Now this is incredibly uncomfortable, because she’s still staring like she expects an explanation.

“You get stronger when we do that thing with you. I’m the only one left. You need to be the strongest if you’re going to—”

She goes phantom and zaps across the room, angrily stomping over to grab her crown once she turns whole. I watch, with some admitted confusion, as she turns a glare on me.

“What?” I snap.

“You’ve taken a lot of joy out of all this for me. I have seven days left. You won’t be allowed to steal any of that joy by turning the best part about all of this into some power show. Fuck. You.”

She flips me the bird, tears waver on her eyelids, and she turns to stalk out like I’ve somehow done something incredibly wrong.

What the hell have I taken the joy out of?

Why does her expectations for Death rise instead of fall?

“Spend time with her, Jude,” I say, mocking the words Kai said to me yesterday after she dozed off again. “The only way you’ll get there is if you quit fighting long enough to understand.”

Understand what? Hell if I know.

“She was more willing to fuck me when I was fighting her off instead of stripping down and lying next to her,” I gripe to myself, searching for my clothes. “It’s almost like she seeks the challenge now that I’ve gone and made it too easy.”

“It sucks to be you,” Kai quips from behind me, startling the hell out of me.

I turn around to find his lips tilted in a mocking smile, but it falls quickly.

“I take it you didn’t do the love thing,” he says as though he’s now annoyed.

“In the short amount of time she was awake, I got flipped off, managed to make her almost cry, and watched her stalk off like I was ruining these seven days. I don’t even fucking know what I did wrong this time. She seemed to like me better when I fucking hated her and found her too suspicious,” I growl as I angrily shove my legs into my pants.

He crosses his arms over his chest in disapproval.

“It’s not my fucking fault. I flat-out told her what I was trying to do, and she took it as an insult, apparently. I thought she wanted me to do the motherfucking love thing,” I say, finding it much simpler to say that word now that I’m not actually trying to say that word so hard. “It’d be easier if all we had to do was say it…and be able to fucking say it.”

I throw my hands up in the hallway, ready to go kill some things that go bump in the Black Heart.

“If she’s not strong enough, that only leaves us with one option.” Ezekiel’s voice comes out of nowhere, and I look over as he comes toward us from the other end of the hallway. “Will you have it in you to flip that switch and go out with her? Or will you let that thing escape and Paca die in vain? Because it’s clear she’s no longer concerned about whether or not she makes it out alive.”

Glaring, I crack my neck to the side. “I’d rather die with a purpose than die as that thing’s puppet once it breaks free and grows even stronger.”

“That’s answering the question without confessing anything about how you feel for Paca,” Gage says as he siphons in next to Ezekiel, jumping into the conversation as though he’s been eavesdropping all along.

I bristle, not liking the three of them teaming up on me.

“I don’t exist without you,” I say through clenched teeth, flicking a gaze at them one by one. “You no longer exist without her. It makes figuring out how I feel about her much harder when things are exponentially sped up, the pressure mounts, and I’m not the fucking romantic kind. I never planned on falling for any woman to the sad and desperate level you’ve all succumbed to so quickly. I wouldn’t even begin to fucking know how to do that.”

Gage looks around, brow furrowing as though he’s distracted, but before I can ask what’s stolen his attention, another voice cuts in.

“You flip that switch, and you break our one and only deal. It’s the only thing I’m asking of you,” Paca says in a tone that clearly means she’s crying.

I’m not turning around. I never know what to do with her when she fucking cries, and I somehow always seem to make it worse.

Gage whips his head toward her in surprise, so I have no idea what was distracting him previously. I focus on searching the hallway for anything peculiar, refusing to glance at the sniffling woman behind me.

Kai starts toward her, but she must wave him off, since he stops abruptly.

His jaw clenches. “I don’t think you understand what you’re fucking asking—”

“I think the four of you are still plotting against me even now. We’re divided, Kai. In all our decisions, we’re always divided,” she carries on, sniffling again. “The four of you, for better or worse, stick it out together and make decisions together, even if they’re hard—”

“Because we take a fair fucking vote, instead one person making a decision for all four of us,” I interject, earning a glare from Ezekiel.

“All four of you,” Paca whispers, echoing the one part of the comment she of course has to go and focus on.

I turn around to face her at last, and freeze when I see the drips of purple flames streaming from her eyes. The fire burns through the hallway floor…which should be impossible.

This floor is resting in Hell, after all.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I say in a tone that sounds more like I’m talking a caged animal into not attacking.

She wipes away the flaming tears, shaking her head. “You’ll survive. Even if I have to see to it myself,” she states with an unsettling amount of confidence.

“If you die. We die with you. That’s what it means to be in a unit. No one gets left behind,” Kai tells her, eyes narrowing. “Just like they wouldn’t leave me behind in the trials, and neither would you. You seem to think this is still a one-sided relationship, when all of us, even Jude, has proven to you we care about you just as much—”

“No you don’t,” she says coolly, eyes turning volcanic in the next instant.

Only this time, instead of the red lava lines breaking up the black, glossy stone, there are purple lines of flame. We all take a step back, and I idly wonder if theirs was as unconscious as mine.

Her voice echoes around us as the walls begin to wilt, and her body starts a steady glow of that purple flame.

“Back then, you loved me more than I could have loved you. You were tortured, left to rot in agony for all eternity with no hope for anything more than that,” she says as her voice gets a longer echo, power pulsing from her body, even as those purple flame tears continuing leaking.

Her blonde hair whips in the sudden wind that stirs in the otherwise stale hallway.

“You, of course, fell in love with your savior, a deeper love than you could ever imagine in that lifetime. Whereas, I didn’t even exist without you in this life. If I took my eyes off you for longer than a few minutes, I faded into that horrible nothingness, fearing each time I wouldn’t come back. This time, you were my saviors instead of the other way around.”

She chokes back a sob, and we all take a step forward, only to be pushed back by some unseen force that seems to be coming out of her body, as the temperature seems to rise.

Not that we can feel it rising.

The walls are just turning to sludge, bleeding into a different illusion with more hallways to wilt against her heat.

“I watched everything. I pretended to be a part of your unusual family,” she goes on, wiping away her tears as she laughs humorlessly. “I fell so in love with each of you for different reasons that it’s sad to look back on. I talked a big game, but I was tied to you from the moment my eyes first landed on each one. I did this so I’d love you enough to follow through—”

“You can’t possibly know that,” I interrupt, glaring at her anew. “You sound as though you’ve already decided we can’t win, and I don’t like fighting battles where all five of us are guaranteed to lose. We blow the fucking world up, the way we were meant to, and we seal off Hell. We can use that secondary trigger topside without killing ourselves. If we—”

“No!” she shouts.

The entire floor quakes beneath us, and wind rushes us so hard we all stagger back a few steps in surprise, as that fire burns brighter and brighter around her.

Purple flames…

I’ve seriously fucking seen it all from this girl.

“I think we should all take a deep breath,” Gage cuts in, talking over Kai when he starts to argue. “This is tense. The stakes are high. We need to calm down and try to—”

“You are my only fucking mission in this life,” Paca states in that echoing tone that thunders through the other walls that are now melting away, along with the floor and ceiling beneath us.

Volcanic rock rests beneath our feet, and glimpses of a fiery sky taunt us from overhead.

“You’re it. My absolute goal has been to protect you. I don’t even want you to love me if it means you die too. I’ll do this on my own,” she says as she turns to go.

We all freeze as Caesar and Pico appear before us, beginning a slow clap, even as they keep dead eyes.