The world undone the pro.., p.40
The World Undone (The Protector Guild Book 8), page 40
“Do you know who he was?”
He shook his head. “I remember almost nothing about him, just that he was there, that he apologized for his mental intrusion.” He snorted. “Which was thoughtful, I suppose.”
“The one thing?” I dug my hands into Ralph’s fur to keep from grabbing Saif’s head and shaking the answers from it. I’d been fed so few truths about my family, about my mother’s history—I was greedy for every morsel he’d give me.
“He told me to find Michael. That if I could locate him, I could potentially save my life—and yours.”
“You know about the realm’s collapsing, then? That I will need to prevent it?”
His nostrils flared slightly, like he was sniffing the magic in the air. “Even the humans are beginning to sense that something is off, Max. And I am more closely tied to the magic between realms than almost anyone.” He tilted his head, studying me again. “Or at least I was, before you.”
“Who is Michael?” I asked, not entirely sure if I should apologize for that.
“The missing half to the other set.” At my look of confusion, he grunted. “You are the daughter of Lucifer, are you not?”
I exhaled. “As in Michael, Michael? Like the angel?”
“He’s no more angel than Lucifer or our ancestors, or any of the other ancients from before. Whatever word we attach to them, he and Lucifer are the only pair. Through them on one side, and our ancestors on the other, the realms were created—worlds mirrored to each other, at first. But protectors grew greedy. And it became clear very quickly to our ancestors that crafting the new realm had nothing to do with creating more space, with protecting humanity from the power we wield. It had only to do with some people’s incessant thirst for power. Because it was born of greed, the magic through the years grew only more demanding, ever-hungry. It fed and thrived on a thirst for violence, power, and chaos, distorting the energy into something it was never meant to be.”
“Lucifer has a twin,” I repeated, my brain stuck on that thought. “He never mentioned it.”
“So you’ve met him?” Saif asked, his eyes hard and the subtle curve of his mouth flattening out into a line. He clearly had no love for the man.
I nodded, not entirely sure what else to say. My feelings where Lucifer was concerned were a tangled mess that I had no intention of sifting through any time soon. “Did you find him? Michael, I mean?”
Saif’s jaw worked as he studied his calloused hands. “I spent over a decade searching for Sayty. I was certain that she was alive, that if she wasn’t, I would know somehow—that I’d feel it. We usually die together, when it happens. When the new generation of anchors takes our power. I think my connection to the magic disappeared when she did. But I remained. And though I felt different, I thought she might be out there still, that she’d simply found a way to bind the power—a difficult art that very few have perfected.” His eyes met mine before they dropped again, a sheepishness in his stare, a guilt. “I admit that I wanted it back. That kind of power, the connection to the world, it could be intoxicating at times. Very few people are born into this world with such a clear purpose—and it was all the more unsettling to have it ripped away. It was there, and then it wasn’t. But if she was dead, it shouldn’t have disappeared—it would have gone to the next line. And since she gave birth to only one child, it shouldn’t have passed to you.”
He grunted. “It took me many years to realize that you were likely the daughter of not one line, but two. That my sister likely carried Lucifer’s child. That maybe, because you are the daughter of the two lines, I don’t know—maybe it makes sense for it all to end with you. A singularity. The workings of our world are never as predictable or tidy as we often think, but in some ways, there is a kind of beautiful symmetry to your existence. To the world we’ve broken, collapsing around us.” His lips thinned into a rigid line. “It’s unfair, perhaps—that those who had no hand in destroying it must inherit the disaster. But such is the way of this world.”
“And now,” I cleared my throat, my mouth had gone bone dry. He’d stopped searching for her, she’d been missing far longer than the ten years he’d looked. I felt the small tendril of hope dissolve on my tongue. That could only mean— “and now you believe that she’s dead?”
Saif toyed with the empty bag that held his water for a moment before he nodded. He swallowed, studied a patch of the ground to his left before his glassy eyes met mine. “I’m sorry I did not heed her wishes sooner. I thought if I found her—” he pinched the bridge of his nose, took a deep breath, “but my apologies give you nothing. I’ve spent the last years of my life trying to find Michael. And with Sayty gone, it was more imperative than ever that the world think me either dead or missing. I couldn’t have anyone after me, after the power in our line, after you. The best hope was that they blame the fluctuations in the realms on the anchor power dying out—a natural end.
“So, to keep them from looking for me or my power, better that they think me dead. It offered a freedom I’d never had before. And I used it to fulfill her last wish.” He licked his lips, a frustrated bark of a laugh pulling from them. “But of course, I failed in that too. And now it is too late, and it is you who will pay that price. Perhaps we all will. If I had found him, if we could have reversed the spell cast in the creation of the realms with all four mirrors, the chances of you surviving such a ritual would be slightly less bleak.
“Lucifer, Michael, me, you—it would be an imperfect mirror, an echo, really—but a chance. The original set survived, and though our side of the power has weakened over the years, it’s not impossible to hope that we could too, in the undoing of the ritual. I searched for years, through pockets of shadow magic and portals, but I could not find him. I wasted years held captive in some offshoot of hell, but even when I escaped, I could not find anyone who’d seen or heard from him in centuries. He seems to have disappeared shortly after the realms were created.”
