The kind that comes from knowing that whatever just happened has already changed the shape of the night.
I sniff the air, a smell hitting my senses before I even register it.
There are five of them.
I know it before anyone tells me.
My senses reach through the walls, into the dark and the distance, the predator in me already hunting for threats, movement, and escape routes.
Five heartbeats…
No, the absence of them, the particular anti-rhythm that I’ve come to recognize in myself when I stand too close to a mirror and notice nothing staring back.
Five scions. Young and hungry. Driving themselves into the fence line at the east gate with the blunt, uncoordinated force of creatures operating on a single instruction with no room left inside them for anything else.
My stomach pulls tight in a way that has nothing to do with bloodlust and everything to do with recognition.
Rogue appears at my shoulder so fast the air moves before he does, his hand closing around my forearm, warm, grounding, and immediate. His gold eyes are already scanning past me, calculating, but he looks at me first.
Always at me first.
“Five scions at the east gate,” he says, which I already know, and the fact that he tells me anyway, that he includes me rather than routes around me, loosens something in my chest. “Coming in hard and feral.”
“I know,” I say, because there’s nothing else to say. “I can feel them.”
Something moves in his expression. Not surprise—he’s long past being surprised by what I can do—but acknowledgment. The same look he wore at the cabin when I tracked the deer in the dark and described its path to him before I’d consciously processed what I was sensing, and he realized there were things about what I’d become that even he hadn’t fully understood yet.
He keeps his hand on my arm and looks at me with a steadiness that makes it harder, not easier, to hold myself together. “You know what they’re feeling. What they are thinking?” My throat closes. “You were one of them,” he continues, and the words are quiet, stripped of everything except honesty. “Not long ago.”
“I know what I was,” I say. My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“Then help us save them.” The words land with a weight I wasn’t prepared for.
Save them.
Not eliminate them.
Not contain them.
Not neutralize the threat in whatever way costs the least.
Save them.
And he says it to me, specifically, because I am the only person in this compound who knows, from the inside, what it means to be standing on the other side of that fence with nothing left in the world except the screaming of a hunger so total it obliterates every other thing you’ve ever been.
I set the mug down on the counter with exaggerated care because my hands are shaking.
“Okay,” I say, and Rogue and I head for the door.
The east gate is chaos rendered in motion, Scorch at the left flank with his veins running molten beneath his skin, Dragonfire barely leashed, the air around him shimmering with a heat haze that makes looking directly at him uncomfortable. Dread is flanked right, his Divine fear projection rolling off him in slow, tide-like waves, making the hairs on my arms stand straight. Hades stands central with the stillness of someone who has never once in their existence needed to rush, and three scions are throwing themselves at the reinforced fence with the mindless, exhausting repetition of creatures that can’t conceive of stopping.
Two more come around the south side. I clock them before I round the building and track all five simultaneously. Their absence-of-heartbeat signatures are mapped in the back of my mind, the way sonar maps terrain, automatic and precise. One of the southside pair is smaller, shorter, I think, though it’s hard toknow anymore whether size means anything. Moving differently from the others. Not mindlessly. There’s something in the trajectory that my body reads as intention rather than instinct, and the hairs on the back of my neck lift, because intention in a feral newborn scion means something is directing them, and that something is never good.
“South!” I shout, already moving.
Rogue’s at my back instantly, but I’m faster than I was three weeks ago in a way that still catches me off guard. I clear the corner of the building in time to see a smaller scion slip through a gap in the outer perimeter that Grizz’s repair work hadn’t fully sealed, a narrow thing, a crack no fully-grown man could navigate. Still, this scion is slight, committed, and driven by something that knows exactly what it’s looking for.
Sloane is at work tonight, thank God, but I don’t know who is inside the main building, and I don’t intend to find out the hard way.
