Lost Beauty (The Deadly Beauties Live On 4)

“You’ve found them, haven’t you?” Slade asks, his voice cool and deadly.

“Keep up.”

I disappear, holding Kya to me like she’s a glass doll. My feet hit the ground inside a dark tunnel, and I look around, trying to figure out where exactly I am.

It takes Slade a matter of seconds to catch up, proving he’s good at trailing the tail of a transport.

A sick feeling invades my throat when I look down to the body that’s on the ground. The skin has been peeled off, and the man chokes on air as blood oozes freely to the floor.

Slade covers his nose, turning away like this is too disgusting for even him.

“What the fuck could do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”

He reaches for Kya, but I hold her tighter, glaring at him like I’m daring him to touch her. His eyes narrow. “Can you fight without risking her body? Or can I hide her so we can find out where the hell she went?”

“You should have brought a doll. We wouldn’t need to stash her body.”

He glares at me. “I didn’t think to bring a doll. Besides, a doll wouldn’t have provoked your instincts. Now hand her to me so I can hide her.”

With a hard kick, I knock out a large portion of the wall, and it crumbles away, leaving room for me to place Kya inside. My Lokie powers slide over the wall, covering it with the illusion that it is untouched.

“She’s hidden, now where—”

A scream from down the hall interrupts me, and I crush the man’s head beneath my boot, ending his torture as Slade starts racing toward the new screams.

He curses, and I taste bile in my throat as we reach the end of the hall and find the next corridor filled with skinless bodies, all of the men slowly dying as they bleed out. Holes are gaping through their chests, as though the monster that did this didn’t want to risk any of them surviving.

“What could do this?” I ask as we hurry forward, stepping over skinned body after skinned body.

“Nothing I’ve ever seen,” he says, pulling his shirt over his nose to help taper the stench of death, decay, and rotten flesh.

My stomach sinks with dread. What if whatever is doing this has hurt Kya? What body is she even in right now?

Dice wasn’t skinned alive. Whatever tried to gut him wasn’t this thing.

The ground groans beneath us as pipes begin to rattle all around. More screams guide us down another corridor filled with just as many flayed bodies with holes in their chests. These are mostly dead this time. It seems as though the kills become more efficient with each new hallway.

The putrid scent grows stronger, and I curse when one of the skinless hands reaches out and grabs my foot. My eyes find the man’s, but I see no hint of Kya in him, so I jerk away. He collapses, his eyes going into a blank stare as he finally dies.

Oddly, he’s one of the few that seems to have eyes. What happened to the rest of their eyes?

Slade’s fists light up with power, and mine light up with fire in response. We weave our way through several hallways of this underground kingdom we didn’t know existed. The tunnels are littered with breadcrumbs in the form of rotting bodies.

“What causes them to rot so quickly?” Slade asks, coughing as the smell grows stronger and stronger with each advance.

“Fuck if I know. How did Kya leave her body if there wasn’t something to go to that she could see? I thought she had to see what she was possessing?”

“I don’t know. Twins in the paranormal world are a rare and very curious thing. Somehow Karma called to her, and Kya’s instincts led her from there. I never should have fucking told her to trust her instincts.”

His voice is layered with fury and... fear?

My heart is pounding out of my chest with fear—fear that Kya is like one of these... In one of these skinless bags of meat.

I’m not sure what I’ll do if... I can’t even think about it. Everyone still alive will definitely die, and I may not ever come back from the abyss. With every step, the dread notches higher, and my fears get worse, causing the primal side of me to growl and threaten to emerge.

Slade skids through blood, slamming into a wall, his eyes wide and fixed down another hallway I haven’t reached yet. I stumble to a halt as my eyes land on the same thing Slade’s have.