. His blade catches across what would be her ribs. The smoke splits and stitches itself back together a beat slower than before.
“Be careful,” I shout, dropping to the floor.
I crawl to Lila. Her pulse is faint. Her skin is ice cold, like she’s been somewhere freezing for hours. I drag her into the far corner and put myself between her and the rest.
There’s no version of this that doesn’t end badly.
I already know that. The last time I killed a wraith it nearly killed me, too.
I had to merge with my pain, tap into every piece of hurt I carried and redirect it like a weapon.
I’m a different person now, but the hurt is still there. It’s always there.
The real question is what comes after.
If Rhea turned, then her mentees turned too. Every single girl she poured her rage into. Every soul she fed on that same poison I tried to warn her about moments ago.
The scythe is back in my hand. I’m on my feet, ready to move, when something stops me.
Pressure in my chest. Not from the fight. Deeper than that.
A tingle at the base of my skull pushes past my body and touches something underneath it.
My soul knows before my brain does.
The wards are breaking.
I lock my eyes on the wraith. The guys have her cornered. Each cut takes a beat longer to close. She’s losing and she doesn’t know what she’s triggered. She’s too new. Too desperate to save herself.
I feel it.
“Guys.”
They don’t hear me over the fight.
“Guys.”
At the same time Nathaniel bursts through the basement doors and locks eyes with me.
“We need to leave. Now,” he says.
The pressure becomes a crack. The crack becomes a shatter.
I gasp like every molecule of air just left my lungs at once. The bones I used to seal this place throb in unison. The feeling ripples outward. From me into the room. Then further. Through every floor and corridor above us.
My soul knows before my brain does.
The wards just broke.
But the wrongness in my soul doesn’t stop. It keeps building. Layer over layer. Like something massive turning over underneath us.
The old radiology wing.
The sealed one.
The twelve dormant stones.
Oh God.
The shockwave from the wards bursting traveled down through the floors and hit every single one of them at once.
I feel the souls before I see them.
They come through the walls. Rhea’s mentees first. Then the others. They materialize one by one, filling the basement with the cold of a grave. The moisture on the walls turns to frost. My breath comes out white.
Cassian, Talon and Nathaniel pull back toward me. Their teeth are rattling.
“What the hell,” Talon mutters.
Too many.
That’s the only thought my brain produces. Too many to count. Too many to fight. Too many to outrun. Rhea hovers among them. I make out disfigured faces in the smoke. I think one of them is Alex.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we are surrounded, and between us and the only exit are more wraiths than I have ever seen in one place.
Cassian adjusts his grip on his dagger and steps in front of me. Nathaniel takes my left. Talon takes my right. None of them look at each other. They don’t need to.
I think about how much I’m not afraid of dying anymore.
Then I think today might be the day I find out if that was true.