17. Eli

17

ELI

" B e careful." Max pressed her lips to mine.

I nodded, soaking in the last few moments of her.

"We'll be fine," Dec said, crushing Max to her in a hug. "As soon as we're there, we'll send a confirmation through."

Levi sighed, clearly annoyed with the farewell processional. "For fuck's sake, we're all going to be back here in less than two hours. This doesn't exactly warrant tears and parting gifts, does it?"

I swallowed back my annoyance, not exactly pleased that I'd been saddled with him and Evelyn for this mission. But even though I didn't know him well, I recognized the waiver of uncertainty in his voice, the way his eyes kept darting about, like he was already on high alert, expecting an attack before we even left this little safe haven.

Was he going to be this jittery and prickish the whole time?

Evelyn squeezed his shoulder, a stern look on her face—both comforting and chastising him.

Fucking hell, was it too late to swap in for Wade's group?

Dec was my saving grace. I took a step closer to her, wrapping my hand around her arm as Evelyn and Levi moved in to do the same.

With a final squeeze, Max pulled back, her jaw tight as she did everything she could to swallow back the anxiety so evident in her eyes.

My eyes locked onto her, burning every sharp line and soft curve into my brain.

She'd be fine. We were all going to be fine.

The four of us in my group were up first.

According to Evelyn and Levi's intel, the council members were never all together—except for their bi-annual meetings. Safety measures apparently.

But with shit as chaotic as it was, there would be no bi-annual meeting this year. Instead, they were strictly keeping to the no-more-than-two-members-in-the-same-place rule, convening full meetings with each other via proxy and phone only.

And while they usually kept to their own homes and lives when they weren't in session, they'd spent the last year dividing their time between various Guild stations around the world.

We were heading to a small contingency satellite a few hours outside of London.

Evelyn was certain European Headquarters would be vacant, that they'd have pulled out most of their protectors after Max's pyrotechnics, fearing a repeat. Instead, they'd become even more scattered, small pockets of teams and researchers spread throughout their complex network of safehouses.

According to Evelyn, this particular campus was one of the council member's personal favorites—being only an hour's drive from their lavish home.

"Ready?" Dec's eyes met mine, sharp and clear. It would take us quite a few jumps to get all the way there, and we'd be taking turns shouldering the brunt of the work.

I wasn't too worried about it though. Outside of Max, Dec had the strongest handle on teleportation. So if she couldn't get us there, then the mission was cracked before it could even get started. Once we were there, we'd open our mental link long enough to confirm we'd made it, then shut it down and go to work.

Get in, get out, we'd be back at The Lodge in no time. Clean, efficient, planned.

As well as something like this could be planned anyway.

After three days of arguing, we'd all decided it was best to only communicate via the link when we arrived, when the mission was done, if we'd found the source of shadow magic, or if one of us was an inch away from death and in desperate need of backup. Otherwise, it would be too much of a distraction, all of us worrying about each other. It wouldn't be good to spread our focus out across the world when we were diving into something so dangerous, so important.

We had one shot at this and if it didn't work—well, we were out of ideas.

"Ready." My focus latched onto Max again, her dark eyes the last thing my vision held onto as the world around us warped and dissolved. A swirling abyss of golden brown that I'd happily drown in.

Six jumps later, and we were lingering somewhere on the east coast. My chest tightened, but it wasn't altogether unpleasant. I'd grown so used to teleporting, our strength growing exponentially the more we worked together, pushing and pulling together, that it hardly affected me anymore.

Mostly, I was just keenly aware of the fact that this was the farthest away from the group we'd ever been, in all of our training.

I closed my eyes, feeling the warm hum of the bond, focused on the feel of it until my body was almost convinced that Max and the others were here with us now.

Dec ran her hand unconsciously over her arm, where I knew her bond mark was etched beneath the fabric, her tight expression softening slightly, like she was making sure she could feel them all too.

Evelyn looked considerably more worse off. Her face was pinched, her hands clutching her knees as she fought to suck down a fresh breath of air.

A bolt of sympathy struck me before I could reign it in. I remembered that feeling well—the unpleasant and uncanny strangeness of your body emerging into existence from nothing. It went away, eventually. Or maybe we just built up a callus to it over time.

Levi looked mostly unphased, which annoyed me even though I knew it shouldn't.

We'd spent the last week practicing with them. Teleporting sometimes up to thirty times a day, until they had built up a near-immunity to the experience.

Ripping yourself through space had a hell of an impact on the body.

Before I could second guess it, I set my hand awkwardly on Evelyn's back, rubbing a gentle, meant-to-be soothing circle on her back as she regained her bearings.

Her muscles tensed under my touch and she froze. When she stood, finally, I saw that her eyes had glazed over a bit, as she muttered a muddled "Thanks, Eli. I'm okay."

