“Kill him,” Jagger said, pointing to Griff.
Griff’s eyes widened. He shook his head, begging with his expression. “Don’t!”
If Justice killed him, Griff would become a mine. We all knew Griff either wouldn’t survive the transition or he’d become more monstrous than his dad.
He held out his hand. “Don’t!” he mouthed.
“Do it,” Jagger said. “That should remind you of what you are.”
Justice’s gray eyes went flat. His expression cleared. He gripped the knife he’d stabbed Jagger with and lunged.
Griff flinched and jerked back.
Griff was clumsy. Griff had always been clumsy. Most of his deaths had resulted from tripping over his own feet, slipping on water, or stepping in front of a bus.
As Justice lunged at him, Griff tripped over a crack in the pavement. His arms pinwheeled. His feet flew out from under him.
Justice’s arm slammed forward.
Winnie shouted and threw the knife she was holding. It darted, flying as swiftly as a passenger pigeon. It struck Justice in the hand. He dropped the knife.
Justice crashed into Griff. They careened backward.
Winnie shouted, “Watch out!”
While Justice had been charging Griff, the horror had snuck closer. Now, it swarmed over them.
A piercing, screaming sound invaded the night.
The horror rose like a tidal wave. It descended, an inevitable wave that would crash over us all.
I tilted my head back and stared into the darkness.
Then it ripped in half, the black curtain of it spreading.
Finn tore through the hole, his fire swords slashing.
“Mari—”
It was too late.
Whatever he was about to say was lost as the horror consumed us all.
103
They were dead.
All of them.
I floated in the darkness, spreading over the thick shroud. I was inside the horror, and the horror was inside me. It invaded my being.
I floated through the heavy thickness of it and felt its hungry malevolence and its writhing, loathing wretchedness of being. It hated that it existed. It hated the taste of itself. It hated its darkness, and it hated all light, because light was what showed the darkness all of its hideousness.
It had lived in its prison for so long that it only knew the deep, dark, horrific sound of its own hatred. It had been devouring itself for centuries, succored on its cannibalistic diet of deceit.
In the prison, there had been no light. There was only light if it crept through the tiny, porous cracks in the walls. When it found light, it attacked. There was nothing more hateful than light.
What was light?
