Page 83 of Darkest Fate

My heart twisted. “I’m still the same me, Caim. I haven’t changed.”

“Do you truly believe that?” he asked, his voice a low growl.

I opened my mouth to try and explain that nothing about me had changed—although I wasn’t entirely sure how true that was. Of course I’d changed. For the better. Hadn’t I?

But then an explosion shook the ground beneath my feet. Brilliant light speared the sky, cutting through the darkness of the night. Caim grabbed me as I stumbled toward the building’s ledge. He hauled me back, and we both tumbled into a heap across his roof.

For a moment, all I could do was blink. Caim stared at me, shock plastered across his face. Something terrible had just happened. An attack on New York. Slowly, we stood. I braced myself as I turned, expecting to see fire and smoke billowing up from the streets.

All I saw was black.

Footsteps clattered across the rooftop as the others joined us. Az instantly took to the skies with his wings flared across the clouds. We watched him soar over the buildings in the direction the explosion had come from. A sinking feeling curdled in my gut. He was flying straight towardInfernal.

An instant later, he was back. His face was covered in shock.

He landed heavily on the roof in a crouch, his body bowed forward.

“What’s happened?” Stolas asked in a panicked voice.

Caim’s hand tightened on my arm as a heavy sense of dread drifted toward us on the wind. It choked me, clogging my nostrils to the point where I wasn’t sure I could even breathe. My knees buckled. I wanted to scratch out my eyes and scream.

“Oh shit,” Caim whispered from my side. “I can feel it. The hellgate is open. But it feels...sostrong.”

My stomach dropped.

Az kept his eyes focused on the ground, his face screwed up in pain. “It’s been opened by a violent force, and the gate is now the size of an entire building.Ourbuilding. The club has been entirely destroyed. And soon, the hellbeasts will come.”

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