"Er," I pulled back, cleared my throat, realizing this was the first time I'd initiated contact with her in years. I turned to Dec. "The big hop across the pond is next. You ready, or do you want a minute to psych yourself up?"

Dec pulled one of her arms across her chest, leaned into the deep stretch, then did the same with the other as she scanned the empty coastline around us. I knew the others wouldn't recognize the fear underpinning her otherwise confident expression. This was the biggest jump. We'd each tried it several times, and Dec and Max were the only ones who'd managed it without rematerializing in the middle of the ocean.

And even then, they'd only succeeded in that twice while carrying passengers.

"Another minute or two, then I'll be good." She bent at her waist, stretching her back and her legs, then sat down, eyes closed, focusing on visualizing exactly where she wanted to take us.

"Cool." I kicked at a small mound of sand, suddenly aware of the fact that while she meditated and centered herself, I was more or less left with the company of Levi and Evelyn.

For once, Levi looked as uncomfortable as I felt, his gray eyes seeming to land everywhere but in my general vicinity.

Evelyn's hands trembled softly at her sides, but other than that, she seemed one hundred percent back to the cool, confident protector persona she always channeled.

After a long, tense moment of silence though, she dropped that mask, her eyes filling with an emotion I couldn't quite decipher as they ping-ponged between me and Levi.

"I'm glad we're doing this together," she whispered, her voice taking on a soft tone I hadn't heard in years. "I can't tell you how happy?—"

My spine tingled at the nostalgic familiarity of it, and I clenched my jaw, frustrated that some small sliver of my brain still missed it—still missed her. After everything.

Levi cleared his throat, muttered an embarrassed, "Mom, we'll be fine."

"I know it's just, if something happens, I don't want to leave things—" Her voice cracked, and I averted my eyes, unsure what to do with this strange version of her. We'd spent months in the same place, and she'd never once tried to crack through the armed wall I'd built up. She'd respected my wishes, and during our preparations for today, she'd kept things professional. Removed .

We hadn't been jovial with each other, exactly, but I'd grown almost used to the cold, respectful, colleague-like rapport we'd built up over the last few days.

This? This I had no fucking clue what do with.

Levi shifted, clearly as uncomfortable as I was. "Stop worrying. It's going to go just as planned."

She set her hand against Levi's cheek, the pure love and adoration that radiated from her face as she studied him shining so brightly, I could practically feel it heating the side of my exposed face. "I know. I know. I just, I just want to make sure you know that if things don't go well, if something happens—that I love you." Her gaze turned to me. "Both of you. More than anything in this world."

She dropped her hand from Levi, took a step towards me.

My heart beat loud and hard in my chest.

I couldn't bring myself to meet her eyes, but a heated anger tore through my body. I fought it down.

I needed to focus. Why the fuck was she doing this right now? Of all times?

Did she have a death wish? Did she want to throw me off my game—the thin veneer of professionalism I'd carefully and artfully perfected to get us through this?

Of course this was happening. We were heading into what was quite possibly the most dangerous, important mission any of us would ever be on, and she wanted to do this now?

For a moment, her hand floated in my peripheral vision, like she was building the courage for something, a muscle memory that was caught halfway between remembered and forgotten. But then, ever so gently, she pressed her palm to my cheek, the warmth of her skin against mine made more noticeable by the chilly breeze wafting along the coastline.

"You need to know, Eli, that I would never have left you willingly. I never meant to hurt you. Or Seamus. But I met someone. It was a one-time thing, could never have been anything more, but I got pregnant and—" she paused, and I could hear her fighting to maintain control over her voice, "I know you might not understand, but I was protecting you both—you and your father." I tensed under her touch, but for some reason I didn't step away, didn't shove her hand from my face even though half of my brain screamed at me too. The other half remembered this warmth, this sense of safety. "You've realized by now that Levi is—" I met her eyes briefly, finding them narrowed as she searched for a word, "different. More than just a protector. I had to keep him safe. You have to know now what The Guild would have done to him if they'd known the truth. And I didn't want you and your father touched by their rage, their punishment, just by association. So I left. It was the only thing I could think to do. But I didn't leave you because I wanted to, because I chose Levi over you. You're both my sons. I love you both more than I can ever begin to explain. I thought I was saving you both. All three of you."

I couldn't bring myself to say anything. My traitorous throat was suddenly clogged, and I saw Dec's shoulders shift at my feet, an awkward bystander to this impromptu confession.

She wasn't breathing. Neither, I was pretty sure, was Levi.

I could feel how suddenly uncomfortable he was, because his shriveled posture, and diverted eyes, I knew, mirrored my own.

Evelyn dropped her hand, glanced between the three of us and shook her head, sniffling slightly as she rapidly blinked away the moisture filming her eyes. "Right, sorry. I just couldn't leave that unsaid for another moment. Not when we don't know what the events of today might bring."

