29. Darius

29

DARIUS

W ell, this certainly wasn't on the roster, but I also wasn't going to balk at the opportunity to kill another one of the infamous Guild council members.

Two of the protectors broke rank at the sight of him and took off running towards the vans.

Xavier disappeared, rematerializing in front of one of the runners, just as she reached the first van. In one smooth motion, he snapped her neck, doing the same to her friend before her body even stilled on the ground.

"Imagine my surprise," his face twisted into a cruel, dangerous smile, "when I found myself in your labs, Peter," Sir Slimeball, apparently Peter, flinched, shoving the small piece of paper discreetly into his pocket, "only to learn that you'd not only stolen one of our most protected creatures, but set up a rather significant meeting without alerting me."

This wasn't the council member I'd encountered, but I could feel his power flaring from here.

At least this made one less prick we'd have to track down. Maybe this little tête-a-tête was more productive than I'd anticipated. And maybe Max would be less pissed about us handling this behind her back if we brought her Xavier's head on a platter in apology.

I was all for a little bloody groveling.

"W-we," Peter swallowed, shaking visibly, though he was clearly trying to buckle down his fear, "we were hoping to surprise you. We've just been brokering a deal."

"A deal?" he arched his brow, whether impressed or unconvinced, I couldn't tell. "And what kind of deal did you think you had the authority to broker without my presence?"

"We need to take him out and get that paper from Slimeball before he teleports out of here," I mumbled to the others. "Last thing we need is him alerting his friend in time to relocate the stone."

Claude's jaw was rigid. "I can feel his power from here. How the fuck does a protector have that much?"

"You've missed a lot recently." I grunted. "They're getting stronger too. Like now that there's only two of them, the power is concentrating in the bodies that remain. They must've all been linked somehow, bonded or whatever."

Would the same happen for Max? If we were all out of the picture, would she grow stronger?

I shook the thought off almost immediately—she'd grown stronger through connection, through building the bonds. Not fracturing them.

Why then did the council seem stronger as individuals?

"Then let's give him a taste of the power he covets so much," Nash said, for once looking at someone with more hatred than he did me.

I could get used to not being the number one enemy in this group.

I grinned, meeting his eyes.

I fucking loved when revenge came with a poetic flare.

Xavier and Peter were talking, and while I didn't bother parsing out the details, it was clear that good old Peter was doing what he did best—riding both sides, but ultimately selling us out on the off chance Xavier had more strength than the rest of us. Fucking twatwaffle.

The other protectors were restless and already dividing amongst themselves—most moving closer to Xavier, as if they'd arrived with the council member and not Peter. But there were also a few brave souls hedging their bets with us and closing ranks around the woman who'd been negotiating with us. They were likely counting on the possibility that their loyalty now would mean a chance at a new council seat later.

"Who goes for the paper?" Eli asked.

The situation was rapidly dissolving, we needed to be quick.

"You and Wade." Atlas's eyes were locked on the drude, "I've got something else to take care of."

Ominous, but whatever.

"Count of three?" I whispered, sliding closer to Claude and Nash. I stopped, glancing back at the others. "Oh, and Nika gets to eat whoever she wants, but no one leaves here alive—can't give them an opportunity to move their base before we ransack it. Deal?"

They grunted their assent and I beamed.

To think, a few short months ago and they'd all been so squeamish about murder.

Now, they were hungry for it. They were coming along so nicely.

"One, two," I grabbed Claude's arm in one hand, and Nash's in the other. He kept hold of Nika. "Three."

I shifted the four of us across the grounds until we were two feet behind Xavier.

Claude sliced a thick line through his palm the moment he was steady enough to do it, before grabbing my hand and stabbing it with more force than was probably necessary .

Probably should've warned Eli about that.

Nash did the same, wincing when Nika lashed out from the pain.

It took less than a breath, but Xavier spun around, face contorted with rage. The moment he noticed Claude and Nash whispering—all of our palms held together a few inches from him, our blood somehow smearing and staining the air, a transparent and macabre painting—that rage morphed into the slightest twinge of fear.

"Oh no you don't," I tackled him to the ground just as he shifted, contorting and moving through space with him.

But while he was bloated with power that didn't belong to him, he was less practiced in teleportation than I was, and clearly unaccustomed to having a passenger.

We flickered from location to location around Guild grounds, like a lightning bug visible only every few feet.

The shifts were uncomfortable and straining, and I struggled to catch a breath. The moment I started to feel my body again, we were off to somewhere new.

It didn't take long before I wrestled him back to where we started, where a portal flickered in the air, an invisible flag in the wind.

"We've never made one like this before." Claude studied it, the portal flaring and swirling now like a tornado was caught inside. "Not exactly sure where it will take him, what it will do to him."

"Don't care," I grunted.

Before I could shove him forward, Nika sank her teeth into his neck, draining deep, thick pulls of his tainted blood.

The three of us tried to wrestle him from her grasp, but we were fighting her—in the middle of a feeding frenzy—in addition to Xavier's erratic, desperate strains to get away from us all.

His face paled, the dark threads that had blown out his pupils, slowly dispersing, until all that I saw was the unguarded, feral fear. He was dying.

I had no idea what his blood would do to Nika, but she was ravenous over it, and no matter how much we fought to extricate her fangs, we couldn't.

When she finally let go, he grew limp and heavy, like she'd drained more than just his blood.

