Eventually, the tunnel opens into a junction where multiple passages meet. Moonlight spills down from above, which means we’re close to the surface.
Then I smell so much blood that it coats the back of my throat and makes my stomach heave.
“Stay here.” I hold up a hand to stop the others.
“No way.” Sam steps up beside me, his jaw set. “You might have developed electric superpowers—which I fully expect you to tell me about once we’re out here—but you’re not going in there alone.”
“Sam—”
“He’s right.” Francis moves to my other side, flames flickering at his fingertips. “We’re coming with you.”
Elizabeth steps forward, her too-big sweater splattered with black hellhound blood, her tiny flames dancing between her fingers. Her hands are shaking, but she meets my eyes with a look that says she’ll fight anyway.
I don’t have time to argue. And maybe… well, maybe I don’t want to see what’s ahead by myself.
“Fine. Stay close.”
We move forward together, and the smell gets worse with each step. It coats the back of my throat, slick and copper-sweet, and my heart drops before my brain processes what I’m looking at.
Coppery-blonde hair dark with blood.
Callie.
Her throat’s gone. It’s like a claw reached in and scooped it out, and I remember how she screamed Alessandra’s name in the last timeline, and now she’ll never scream again because she doesn’t have a throat to scream with.
Elizabeth makes a small, wounded sound behind me.
“Don’t look.” I step in front of her, and then my eyes are drifting to where Alessandra’s curled next to Callie. Her body’s twisted at an angle that bodies aren’t supposed to twist, and her hands are still raised, burn marks scorching the ground around her in a perfect circle.
“That’s... oh gods.” Francis stumbles backward, and I follow his gaze, and I wish I hadn’t.
Deacon Park isn’t a person anymore. He’s just pieces scattered across the stone like someone took him apart and forgot to put him back together.
I force the bile down and keep looking.
Tyler’s slumped against the wall next to Deacon’s remains, his arms wrapped around the intestines spilling out of his slashed stomach. His eyes are open in death, frozen in terror.
Tyler and Deacon were emberlinked partners, just like Callie and Alessandra. Hopefully wherever the four of them are now, they’re together.
A scream echoes through the tunnels, distant and desperate. Then it cuts off mid-cry, like someone pressed a mute button, and I’m running before I realize my legs are moving.
The passage twists and curves. Sam, Elizabeth, and Francis’s footsteps echo off the stone behind me, their fire hot and ready.
Staying as quiet as possible, I peer around the corner, and my lungs stop working.
Nina’s on the ground, her dark eyes staring at nothing, her notebook at her feet. Blood soaks the pages.
Vera’s beside her with her dagger in her fist and a hole in her chest where her heart should be. Her face is frozen in a snarl, because Vera never stops fighting, not even at the end.
Garrett’s a few feet away, his blade broken, his body torn open. I dragged him out of the caves in the last loop, told him to move even though his ankle was twisted, and thought about how I didn’t even like him but wasn’t going to let him die on my watch.
Deidre’s in the center of everything, her dark hair spread around her head like a halo, her hands shaped like she was holding that damn defensive formation again.
Six hellhounds circle the bodies, sniffing at the blood, growling low in their throats.
“Get back,” I tell the others, and my voice is cold and dead, not sounding like mine in the slightest.
They scramble backward.