"But you came back," I said, the words ripping from my lips without any permission from me. I heard the hurt in my voice and I hated myself for bleeding in front of them. Still, now that the Band-Aid had been ripped off, I could do nothing but let the wound weep. "To The Guild, I mean. If you really thought Levi would be in danger, why did you come back? And never mention any of this to me?"

Something unrecognizable passed over her face, and Levi stiffened, fingers digging into his thighs like he could teleport himself from this spot if he just focused hard enough on it.

"I remained threaded through The Guild—occasionally taking on missions when it suited. And then, when Levi was older, I came back in a fuller capacity. He could mask his—abilities," a small, sad grin hooked the corner of his mouth, "and I told The Guild I wanted back in."

Her familiarity with Charlie and the others tugged at something in my brain. "You've been spying since then, haven't you? Working against The Guild?"

She straightened, something like pride lifting her chin as her gaze met mine. "I have. And because I'd proven myself loyal to The Guild, over the years, they allowed my discretion with respect to Levi. I told them I trained him on my own, that he operated best independently. It's why he's never been to the Academy or worked in an official capacity with any single team."

I shot a glance at him. "Any chance you're going to tell me what the fuck it is that you are?"

He grunted, shook his head.

"Didn't think so." Fuckhead. I turned back to her. "But when you rejoined, you still never told me this, never told dad—" my voice caught on that word. Watching my dad suffer from that heartbreak for so many years, why the fuck wouldn't she have just told him the truth? He would have chosen her over The Guild in less than a heartbeat. "You could have told us."

Her expression softened, jaw still tight like she was trying to keep back a wave of emotion. "Maybe. But your dad was high up in The Guild. And you—" she exhaled, "you were too, Eli. I didn't know where your loyalties lay, couldn't risk—" she glanced at Levi. Couldn't risk him. "And when I tried to establish some kind of relationship with you, you so clearly didn't want that."

"So it's my fault?" My fists were clenched so tight, I could feel my skin parting for my nails.

"No," she pinched the bridge of her nose. "No, of course not. None of this has ever been your fault. That's not what I meant. You hated me. For hurting you. For hurting your dad. It was just easier to let you. Hate can be a powerful tool, a weapon for protectors. If I couldn't have the kind of relationship with you and your father that I wanted, at least I could provide you with that. A source through which to siphon your rage and bring you two closer together. You had each other. That was all either of you really needed."

"You have no idea what I needed."

Silence fell over us all.

My chest was tight, my stomach nearly ready to retch as I parsed through all of this, reframing the last twenty years of my life through this lens. I couldn't tell if I hated her more than I did before or if I wanted to say ‘fuck it' and hug her.

Either way, I was ready to vomit.

"I can't," I shook my head, taking a few steps back, "I can't deal with this shit right now." I cleared my throat, stared out at the crashing ripples of waves until I was sure I wouldn't start fucking crying right here, right now, "I need to focus. We need to focus. This," I took a deep breath, gestured aimlessly between us, "this is the past. It doesn't matter right now."

"Right," Evelyn said, her voice soft, so much more fragile than I'd ever remembered it being, "you're right. I'm sorry. This—this was. I'm being selfish. I'm sorry, Eli."

Declan stood up, cracking her neck as she moved to stand by me.

Evelyn jumped, like she'd forgotten about Dec's presence entirely. A blush crept over her cheeks and her stare held firmly on the ground by her feet.

Dec's hand found mine and squeezed.

Warmth spread through me at her gentle, steady presence.

For most of my life, she'd been this for me.

She'd been here . At my side.

I squeezed back, centering myself, focusing on the bond that connected me to my team. They were the reason I was here. The reason I was freezing my ass off on some sad beach, ready to save the world.

Try to, anyway.

I'd deal with the Evelyn and Levi shit later.

If I wanted to.

But also, it was maybe okay to just—not. To just let things lay how they would. It was okay we weren't close. It didn't matter.

I'd spent so long hating my mother, letting her abandonment shape so much of how I viewed the world, my relationships—just, everything.

And I'd let that hatred overshadow the truth. I had a family. One that I loved. One that was there when I needed them, through it all. One who saw every side of me and still wanted me for their own.

Six had been there, cushioning that pain even through my angstiest years.

If I wanted to mend things with my mom, to open this cesspool of pain and swim through it, searching for anything salvageable, I could do that later. But I didn't need her. Or Levi. Not anymore. I had everything—everyone—that I deemed essential already.

I squeezed Dec's hand back, then cleared my throat, shoving any residual emotion away. "Ready?"

She winked at me, then nodded to the others. "Let's go."

Dec got us over without an issue, and after a brief rest while the other teams started their jumps, I handled the final few, significantly shorter jumps.

Turned out, aiming was a lot more difficult when we weren't trying to teleport towards Max. Visualizing was key, but it was almost impossible to visualize a place neither Dec nor I had been to before.

It had become surprisingly intuitive recognizing when Max or one of the others was pulling for power. Like a switch, or wave of energy that I could interpret once I knew to look for it.

