Hades is a different kind of arrival entirely. He moves through the threshold with a quietness that has nothing to do with stealth and everything to do with a man entirely at ease in his own skin, and his skin is marked with faded ashen runes that shift faintly when the light catches them, as though the ink is rearranging. His eyes are dark, his expression steady, untouched by urgency in a way that only comes from centuries spent around death.
He walks without urgency, leaving the heat Scorch carried behind. The air cools subtly around him, the atmosphere shifting from fire to stillness. He crouches rather than stands, bringing himself to my level. His gaze is calm, unhurried, the look of someone reading a situation he has seen many times before. “I can dampen your connection to death,” he says, his voice low. “Slow your metabolism. Buy you time between thehunger cycles.” He tilts his head slightly. “It won’t remove it, but it’ll give you longer between the waves.”
“How does it work?”
“My hands on your sternum. A Null Pulse through the death energy that drives the bloodlust.” His eyes flicker, a ring of deep black bleeding into the dark of his irises. “You’ll feel cold. More than you already do. It passes.”
Something about his complete absence of alarm, the way he speaks about death as though it’s a familiar road he’s walked too many times to fear. This thing exists and must be accounted for, but not feared, settles something in my chest that had been braced since the moment the engines cut out on the gravel.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods, unhurried, and rises.
He studies me for a moment, calm and measured, taking in the situation like it’s familiar territory. “Dragonfire strips the noise,” he says quietly. “Null Pulse shows you what remains when everything else falls away.” His gaze lingers on mine, dark and knowing.
The runes along his skin shift, ash-dark lines sliding over muscle like living smoke. He lifts one hand toward my sternum.
The air drops in temperature instantly.
Not a breeze.
Not a chill.
More draining.
The pulse hits without force, a silent ripple that moves through me like the world exhaling. What little warmth I have leaches from my limbs first, a creeping frost that coils through my veins and settles behind my ribs. The lingering heat of Dragonfire gutters out, leaving a hollow, glacial quiet in its wake.
The lights flicker.
Once.
Twice.
Shadows stretch across the cabin walls, thinning until they look almost transparent, and for a heartbeat, I swear I see movement where there shouldn’t be any. Figures at the edges of my vision, pale outlines slipping through the corners of the room.
Shadows stretch across the cabin walls, thinning until they look eerie, too long, too slow, as if they’re pulling away from the people who cast them. The lights flicker again, and for a split second, I think the room has doubled, outlines blurring at the edges of my vision.
Movement gathers in the corners.
At first, I think it’s the pulse distorting my sight—shapes where there shouldn’t be shapes. Pale figures standing too still, faces half-formed, clothing shifting like smoke caught between breaths. They crowd the edges of the room, silent witnesses pressed against the walls.
My gaze jerks from one to the next.
More of them.
Everywhere.
Cold claws up my spine as the realization begins to sink in, slow and sickening.
They aren’t reflections.
They aren’t shadows.
They are people.
Dead people.
One turns its head toward me.
