Jagger whipped toward me. His flat gray eyes widened, and he gripped his obsidian dagger. His hand bled, and whatever he felt made him shout. He leaped toward me.
The horror reared and then swooped down.
I’d seen this.
I knew what would happen.
Everyone would die.
A human being couldn’t survive inside of it. They suffocated in the darkness.
I wasn’t the light, but I had light in me. I’d unlocked my heart and died. But when I’d died, the light had filled me with new life. I was glowing with it.
Jagger’s face contorted, his rocklike skin bulging with rage. He knew as well as I did that I wasn’t a mine anymore.
I belonged to the truth, and hatred and evil could never survive in the truth.
Jagger swung. His knife arched down, striking toward my throat. I reached out and placed a hand on his arm.
A long time ago, when we were kids, Griff, Justice, and I had played a game. It was a what-if game. One of our questions was, “What if Jagger could die permanently?”
Griff had whispered, “Then we’d die too.”
“What if that was okay?” Justice asked.
And both Griff and I had said, “Yeah. What if?”
Rou had heard us and told Jagger. We’d never played the what-if game again.
I gripped Jagger’s arm. He screamed.
It was a scream of agony. It was a terrifying scream of despair. It was a thousand screams sounding at once. It was Furtig, blood, and hate.
At my touch, his rocklike skin cracked. The cracks raced over his gray skin as if a hammer had slammed down on a slab of brittle shale.
He turned to stone. Then, as his scream echoed through the horror, the stone crumbled and fell to ash.
Less than a second had passed.
Finn raced through the horror’s curtain.
Winnie darted across the pavement.
As Jagger disintegrated, Griff screamed and then disappeared.
Justice clutched his chest and slammed to the concrete. He dropped like a tree mown down by a tornado.
Fear pulsed through me. Panic threatened to seize me.
“Justice!”
Was he dead?
Was Griff?
The horror swooped down.
Winnie leaped on top of Justice, covering him, just as the horror crashed over them.