That was good. Channeling her fire and teleportation power would be more of a breeze during this tandem attack than I'd initially thought it would be.

I bit down on the flare of excitement. This would be a success. I could feel it in my gut.

I sent through a quick confirmation to Max, then Dec and I focused on shutting down the mind link, closing that part of connection. It would make it easier for us to concentrate, and easier to focus on and pull her power when we needed to.

Once we were a mile out, according to Evelyn, who had a much better directional radar than she'd passed down to me, we stopped teleporting. It was time to wait for the others to get to their locations before we started the—hopefully relatively silent and quick—ambush.

Like Headquarters, this location was surrounded by a forest—trees and hills lined the path we carved.

As similar it was though, it smelled different here. Fresher, crisper.

How far were we from a town? From people?

Headquarters was relatively isolated, but this was next level. I could taste the brine of the sea on my tongue.

"You're sure this is the spot?" I asked. It was hard to imagine evil doings unfolding in such a beautiful place. But maybe that's what made it a smart choice.

"Positive," Evelyn said, her steps sure and steady as she led us forward. "Just a little bit longer and we're there."

The rest of the trip was spent in silence. Partially because we were aiming for stealth, but mostly because I was still reeling from her confession, as much as I'd tried to shove it away.

My relationship with Evelyn and Levi had always been a tense one—but there'd been a simplicity in that tension. I hated them and they knew it. Our interactions were uncomfortable and, in Levi's case, a little heated, but they weren't unpredictable.

This new information could change that dynamic if I let it, could complicate things I wasn't sure I wanted to complicate.

Did I want her in my life again? Beyond just as a partner in this mission?

And Levi—did I really need another brother when I already had Wade and Atlas?

I didn't need a family, but maybe forgiving them was worth it—would release something knotted and snarled inside of me. And maybe it could do the same for my dad.

"This is it," Evelyn said, her voice hushed as she ducked behind a particularly brambly tree.

I shook my spiraling thoughts away and stepped next to her. Before I could overthink it, I grabbed her hand, giving it a soft squeeze when her eyes met mine.

She exhaled, lips quivering in a hesitant smile as she squeezed my hand back.

It wasn't much, but it was all I could give her right now.

My heart hammered against my chest, calming just slightly when I felt Dec press up on my other side.

"Fucking hell," she said, her accent thick, like being back on this continent unconsciously pulled it out of her. "Of course their low-key rendezvous point would be a fucking castle."

Castle wasn't an exaggeration either.

The grounds were wild and unpolished, grasses and wildflowers competing for space in every direction we could see. But the building was solid, sturdy.

It appeared to be made of stone, the lines not entirely perfect or symmetrical, but worn in over time, visible divots carved out that I could identify even from here.

And there were four towers attached to the behemoth structure. Or maybe turrets? I wasn't sure what the official name for the cylindrical add-ons to a castle were, but they were there, protruding and castle-like.

Dec's eyes darted briefly to Evelyn. "Do we know where she'll be?"

Our target was a council member named Amalia. If we were lucky, her co-council member and part-time fuckbuddy, Xavier, would be with her too.

Two for one, my kind of deal.

Evelyn's posture was rigid, her attention focused as she studied the grounds in front of us. Any lingering emotion from the conversation earlier had long dissolved away, leaving behind the confident, borderline arrogant persona I was much more familiar with.

Good.

As cold as she could sometimes be, I couldn't deny the fact that she was one hell of a protector. And that was not even including the extra dose of badass required to be secretly spying on the organization she'd been steadily rising in for decades.

It was the version of her that we needed today.

"They could be anywhere, but the largest suite is situated on the northwest turret." Turret. Fuck yeah, I was right. "Can't guarantee that's where she'll be now, but I'd bet my best blade that she's taken that room for herself. Amalia is," she paused for a moment, eyes narrowing as she searched for a word, "lavish."

"So how do we get up there without anyone noticing?" Declan scanned the vicinity. "I thought there'd be more people out and about."

Evelyn turned to Levi, a silent question scrunching between her brows.

"There's definitely no one outside, but let me go in first, I'll signal back if it's open."

"Why—" I started, but a sharp glare from him had me swallowing the question I knew he wouldn't answer.

The Plan.

This was part of the plan, and it was best to just go through with it as we'd prepped.

Dec and I were the ones teleporting, which meant we were necessary for getting out of this. Apparently, Levi was the expendable one.

So we waited for him, the three of us silent and tense while Levi casually strolled up to the castle and then, eventually, climbed the wall, hands and feet seamlessly finding the divots and handholds like he'd been rock climbing this wall his entire life, until he reached a black, weathered window.

Declan vibrated next to me, but she didn't look scared. Her face was focused, ready.

The waiting around was the difficult part.

I felt that too, deep in my bones.

Sometimes stillness was the most difficult part of the job.