Before he had a chance to heal or react, I shoved my hand deep into his chest cavity, savoring the feel of warm blood drenching my skin as my fingers closed over his heart. I ripped my arm back and maneuvered him towards the hungry portal. "He'll be dead regardless, let the shadows decide his fate—they're owed their own revenge for his crimes."

Xavier's eyes were wide and unseeing as he fell back, lips rounded in a noiseless scream as his stiff fingers tried to hold onto me now instead of push me away. Claude pulled back his hands, carelessly breaking several fingers in the process. In a single blink, he was gone, his limbs swallowed into the hole at angles that made me wince.

I held the steaming heart in my hand for a moment longer, before tossing it in after him.

The portal rippled with an iridescent flare, like the veil was extending its own form of gratitude for the sacrifice.

Nash and Claude were already working to close it, their brows caked in sweat from the effort.

"Go have fun, Nika" I said, moving to help them. My eyes locked on hers. "But the ones we came with are off limits."

Her mouth hooked into a grin, her eyes narrowed with a different kind of thirst than I'd seen in their depths before now—she was hungry for revenge, no longer clouded by the feral bloodlust that had been controlling her. As if the council member's blood had sated what couldn't before be sated.

Huh. I'd unpack it later. No use getting Nash's hopes up now if it was only a temporary reprieve .

She nodded to me once, clear understanding etched into her expression as her gaze shifted to the crowd of scrambling protectors. Not needing to be told twice, she took off, tearing into the one closest to her.

"Go," Claude grunted, nudging his head towards the action. "We've got this."

I narrowed my eyes. "You sure?"

Nash snorted. "Trust me, we're more practiced at this than you are."

There wasn't much animosity in his tone though, just a stiff teasing, like he had to exercise the now-unfamiliar muscle.

I nodded, suppressing a grin as I ran back into the action.

I'd torn through four protectors before the woman, Peter's companion, stood before me, trembling.

Her face contorted in fear and disgust as I bared my teeth.

"We had a deal," she barked, voice raspy and trembling as she took a few steps back, vulnerable now that Peter lay in a crumpled heap at her feet, and the majority of her entourage had abandoned her for death. "Where's your sense of honor?"

"My honor?" I gripped her by the neck, languishing the feel of her trembling in my hands. I nodded in the vague direction of where The Guild labs once stood and smiled. "I must have left it buried in my cage."

I snapped her neck, savoring the sound.

Eli and Wade were finishing off the last scavengers.

When I scanned for the wolf, I saw him standing with the drude. He'd pulled the key from the demon's handler, and rather than kill either of them, he…let the Nightmare go.

The girl's body flickered between shadow and form as she studied him, her eyes rounded in surprise.

The handler at her side bent over, crumbling in on himself, hands clutched to his temple as a dark, ominous scream echoed around us.

Slowly, the drude looked more solid, less frail. And then, with a last glance at Atlas, she dispersed into a black shadow and fled from the scene.

Atlas studied the handler for a long moment—the last protector alive on the grounds.

"Should we—uh," Wade studied the pair of them, "finish this off?"

"No." Atlas met his brother's eyes, something unreadable in his expression, though he looked less burdened than before. "He won't be able to fight her power for long. He will be dead soon. She deserved to finish him off."

"And, er," Eli scanned the gruesome scene, hardly even flinching as Nika made her way over to us, drenched in blood and entrails, "Do we go after the drude?"

Atlas shook his head. "No, she had no control over her power in those cells. Let her go, she won't get in our way. No one deserves to die in a cage."

"This was certainly a much more dramatic meeting than I'd anticipated. But we're one more council member down," Eli said, nodding to Claude and Nash as they made their way over to us looking haggard and exhausted. "All good?"

Claude nodded, but Nash didn't move his focus from Nika.

She was…relatively calm, minus the gorefest she was wearing. And while she was silent and standoffish, there was something different about her general affect, like she was more herself than I'd seen her.

I watched tempered hope sprout in her brother's expression, hoping again, for his sake as much as hers, that this was not just a temporary reprieve.

Eli studied her with just as much hesitant interest.

Maybe it was the four of us together again, uniting through a portal, maybe Xavier's power-infused blood had cured her, maybe it was nothing—just a passing calm from gorging on all that blood, a high from our success today. Only time would tell.

"You think it will actually work?" Claude cleared his throat, then turned to me. "That using your connection to Max will help you save her?"

The flutter of excitement in my stomach turned sour as I glanced at the others. I had no fucking idea. We'd either developed a plan that had the potential to save Max, or we'd all just effectively signed our death warrants along with hers.

Claude gripped my shoulder, lightly squeezing at my silence. For some reason, my throat tightened, like there was a metal ball stuck there.

His expression softened when I glanced at him.

"I hope it works," he muttered.

I found myself believing that he did too. "Max is hard not to root for, isn't she? Hard not to love."

"Not just for her sake, brother." He squeezed my shoulder again, and that obnoxious metal ball doubled in size.

Wade bent down over Slimeball's slim form, and fished through his pocket. He pulled out the crumbled piece of paper, flattening it out as the sun beat down on us.

I took a deep breath. "Please tell me there are actual coordinates on that thing and that this wasn't all for nothing."

Wade pressed the sheet into my chest with a smug grin. "Let's go home, get cleaned up, and then we can tell Max the good news."