Total pages in book: 117
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 562(@200wpm)___ 450(@250wpm)___ 375(@300wpm)
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.