Evelyn hadn't so much as taken a breath since Levi disappeared through the window, her anxiety practically clawing at my ribs. He might have thought of himself as expendable, the best to take risks, but she did not.

Did she ever worry so intensely about me ?

I shoved away the selfish thought before it had a chance to grip me.

A pale hand dipped back through the window, waving us forward.

She exhaled, body sinking in relief.

And I found, surprisingly, that mine did the same.

As annoying as he was, I didn't want the fucker to die. And not just because his death would signal more complications than we'd anticipated.

I grabbed Dec and Evelyn's hands, and pulled them in one final jump to the room.

Precision was easier when I had a thing to visualize.

We landed, all of us still on our feet, in front of Levi.

The room was small, cluttered with long-ignored desks and random bits of furniture. Cobwebs collected along the windowsill, and the cloying, thick scent of stale air clung around us.

We said nothing, the four of us listening for the slightest sound or disturbance to suggest life on the other side of these walls.

All I could hear was the sound of our breath.

As one, we moved towards the door, walking quietly and quickly, with Levi leading the way. He apparently had heightened senses, so he'd be the first of us to recognize a protector's presence.

The hall was equally abandoned, the sconces and lamps dark and dusty from disuse.

I devoted most of my energy during our relatively peaceful scavenger hunt looking for the shadow magic source.

Not that I actually knew exactly how to do that.

Max and everyone seemed so sure that we'd ‘know it when we found it' but I had my doubts. She'd described what she'd felt when she saw the stone during Atlas and Reza's bonding ceremony .

Still, it was hard to dig for a feeling I'd never felt before. I was just going off vibes.

But this was also our best and only chance at locating the fucking thing, so I didn't have a better option.

I glanced at Dec, could tell that she was focusing too. When her eyes met mine, I knew she didn't feel anything yet either. We didn't need the mindlinks to read each other.

That didn't mean it wasn't here. Could just mean we weren't close enough yet.

Either way, we weren't leaving here until we found Amalia. If we couldn't get the stone, the least we could do was take her out before she had a chance to reach out to the others and regroup. The base goal of these missions was to take out the council members, like dominoes, until we found the missing thing we were looking for.

I bumped into Levi, but swallowed the grunt of annoyance back.

His spine was rigid, unmoving. He had that sort of creepy stillness about him that Darius often invoked. The kind of stillness that no human or protector could ever believably achieve.

He nodded his head to the door on our left.

It took me a few seconds, but eventually I noticed a soft rustling. Then, voices, too quiet and far away for me to hear.

But this castle was clearly not as abandoned as it had initially seemed.

A spark of adrenaline flowed through me, from my head down through each of my limbs. Whether it was laced with anxiety or excitement, I wasn't entirely sure. It didn't matter.

We continued forward, making our way to the northwest turret, pausing inside empty rooms and closets every few minutes whenever we heard shuffled footsteps or muffled voices pass us by.

The air was thick with tension and I could practically feel the hair on my arms lifting towards it. Waiting. Too quiet. Too quiet. Too quiet.

Levi paused at the base of a spiral staircase, the walls nothing but dark stone with a few dim lights.

Dec's eyes darted towards me, brows lifted as if to say, "This is it. Don't die."

I shot her a wink, a far too casual attempt at allaying her anxiety.

The climb was slow, with Levi at my front and Dec at my back.

My fingers flexed around the hilt of my blade, my other hand free in case I needed to call forward Max's fire.

The air in the stairwell was stale and cloying. There was an almost metallic taste to it that had my spine tingling. And not in a good way.

Something was off here, wrong.

I didn't feel the draw that Max said we would, but I could sense there was magic here, a twisted perversion of the electricity the bond to her emitted.

When we made it to a large, ornate room at the top of the narrow staircase, we filed in, slow and steady.

The room was adorned in golds and rich shades of green. The curtains around a large gold-framed bed were made of a heavy velvet-like material, and the knickknacks lining the shelves signaled a lifetime of meticulous curating and collecting.

Still, as lavish as the decor was, the air was rimmed with floating dust particles, like it hadn't been cleaned in weeks.

A small cough pulled my attention back to the bed.

The bedding was so thick, piled high with blankets and more throw pillows than one piece of furniture could reasonably hold, that I'd almost missed the frail figure sitting amongst them.

Dark clumps of muddy-brown hair were gray at the roots and patchy, as if several sections had been ripped from the pale, blood-crusted skin of her scalp, and her blue eyes looked marled with black, as if someone had spilled a few drops of ink in their depths.

She coughed again, and sat straighter, squinting like she couldn't properly see us, her nostrils flaring slightly as if to catch our scent.

"Who the fuck is that?" I whispered out the side of my mouth, but the woman clearly heard me.

Her head turned to me and she gripped the bedding, relying on its bulk to help lift her up.

One thin, pale leg appeared around the side of the bed, then another. After a few moments, she straightened herself up and took a few steps towards us.

