The wards are breaking.
I lock my eyes on the wraith. The guys have her cornered. Each cut takes a beat longer to close. She’s losing and she doesn’t know what she’s triggered. She’s too new. Too desperate to save herself.
I feel it.
“Guys.”
They don’t hear me over the fight.
“Guys.”
At the same time Nathaniel bursts through the basement doors and locks eyes with me.
“We need to leave. Now,” he says.
The pressure becomes a crack. The crack becomes a shatter.
I gasp like every molecule of air just left my lungs at once. The bones I used to seal this place throb in unison. The feeling ripples outward. From me into the room. Then further. Through every floor and corridor above us.
My soul knows before my brain does.
The wards just broke.
But the wrongness in my soul doesn’t stop. It keeps building. Layer over layer. Like something massive turning over underneath us.
The old radiology wing.
The sealed one.
The twelve dormant stones.
Oh God.
The shockwave from the wards bursting traveled down through the floors and hit every single one of them at once.
I feel the souls before I see them.
They come through the walls. Rhea’s mentees first. Then the others. They materialize one by one, filling the basement with the cold of a grave. The moisture on the walls turns to frost. My breath comes out white.
Cassian, Talon and Nathaniel pull back toward me. Their teeth are rattling.
“What the hell,” Talon mutters.
Too many.
That’s the only thought my brain produces. Too many to count. Too many to fight. Too many to outrun. Rhea hovers among them. I make out disfigured faces in the smoke. I think one of them is Alex.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that we are surrounded, and between us and the only exit are more wraiths than I have ever seen in one place.
Cassian adjusts his grip on his dagger and steps in front of me. Nathaniel takes my left. Talon takes my right. None of them look at each other. They don’t need to.
I think about how much I’m not afraid of dying anymore.
Then I think today might be the day I find out if that was true.
For a moment, time seems to slow down.
