Unchained Beauty (The Deadly Beauties Live On 5)

Honestly, Slade would have just killed anyone who tried to stop him from leaving with Arnold, or at least left them for dead.

“Good?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, looking over my shoulder. “I’m doing all I can to be worthy.”

“Be worthy? Ella, are you fucking listening to—”

I dematerialize and bounce around to a few places before finally landing in front of Alton’s cave. Arnold is just rousing when I drop his foot.

“He’ll dematerialize if you wait too long,” I say as Alton walks over, eyes wide and face pale as he stares down at Arnold with no recognition. “He’s one of the masked men who aided the rings in your retrieval. I just need to—”

Well, apparently he doesn’t need much prompting.

In the next instant, I see Alton go feral for the first time. He throws himself on Arnold, and I watch as he rips him to shreds, even as Arnold’s bloodcurdling screams beg for mercy.

Yes, it’s vicious. Which is sort of the point of this experiment. Plus, Alton looks like he feels a little better by the time he’s completely obliterated the man.

There are a lot of variables, but we finally figured out the key ones. I hope.

Alton sags back to the ground, his back pressed to the cave. “You should have given him to Slade,” he says, his eyes more silver than they’ve ever been.

This particular Trout didn’t actually play a part in his capture, though he hauled in plenty of other innocent souls for the ring runners to wreck. But I’m not going to steal the only moment of joy Alton’s possibly had in too long.

“Slade’s had his fill,” I say as I turn and walk out.

“Why?” he calls to my back. “Why give that to me? Why give me even that little bit of peace?”

Glancing back, I say, “It wasn’t for you. But I’m glad you liked the present.”

With that, I dematerialize and land in our little underground cellar.

“When he externalizes that force, it will lose a lot of its power. We’re going to need a counter source. It’ll need to be an enormous, quick burst of power from a source like the forest, but it can’t be channeled unless she sacrifices someone with the same blood as a medium,” Kimber is arguing.

“Ella has that sort of power on her own,” Kya snaps just as heatedly. “She just needs to—”

“If she taps into that much power, she could accidentally kill us all, and what’s the point in doing all this instead of letting Slade at least weaken her?” Kimber points out.

“If my powers had been forced to stay as dormant as Slade’s, I could have created a source like that. Did you know Slade felt how to do that on instinct, since he never truly got to physically inspect the forest? It’s one of our survival instincts, oddly enough,” I interject. “Same way Mom realized how to pull the purgatory residue in to create that forest.”

Kya takes one look at the blood splattered on me, compliments of a brutal, messy Alton, and cocks an eyebrow.

“I guess it worked?” she asks.

“Yep. So there’s that theory proven.”

“What does Slade knowing how to do that as an instinct have anything to do with this?” Kimber asks me.

“How’d the deer go?” I ask Kya instead of answering.

She shudders. “I can’t believe you were right about…” She pauses, and we both look over at Dice, who is crunching on a Kit Kat, eyes glued to us.

“Really? This is how you’re helpful?” I ask him.

“I’m working on the little things,” he points out. “But this is my break time. I’m part of a union, so you can’t take this away from me.”

Rolling my eyes, I look back to Kya. “Now see if you two can figure out where I’m going with this.”

They both slow blink.