"Amalia?" Evelyn's expression was one of horror as she watched the frail woman move towards us. The closer she came, the more unwell she looked. Bruises and half-healed wounds covered nearly every inch of her, and dark veins bubbled against her papery skin, like every inch she moved pushed them closer to the edge of bursting. "What the hell happened to you?"

Amalia?

This was the scary council member we were here to shake down for powerful shadow magic?

She looked a breath away from passing out.

"Evelyn?" The woman winced, her voice little more than a soft croak, "You're supposed to be dead."

Levi shifted further in the room, standing between the frail woman and our mother.

I resisted the eye roll threatening to escape. This woman was not a threat.

"Well, obviously I'm not. What happened to you?" she asked again. I took a few steps forward while they shuffled awkwardly through small talk, searching amongst the cluttered shelves for anything that might possibly resemble the stone we were after. Amalia was clearly a pack rat, but of the fanciest variety. The place looked like a museum, like she'd surrounded her deathbed with a shrine—an attempt to carry the things that mattered most to her into the next life, perhaps. The result was just cluttered and gaudy. "Is this from the shadow magic?"

The woman's lip curled at that. As she shifted, a sharp metallic clang rang through the room.

When I spun back towards her, I noticed something I'd missed initially. Her small, veiny ankle was clamped tight to a large, thick chain. She tugged and shifted against it, her eyes rolling back in her head slightly as some sort of fit took over.

Spit flew from her chapped lips as she hissed and struggled against the restraints, her arms outstretched as if she could pull Evelyn to her if she just reached far enough.

The effort did nothing but leave blood trailing down her foot. The floor was littered with slivers of skin that had shed away from her ankle being rubbed raw.

My stomach tightened and I dropped a small trinket I'd picked up off a shelf onto the floor. This scene was all too familiar now, all too hopeless.

"The shadow magic," I whispered, leaning back until my eyes met Dec's. "She's been tainted by it," I swallowed back the annoying rush of bile threatening to tear through my throat, "like my dad."

"Oh Amalia," Evelyn took a step back, her face a few shades paler than usual, "you reckless, reckless woman."

The frame of the bed groaned and strained as Amalia pulled towards her.

Like Levi, I found myself inching closer to the woman, putting myself between her and Evelyn, who she so very clearly had a craving for…well, eating, probably.

I bit back my disgust and reached for Max's fire. I wouldn't use it unless I absolutely had to, because doing so meant the others wouldn't be able to. But I kept my awareness of it clear in case Amalia got loose.

The bed was sturdy, reinforced with metal and bolted to the floor.

"Who tied you here?" Levi's voice was metallic and harsh.

Amalia was beyond conversation, overcome with hunger at the temptation of so many of us. I'd watched Seamus get to this point more times than I could count. I knew we wouldn't be getting a word out of her now. Not until she'd had something to eat.

But it wasn't just the fact that we were sharing the garish room with a zombie that had me tense. The isolation of the castle, the general offness of this place made the hair on my arms stand up. Something was very, very wrong.

There was a strange stench that I couldn't quite name or describe.

When I took a step closer to her, it only grew stronger.

"The shadow magic," I glanced briefly at Dec, not fully willing to take my eyes off the woman desperate to eat us, "I can smell it in her blood. I think that's what I'm sensing, anyway." This was all absurdly new to me and my body was still adjusting to the boost it got from being bonded to Max. "It's twisted and rancid."

In other words, nothing like the intoxicating thrum of magic that connected us to Max that I now seemed to crave as desperately as air.

This was a perversion of it, a distortion that rearranged and snarled it into something entirely wrong.

The stone wasn't here, but it had been. I was sure of that, though I couldn't exactly explain how.

Or else Amalia had been near it. Had been infected with it, somehow.

"What—" Levi's question was cut off by a soft thud followed almost immediately by a small gasp .

I spun around, and my eyes met Evelyn's. They were wide with shock, with a desperate realization I hadn't quite grasped yet.

Time stood still as my brain caught up with the shift in the atmosphere.

A man stood behind her, a few inches taller.

"The dead," he whispered, his voice cold and hollow, "should remain dead, don't you think?"

Evelyn's black shirt grew darker in the center, wet. And then started to move, like her heart was beating outside of her ribs.

No, not her heart.

Those were—fingers.

With a loud, wet crack, the man pulled back.

Evelyn's knees fell to the ground, the shadow of surprise on her face, just a leftover ghost as she collapsed face down onto the rug.

The man held her heart in his outstretched hand. Her blood painted splatters up his wrist and seeped obscenely through his fingers as he studied us.

A dark, deep, almost soundless gasp ripped from Levi as he rushed the man, but the man merely teleported, from the bloody patch of carpet on which he stood, to the other side of Amalia's bed.

Levi's arms grasped nothing but air as he crashed into the doorway and regained his footing.

