Page 439 of Eight of Swords, Part Two

Beneath the surface, the old world is gone… and so is he.

✴

Riley hasn’t been alone for seven years.

But when he wakes, he knows that Kade… Jules… his brother is gone.

Because there’s a hollow inside him that echoes with the loss.

A profound internal absence.

And then he hears something from high above.

A howl tears out across the night.

Inhuman and vast, it’s louder than any gunshot Riley has ever heard. It grows until the air itself seems to split around it.

The Tower answers with a low metallic shudder.

The rain vibrates against Riley’s skin.

His senses are climbing like crazy.

Smell, sight, sound.

His skin is burning as the loss tears him apart inside, births the kind of primal fear he hasn’t felt since he was too small to remember it.

Alone.

He’s alone. No brother. No blood kin.

No binding. No Julian in the back of his mind. No one but… him.

He rolls painfully onto his side, body purging.

The rain feels like needles. The ground feels like glass.

The cold is biting, the sounds are deafening, the smell is sickening.

His own blood is everywhere.

He knows why.

Because he fell.

Blaire pushed him and he fell and he landed and he died.

He died instantly.

The world just… went away.

But now it’s back… and his little brother is gone.

That noise up there is Lachlan.

Riley can feel his pain.

Forehead to wet, bloody concrete, Riley can’t even cry because his body is in such a dead drop of panic, it’s running itself ragged on wasted sensory amplification, on heightened smell and the ability to hear for miles, how useless he is, how fucking pathetic this body—