Page 149 of Walking in Darkness

And the sky?

It was open directly above it.

Chapter Forty-Four

Aria

I’d never seen anything so gruesome. Anything so grisly or appalling.

The atrocity greater than anything I’d ever witnessed, including what I’d seen in the minds of the Kruen as I’d fought in Faydor.

Not until this.

Pax was right.

They were slaughtering.

Slaughtering and slaying and butchering without thought.

Blood and limbs and bodies were strewn everywhere. Some had been set afire. Others moaned and begged to be relieved of their fatal wounds.

The stench of the carnage filled my nostrils and sent nausea swirling through my stomach.

But I staved it off.

We didn’t have time to weep or mourn. We had to meet the brutality blow for blow.

My heart raced in the middle of it. A thunder that drummed through my spirit and rushed through my veins.

An awareness so viscous and heavy that I felt it as weights around my feet.

The wickedness that crawled this plane.

Noxious.

Toxic and foul.

A cold slick that slipped across my flesh as we moved toward the place where I knew Ambrose would be.

Josephine and Ellis held my hands as we moved within the sanctuary that had been created by the other Laven.

Their loyalty and ferocity feeding me strength.

Timothy was in front of me, and Dani was behind.

While Pax carved a path for us with the tractor up ahead.

Then everyone suddenly stopped.

Froze.

It felt as if the temperature had dropped by a thousand degrees.

Even the deranged had ceased to fight, and instead turned toward the origin of the suffocating power that held the oxygen in its cruel, vicious fist.

Pax shut the tractor off, and the loud roar of the engine was suddenly silenced.

And in it was a quiet howl.