"You must be Xavier?" Declan asked. Her jaw was tight, her hands clenched into fists at her sides as she fought to keep her eyes on the man, and not on my mother's corpse at her feet.

Amalia's moans and wails grew more aggravated at Xavier's nearness, and she crawled over her bed sheets, trying to get closer to him.

His lip curled as he spared her a brief glance of disgust, then he took a few steps to the left until he was just out of the reach allowed by her invisible cage .

"And you," he glanced at Dec, scanning her from head to toe with a small grin that made my stomach turn, "you reek of power."

A flash of greed sparked in the black pools of his eyes.

Like Amalia, he'd clearly been experimenting with the shadow magic. But he seemed far more collected, in control of himself.

Levi moved towards him, ready to attack again, but Dec's arm reached out to stop him. She shot him a dark look, her order clear—stand the fuck down. We have work to do.

It was typical protector protocol. When one of us was lost on a mission, the rest were meant to go on. To buckle back the pain of that loss until the mission was complete and we'd been debriefed. Only then, in the privacy of our own cabins, in the company of our teams, did we ever dare to let that grief seep from our pores.

But Levi didn't grow up around our kind. And now that I was so far removed from The Guild, I could see how callous, how impossible that request really was.

Levi's nostrils flared as he fought the urge to fuck over the whole mission. For a moment, I thought he would. But after a few deep, sporadic breaths, he abandoned the fight altogether. He dropped to his knees next to Evelyn, searching for signs of life I knew wouldn't be there.

Still, I couldn't bring myself to look. I knew once I did, that her death would be finite.

Any hope I'd had about a possible reconciliation, gone.

"You must be her," Xavier said again, his focus on Dec and Dec alone, either oblivious to our turmoil or completely ambivalent about it. "You look a little different from how they described, but I can sense the magic in you. Strong. So much stronger than I thought it'd be. We knew you'd come to us eventually. Power is drawn to power. "

Did he think she was Max? Dec caught my eyes briefly and gave me an almost imperceptible head shake.

Right. Let him think that.

"The stone," Declan stood taller, her blade still dangling from her fingers, though I knew firsthand it could be in his neck in an instant if she needed it to be, "where is it?" She tilted her head to the side, studying him, her body slipping into an almost casual stance that I knew was only for show. "I don't sense it here."

Xavier's brow arched, his mouth curving into a slimy fish hook of a smirk as he tossed Evelyn's heart on the bed—as if it was nothing. "So it's as we guessed. You can sense it, then? You're right though. It's not here."

To my absolute fucking horror, Amalia pounced on the bloody muscle, her teeth and fingers fighting for purchase over the surface area as she devoured it in a few rabid bites.

I couldn't hold back the burning surge up my throat any longer. The wet sounds of her feverishly eating a piece of my mother completely obliterated the last thread of control I had left.

I vomited a puddle at my feet, gagging and coughing until everything in my stomach was out.

Xavier groaned. "Disgusting. You're lucky I have cleaners coming tomorrow."

"Her heart? Was that fucking necessary?" Dec barked out, some of her cool mask dissolving into a rage I'd only seen a few times before.

When she shifted like she was going to walk over to me, to see if I was okay, I held up my shaky hand to stop her.

Stay on mission. We had one chance here. I wouldn't be the reason we failed it.

She fought with herself for a moment, her instinct to help me at war with our goal.

Levi was whispering something I couldn't quite hear or understand, his hands hovering over where I was certain our mother's corpse now lay.

Xavier merely watched us, attempting to appear bored and in charge, but I could sense the pulse of excitement in his posture. He thought he had us. He thought this was it. That he finally had Max.

People grew reckless, greedy when they assumed that they'd won.

Declan was right. We could get more out of him.

We could salvage this mission, make it worth—something. It had to be. We couldn't just go back empty handed. Not after?—

"The woman," I nodded towards Amalia, not entirely able to bring myself to look at her, to see the splotches of my mother's blood left on her sheets, or dribbling down her chin, "what happened to her?"

Xavier's nose curled as he watched Amalia. She preened under his gaze, momentarily satiated by the snack, though I knew from firsthand experience that her hunger was nowhere near met.

The hunger never abated. It only grew worse, compounding on itself until more and more of her time would be spent in these rabid states.

He shrugged, disgust still baked into every line of his face as he glanced down at me. He turned his attention back to Dec. Apparently she was the only one of us worthy of being spoken to. "Some are too weak to hold the kind of power we wield. Two of the lesser council members died almost instantly. Since Amalia held on, I thought she would eventually follow my fate, that she would pull through from the transfusions. Clearly," he glanced at his girlfriend, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes as he watched her try to break through her chains with a renewed fervor, "I was mistaken. She isn't strong enough."

"The stone," Declan said again, "where is it? "

"Impatient and arrogant, just as I've heard. We've been waiting for you. If you play nicely, we can take you to it. I think you'll like what we have to offer." Xavier laughed, the bark devoid of any real humor.

