Page 157 of Walking in Darkness

In a flash, I could no longer contain it.

My arms were stretched out in front of me when Pax and I hit him again, though this time, we held on, trying to inject as much energy as we could into his body.

Into his spirit.

Unsure of which needed to succumb first in order to end him.

Praying that ending him was even possible at all.

That his immortality didn’t actually mean that he would go on forever.

Because this had to end.

It had to.

We couldn’t allow this infestation to spread across the globe. Couldn’t imagine the pain and suffering.

My family’s faces flickered through my mind as I struggled to hold on. To pour everything I had into burning out his soul.

My mother.

My brothers and sister.

My father, too.

Those who’d been manipulated and used. Targeted and violated.

For all of them.

Foreveryone.

“Don’t let go, Aria,” Pax wheezed, trying to hold on as well. Our limbs shuddered and shook from the effort, from the energy that surged and passed between the three of us.

Ambrose thrashed, trying to buck us off.

Pax’s brow furrowed, a warning that he was going to shift, and for a second, he let go with one hand and withdrew a blade from the sheath attached to his waist.

He lifted it and drove the blade into Ambrose’s side.

Ambrose howled with rage. With a fury unlike anything I’d ever heard.

His fist suddenly flew from out of nowhere. I had no time to prepare before it cracked against my jaw.

I was knocked from my feet before I could even process the agony that splintered through my head.

A moan of misery jolted out of me when I landed in a heap twenty feet away, my chest feeling as if it was going to cave in.

Blackness threatened to take me whole. Consciousness fading in and out. I blinked through it, clawing my way out of the delirium that wanted to pull me under.

I choked as I fought to catch the breath he had knocked from my lungs.

A haze billowed over the area, disorienting and dark.

A veil that tried to cloak my perception. To push me toward the surrender Ambrose had demanded.

But I wouldn’t give in.

I forced myself to sit up, but a sob ripped from me when a shearing pain suddenly tore through my thigh. A wild throbbing that nearly dropped me back to the ground.