He slipped a hand in his jacket and tugged, pulling away a worn rope with a large stone dangling from the middle.
As if of its own accord, my hand reached for it, my eyes locked on the strange stone, the rest of the world falling into background particles. I held my breath at the sight of it.
Power, both familiar and not, washed over me, coating my skin, diving deep into the marrow of my bones, infiltrating all of my senses until it was all I could see. All I could feel.
“Shadow magic,” I said, feeling the almost familiar pull to it. With great difficulty, I tore my eyes from it to look at Saif. “But different, somehow.”
Saif nodded, his eyes unblinking as they bore into me. “Greta got word that you were here. That your power was growing. Things have sped impossibly in the last year—things that once put in motion, we can’t return from. The fabric of our reality is collapsing—and the choices of greedy men many years ago could spell death for every living being in this realm and all others. A bit ridiculous then, that with such high stakes, and all my time searching, this is the only thing I have to give. A pendant that belonged to Michael. A family heirloom I only just recently came by. All other trails to the man himself have dried up. It is said that his blood, a piece of his power, is infused in the heart of it. Perhaps you can make use of it, perhaps it will be enough to prevent the world’s undoing.”
“Greta?” her name came out as nothing more than a pathetic croak.
A wistful expression flitted briefly across his face, but melted as he studied me for a moment. “She’s gone too, isn’t she?”
I nodded.
He sighed, then cursed under his breath. “She was the only one I was in contact with, and even then, only very minimally. She didn’t know who I was, not fully. But she sensed the urgency, and agreed to become my eyes on you. Though I’m told you did not always make that easy,” his mouth bent into that fish-hook grin again, “like your mother in that way too, I suppose.”
Silence settled around us like a cold fog.
The euphoria at seeing him slowly dissolved into dark, echoless understanding. I couldn’t deny the flutter in my chest at the possibility he’d found a way to save me. A Hail Mary in the final seconds of the game. Instead, he brought a crushing certainty that the worlds were collapsing. That I would die. That even then, the ritual might only just keep things together—a fragile possibility.
Strangely, that mere whiff of hope had made the unsettling reality only more difficult to face. There might have been a way—a way to stay with Darius, Eli, Atlas, Wade, and Declan—but it was now gone.
“So that’s it then,” I said, closing my fingers around the stone, comforted, if slightly by the steady weight.
Saif took a deep breath, watching me again, though I couldn’t tell what he saw, what he was trying to read. “Are you very scared?”
The question was a deep, aching blow to the chest, but it also held relief, a balloon of tension popping its release.
Was I scared?
I hadn’t really let myself linger on this specific fear. I’d been close to death so many times, that adrenaline and fear were impossible threads for me to unwind.
But this was different than all those times before.
I’d be willingly going to my death—I would be my own cause of destruction.
I wouldn’t fight it, not knowing what I knew now, what could become of the world if I did.
And, honestly? I was fucking terrified.
As much as I wanted to be the kind of heroic figure who could just go into the darkest night, wearing a badge of bravery and honor, with no selfishness and fear braided into it, I wasn’t. I wasn’t some forged, selfless hero.
I was just a girl who’d been born into a specific past, just the end of a story and lineage of pain and sacrifice I only barely understood.
In comparison to what came before me, and what lay ahead of me, I felt weak—clumsy and incompetent.
I nodded, swallowing back the rush of emotion that washed over me, thick and hurried, now that I finally dared to look at it.
“Me too,” he whispered. Some strange kinship floated between us, a tether of acknowledgment, of sameness. The power that flowed through me flowed through him too, but when I looked into his eyes, I saw the same fear, the same sense of incompetence against what we were up against. We were just two people, each holding only a fraction of the power of our ancestors, the original anchors. And we were all that stood between the realm and a power that had grown only stronger with a hunger to devour it.
Though we’d had radically different experiences, the loneliness of our roles in this world was mirrored in each other.
Saif wouldn’t try to stop me. He wouldn’t fight me on my decision like my team had, wouldn’t tell me it was the wrong choice.
Because it wasn’t.
The blood of our ancestors flowed through us—that power, that connection was a sacred promise that had to be fulfilled. Put right.
He stood up, closed the few feet between us, and dropped next to me, awkwardly patting Ralph on the head as the hound adjusted to the added presence.
Saif’s shoulder pressed against mine, his side leaning into me—a strange, unexpected comfort, steady and true even though I’d only just met him.
Silence fell over us for a long stretch, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. If anything, it was just surreal.
My mother’s twin was alive. My uncle. And he was sitting next to me.
Something about his presence gave me a new kind of strength—an acceptance of what was to come. Maybe even a sense of pride in feeling connected to this long line of ancestors I’d been deprived of knowing. I wasn’t alone in this task. I didn’t know him, but Saif was here now, he was part of this with me.
An idea started to form, ephemeral and transparent at first, but growing solid with hope.
