As he prepared to breach St. George’s, Jed could feel the pull of a black hole—a force so violent and evil he could not possibly ignore it. To find it, he realized, all he had to do was let gravity lead the way.

“Can you feel that?” Jed asked Eli as he used the butt of his rifle to break an exterior window to a classroom on the west side of the building.

“Yeah, bro,” Eli said, scanning their six while Jed breached. “I hope we’re not too late.”

“Me too.” Jed stepped over the jagged row of broken glass still clinging to the bottom of the window frame.

Once inside the empty classroom, he cleared left and right, swiveling his torso in a combat crouch while sighting over his rifle. “Clear.”

Eli landed with a crunch beside him. “I got a bad feeling about this, dude.”

As if serving as an exclamation point to Eli’s comment, gunshots echoed inside the school.

“Not good,” Jed said, quick-stepping toward the classroom door leading out to the hall.

At the threshold, he crouched beside the doorframe and signaled he would clear left and go left. Eli nodded, his responsibility implicit. Jed counted them down, opened the door, and surged into the hall. Sighting over his rifle, Jed scanned for targets, his holographic targeting laser sweeping down the long, darkened cooridor.

“Clear,” he said a moment later, his voice a near whisper.

“Clear,” Eli echoed but immediately followed up with “I got a body, twenty-five feet away—down and not moving.”

Jed swiveled for a quick look, needing to confirm with his own two eyes it wasn’t Sarah Beth. “Looks like it could be a teacher. I don’t think that was our shooter.”

“Agreed,” Eli said.

A scream from the other direction sent a chill down Jed’s spine because it was a voice he’d recognize anywhere.

Sarah Beth!

Fresh adrenaline surged through his veins, and he took off in a sprint with Eli in trail. With every fiber of his being, he wanted to charge blindly around the corner, but nearly two decades of Navy SEAL training and muscle memory intervened. He stopped short of the intersection in a combat crouch and exhaled. Then sighting low and fast, he looked around the corner. What his eyes saw at first didn’t compute—bodies sprawled everywhere, some moving, some not, and a towering dark malice closing in on Sarah Beth.

She was facing Victor alone.

Jed chopped a hand and surged around the corner, hugging the left wall while Eli advanced beside him, clearing right, then arcing wide left and falling in step. His immediate inclination was to flip his shot selector switch to full auto and cut the dark malice to ribbons, but the geometry didn’t work. Victor was too close to Sarah Beth; there was no way to strafe him without hitting her.