I don’t understand the language.
I’m not sure it is one, not the way language usually works. It’s something older, something that vibrates rather than traveling through the air. His hands are moving in short, precise gestures, and from the cracks between the flagstones, from the dark beneath the broken pews, something responds. Skeletal shapes haul themselves up through the floor with a grinding patience that makes my skin crawl even though they’re on our side, pale bones assembled and purposeful, closing the gaps in Scorch’s fire wall with eight feet of necromantic authority that even starving vampires hesitate to approach.
Sloane moves around me with her hands already crimson-gold-lit, heading for the nearest captive scions at a pace that suggests she has absolutely no intention of fighting if she can help it. Her Bloodfire builds in the cup of her palms, not destructive, not the burning wall that’s in her arsenal, but something different, something that seems to call rather than destroy. “I can purify the influence,” she says, mostly to herself, already crouching beside the first cowering figure who has pressed themselves against a fallen pillar rather than charging. “Hold the line. Give me time.”
Rogue hasn’t moved from in front of me. His eyes are gold, that deep, burning amber that means his wolf is fully present, extremely unhappy, that complete shift that doubles his strength in a matter of seconds.
Valeria watches all of this with the patience of someone who has seen more battles than any of us have lived years, then she smiles and moves toward Crave as if she has all the time in the world.
“You can’t win this, Draven,” she says, almost conversational, as two scions flank her without being commanded, responding to her the way blood answers hunger, instinctive and undeniable. “I have been building this for over two hundred years.”
Crave steps to meet her, his shadow peeling away from the wall, spreading, and the ancient cold of him fills the space between them. “You’ve been in exile for over two hundred years,” he says. “There’s a difference.”
They collide, and the church shakes. I drag my attention back to the scions still circling, still hungry, still bearing down on the fragile line that Hades’ skeletal warriors are holding at the center of the main hall, and I make myself look at them, not as threats, but as people. The way Rogue taught me, back at the cabin, back when I was the one shackled to something I couldn’t control.
One of them meets my eyes. A young man, who couldn’t be more than twenty, his face hollowed out by weeks of starvation, his eyes red, wild, and absolutely terrified beneath the hunger.
I know what he’s drowning in.
I’ve been there.
“Hey,” I say, loud enough to cut through the noise, and his frantic movement stills for just a fraction of a second. “I know you can hear me. Underneath it. I know the hunger is everything right now, I know it’s so loud you can’t think past it.” I keep my voice steady, even though the sire command is still whispering at the back of my skull like a splinter lodged somewhere I can’t reach. “But you can fight it because I did. And I’m standing right here.”
The young man blinks.
It’s not much. It’s barely anything. But it’s enough for Rogue to move, smooth and fast, catching him by the shoulders before the hunger can close back in, holding him with a grip thatcontains rather than harms, his wolf presence pressing into the scion’s bloodlust the same way it presses into mine.
Steadying.
Anchoring.
The young man stops fighting and starts trembling, and there is something so desperately human in that trembling that my chest squeezes hard enough to hurt.
Sloane is there in moments, her Bloodfire settling against his skin in a wash of warm light, burning Valeria’s influence out of his blood like smoke from a wound, and he makes a sound that is somewhere between agony and relief.
Somewhere behind me, Valeria screams something at Crave in a language I don’t speak.
The church shakes again, as the battle rages around me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ROGUE
Crave and Valeria crash together in the upper main hall with a force that shatters the nearest pew into splinters, sending shards of centuries-old timber spinning across the stone. Their battle becomes ancient power against ancient power, neither giving an inch, the air around them cracking with the pressure of two Original-level beings finally letting the leashes off. Part of the church wall crumbles on impact, and plaster rains down like snow.
I don’t have time to watch them.
“Hold the line!” Scorch’s voice cuts through the chaos, and then his hands come up, and the world turns orange. Dragonfire erupts in twin walls of living flame, cutting the main hall in two and forcing the first wave of scions back hard. Several of them shriek at the heat, their pale skin blistering, and the stench of scorched vampire fills the air, thick, acrid in the way that only burning supernatural flesh ever is. Scorch plants himself between the fire walls like a man made of stone, cigarette somehow still between his lips, his veins crawling with molten red beneath his skin.
“Anyone runs through my fire, they don’t get to complain when they’re crispy,” he announces, absolutely conversational.
Dread steps up beside him and does something quieter and more devastating, something I always forget I’m grateful for until I watch it work. The fear projection rolls out of him like a tide going out, invisible but absolute, and half the advancing scions stagger mid-stride. One of them drops to its knees, overwhelmed, clutching its own head. Even the ones who pushthrough it are slower, uncertain, the feral focus in their eyes suddenly clouded by something they can’t name.
Hades raises his hands.
The ground answers.
Skeletal hands breach the church floor, fingers first, then knuckles, then wrists, pulling themselves up through stone with the grim patience of the dead, and the necromantic warriors take their positions along the perimeter, ribcages half-exposed, eye sockets burning cold blue. They don’t bleed or tire. They hold what they’re given with the absolute indifference of things that have nothing left to lose.
