Unmade (Unborn #4) - Amber Lynn Natusch Page 0,46

countered. I lowered my hands and let him speak as I tried to calm myself—tried to preserve my power for the moment I would need it most. Worry and fear would not help my fallen brothers. Cunning, however, would. “Now tell me, Khara, do you want the chance to know your dead brothers, or do they mean nothing to you? Are you willing to be the cause of their eradication?” I did not bother to respond to such a clearly rhetorical question. He was very well aware that I did not want that fate. “I didn’t think so.”

“How do I do what you want?” I asked. Oz wheeled on me the second the words left my mouth.

“You can’t—”

“I cannot let him do what he threatens to, either,” I said, cutting him off. “They are my blood.”

“You don’t understand what this means.” He grabbed my arms. “If you free them, they will spread and pollute the world with their evil. They’ll be a plague on this Earth and destroy everything and everyone on it.”

“I will not let that happen.”

“You won’t be able to stop it!” he argued. “Dark Ones literally corrupt everything they touch. They will spread evil at a rate you can’t even fathom. There will be no stopping it. Not even you can—”

“I will try—”

“That’s not good enough,” he said, shaking me.

I looked at where his hands gripped my biceps, then back into his desperate brown stare.

“You have touched me. Am I now corrupted, too?”

His mouth pressed to a thin line. “This is hardly the time to try and unpack that, new girl.”

“Do you think I am bluffing?” Kaine asked as he took a step closer.

Oz held me tighter. “Your brothers would not want this.”

I knew he was right, but the truth in his words changed nothing.

“Perhaps you need to see just how serious I am,” Kaine said.

Before I could respond, an obsidian feather appeared only inches away, pointing directly at my heart. For a moment, I did not understand how that could be, given where I was standing, but then I looked at Oz, and the tip of a wing protruding from his chest, and realized what had just happened.

“I have been waiting a long time to do that,” Kaine said, ripping his wing from Oz. “I’ll be in the Underworld with your dead brothers awaiting your answer, Khara. You have forty-eight hours before they meet their final end.”

Oz fell to his knees as Kaine took to the air and flew toward the Underworld with frightening speed. I wanted to follow—to strike him from the sky—but the gurgling sound Oz made when he tried to speak held me back. Then he fell to the rooftop at my feet.

Though I could see him plainly, I could not process what was before me. Oz was lying on the roof, blood streaming from his chest where a shiny black feather stuck out—right where his heart should be. I dropped to his side, reaching for the weapon.

“No!” he ground out as blood sputtered from his mouth. With every droplet that fell, my heart sped up a tick.

“The wound cannot be fixed with the blade still in there.”

He looked at me with alarming seriousness. “It cannot be fixed at all.”

Icy dread ran through my veins at his words. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Kaine knew exactly what he was doing.”

Another cough.

Much more blood.

“Well, Kaine will be sorely disappointed when he learns he has failed,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “Trey, you must bring the Healer. It is Oz. Come quickly.”

Seconds later, Trey appeared with my twin in tow, no Healer to be found.

“She cannot help him,” Sean said as he approached, a hint of guilt in his tone.

I stood to face him. “Cannot or will not?”

“She works for the PC—serves the PC—”

“Then she will serve me by doing my bidding—”

“Khara—"

“No!” I shouted, cutting him off. “We have been here before, Brother—been on this precipice in the past. I told you then that, if you did not let me help him, my wrath would know no end. That has not changed.” I turned back to Trey. “Bring the Healer. Now.”

Trey disappeared, returning with a petite girl who barely looked old enough to be what they claimed she was—the Healer.

“Fix him,” I said, pointing to Oz. Her eyes drifted to Sean, awaiting his directive. He shook his head, and I felt as though flames would burst from my mouth at any moment.

“You are not to heal him,” Sean said. “He is