He took a step closer to her and she tensed in response.

I reached for the steady flow of fire, sensing that something in the room had shifted.

"You're—" his jaw hardened as he took a deep breath, his expression melting into rage. "You're not her."

He reached for Declan and I shifted to the bed, wrapping my arms around Amalia, my blade pressed to her throat.

"Don't touch her," I bit out, trying to fight the thrashing woman in my grip. Maybe this wasn't the best idea I'd ever had.

He may have been disgusted by her, but he cared for her. He wouldn't have gone to the trouble of setting her up in this room if he'd wanted her dead.

Xavier flinched, indecision flashing across his face before he shook his head, expression a blank mask. "Kill her. She's no use to me anymore. I have no tolerance for weakness."

"This isn't strength or weakness at play," Levi's eyes were hard, his voice dull as he watched Xavier, "only greed. You've stolen power that didn't belong to you, and it will corrupt you all. She's just experiencing the consequences on a faster timeline."

Xavier's expression hardened, and I met Declan's eyes briefly. She nodded once.

This was it, we weren't getting anything more out of either of them.

The stone wasn't here. This dude wasn't going to give us anything worth dying over. We were wasting time.

Sharp pain clawed at the back of my neck, then my scalp. "What the fuck?"

When I looked down at my arms, they were covered in deep, painful scratches .

I glanced around the room, searching for the culprit, but no one had moved. Amalia thrashed in my arms, but these cuts weren't from her.

It took me a moment longer than it should have for me to get over the shock and realize what this was.

Darius.

"Fuck." If Darius was in trouble?—

When my eyes found Dec, I knew she'd come to the same conclusion.

He was with Max. Was she okay? Should we go to them?

No.

This wasn't the plan. They'd stick to the plan.

I didn't have time for my own fear.

They hadn't used the bond. They were fine. Just a few scrapes. I needed to focus.

In one fluid motion, I let Amalia go, just long enough to bury my blade into her chest. She fought against me, lost in a frenzy of hunger until the light finally dimmed in her eyes. For a moment, her expression softened, her eyes almost grateful as the last vestiges of life bled out of her.

Xavier yelled, and tried to attack Dec, but as fast as he was, she'd been prepared. A flare of fire spilled through the room, catching him off guard.

"But you have traces of her power. How?—"

I ripped my blade from Amalia's chest and threw it into his.

I'd nicked his heart, I was certain, but it wasn't a clean enough shot. He was still alive, still moving. With one dark look at us, hand clutching the hilt of my blade, he teleported from the room.

"Fuck! No. We have to go after him." Levi ran his hands through his hair, darkening the strands with the blood that coated his fingers. "This—this can't have all been for nothing. We'll find him."

I knew that by "this" he really meant her death .

"It isn't here," I said, unable to meet the pain reflected so clearly in his eyes. "The stone."

"We know two of them are dead at least," Declan said. "And we know that they can't control the shadow magic as well as we thought. They aren't like Max. They weren't built for it. This wasn't for nothing."

"Three, now." I shoved Amalia off of me and wiped some of her gore on the already soiled bedding.

She nodded. "That means only four left. Hopefully the others had better luck locating the stone than we did."

The fight left Levi's body, his shoulders slumping as he bent down. He lifted Evelyn's body, cradling her in his arms.

"What are—" I swallowed the question when his gray eyes met mine. I let my gaze drop briefly to her face. Her eyes were open and empty. She looked frail, almost childlike in his arms. For the first time in years, I wanted nothing more than for her to look at me again, to pull me to her in a hug, to smell her hair as she pressed a kiss to my forehead.

I sniffed, shoved down the wave of emotion, and ignored the pressure tightening around my ribs.

"We're not leaving her here." All the teasing arrogance I was used to in Levi's voice had deflated.

I studied him, seeing small pieces of her etched into his face, pieces of me, too. For the first time that I could remember, he looked almost helpless, lost. A far cry from the man who'd been barking out orders and playing hopscotch on my last nerve for months.

Now, I saw him for what he was. Just a kid. One of us. Just another pawn who'd been abused by the fucked-up rules of the power-hungry Guild.

My little brother.

And I'd spent his entire life trying as hard as I could to push him out of mine. None of it was his fault. He hadn't asked for any of it .

No wonder he was such an insufferable asshole during the few times we'd been close enough to lodge insults.

A hollow ache carved itself deep inside of me, taking shape and making itself a permanent home.

The familiar sense of loss I'd long associated with my mother grew dense, unmovable. It was sharper now, and I knew it would be permanent.

She was gone. I wouldn't get a do-over with her.

But I could have one, maybe, with Levi.

I nodded. "You're right. We're taking her home."

And then, a bolt of pain, white-hot and angry shot through my stomach.

I bent over, fighting to catch my breath, but it was impossible.

When my hand pulled away from my stomach, I saw only red.

Until even that bled to black.