“Do you know where we’re from?” I asked, trying to keep the excitement from my voice. I’d been denied my own history for so long that I was starved for even the barest taste of it, the smallest morsel. But it was bigger than that, bigger than my own desires. “The ritual requires a nexus. Lucifer thinks it might be where the original ritual took place, though he has no memory of it.”
“Our ancestors are from a region in Southwest Asia, near modern day Lebanon.” He paused, considering for a moment, while I lingered on that word—our. “Though that doesn’t necessarily mean that was where this all began. The ancients could shift through space, they moved through the world with a different kind of ease than most understand. The spot where they landed—it could be anywhere.”
I slumped back against Ralph, wrestling with the impossible scope of anywhere.
Lucifer was supposedly there in some capacity—maybe we had a better chance of jostling his memory, with magic, or a trick of some sort.
“Is he certain that it must be the literal place of origin?”
I shrugged, unsure.
We settled back into silence, the temporary lightness growing heavier with each passing moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the fragile silence, “I wish that I’d done more, that I hadn’t spent so much time trying to avoid what couldn’t be avoided. I’m sorry that I’ve left you to face this alone.”
“I know.” I wasn’t alone. My fear slowly started to ebb, making way for not quite the calm of acceptance, but something much closer to it than I’d felt before. “I understand. I wouldn’t have been able to let go of that hope either, if I thought she might still be alive, out there somewhere.”
His jaw clenched, expression unreadable. He took a deep, steadying breath, then turned to me. His rough hands grabbed mine, peeling my fingers back until he revealed the stone.
His gaze dropped to it, focused and unsure. After a heavy sigh, he nodded, then he picked the stone up, sliced the sharp edge into the tender flesh of my palm, and carved a rune into my skin that I couldn’t make sense of.
“Hey,” I pulled my arm back, staring at the small pool of blood cradled in my hand. “What the hell?”
Without explanation, he sliced a similar wound into his own flesh, then grasped my hand with his, our blood mingling as one.
His eyes held mine, unblinking, and I found myself unable to move, unable to look away. He spoke in a language I didn’t recognize, but it resonated deep in my chest like a rumbling drum, and moved up my throat until his low and melodic voice harmonized with mine. I didn’t breathe as an unfamiliar tightness wrapped around me, a vise I couldn’t break from.
Panic bled through every atom in my body, but I couldn’t bring myself to stand up or push him away. It was like he’d cast a trance over me, one my body was determined to wait out, no matter the consequences.
The black of his eyes bled, until no white remained, the swirling smoke there calling to me in its strangeness.
Then, as quick and firm as the trance had held, it loosened.
He fell back, breaths harsh and unsteady. The color quickly drained from his face, the light from his stare, until he looked thirty years older than he was, almost sickly.
Michael’s pendant dangled from his hand as he fell back against Ralph, his eyes open and unfocused as they searched aimlessly before finally landing on me.
“It isn’t much, my niece. But it is, unfortunately, the only thing left for me to give you—an unbinding spell, my blood to yours. Any remnants of my power are yours. Any lingering blocks placed on you in infancy are gone. It’s not enough for you to survive the ritual, but it will hopefully be enough for you to see it through.”
And with that, his eyes closed, and the tension in his body fell slack.
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29
DARIUS
Well, this certainly wasn’t on the roster, but I also wasn't going to balk at the opportunity to kill another one of the infamous Guild council members.
Two of the protectors broke rank at the sight of him and took off running towards the vans.
Xavier disappeared, rematerializing in front of one of the runners, just as she reached the first van. In one smooth motion, he snapped her neck, doing the same to her friend before her body even stilled on the ground.
“Imagine my surprise,” his face twisted into a cruel, dangerous smile, “when I found myself in your labs, Peter,” Sir Slimeball, apparently Peter, flinched, shoving the small piece of paper discreetly into his pocket, “only to learn that you’d not only stolen one of our most protected creatures, but set up a rather significant meeting without alerting me.”
This wasn’t the council member I’d encountered, but I could feel his power flaring from here.
At least this made one less prick we’d have to track down. Maybe this little tête-a-tête was more productive than I’d anticipated. And maybe Max would be less pissed about us handling this behind her back if we brought her Xavier’s head on a platter in apology.
I was all for a little bloody groveling.
“W-we,” Peter swallowed, shaking visibly, though he was clearly trying to buckle down his fear, “we were hoping to surprise you. We’ve just been brokering a deal.”
“A deal?” he arched his brow, whether impressed or unconvinced, I couldn’t tell. “And what kind of deal did you think you had the authority to broker without my presence?”
“We need to take him out and get that paper from Slimeball before he teleports out of here,” I mumbled to the others. “Last thing we need is him alerting his friend in time to relocate the stone.”
Claude’s jaw was rigid. “I can feel his power from here. How the fuck does a protector have that much?”
“You’ve missed a lot recently.” I grunted. “They’re getting stronger too. Like now that there’s only two of them, the power is concentrating in the bodies that remain. They must’ve all been linked somehow, bonded or whatever.”
Would the same happen for Max? If we were all out of the picture, would she grow stronger?
