"You're very special," the technician prepared what looked like a standard blood pressure cuff. "A true prophet, born outside the traditional bloodlines."
"Lucky me," I mumbled. Like I really had a choice in all of this.
"Oh yes," he agreed, and something in his tone made me look up sharply. His eyes had changed; where they had been brown, they now glowed with an unnatural amber light. "The Harbingers of the Ending Days have been waiting for one like you."
My blood went cold. "The what now?"
His face split in a smile that was too wide, revealing teeth that had suddenly become too sharp. "The world is changing, Winter. The old prophecies are breaking down. You are part of something greater. The Final Prophecy."
He reached into his lab coat and pulled out not medical equipment, but a curved knife with strange symbols etched into the blade.
"You have a choice," he grinned, the amber light in his eyes intensifying. "Join us willingly, or I deliver only your heart to the Harbingers. Either way, you will serve the Ending Days."
I scrambled backward on the table, my back hitting the wall. "I'm going to go with neither, thanks for the offer though."
He lunged forward with inhuman speed, knife raised. I threw my hands up instinctively, the markings on my arm flaring bright blue, but before my magic could react, the door exploded inward.
A blur of motion crossed the room. Zane materialized behind the cultist, one hand gripping the man's knife arm, the other wrapped around his throat. I'd never seen Zane move like that, all his casual, lounging grace transformed into lethal precision.
"Harbingers," Zane spat the word like poison. "I should have smelled you the moment you walked in."
The cultist struggled, his face contorting. "You! The ex-bounty hunter. The Master said you might be with her."
"Your Master has a long memory," Zane's mismatched eyes now glowed with their own light, one sapphire, one emerald. "Too bad you won't live to report back to him."
With a swift, practiced motion, Zane twisted. The crack of the cultist's neck breaking was sickeningly loud in the small room. The man collapsed, the knife clattering to the floor.
Zane stood over the body, his face a mask of cold fury unlike anything I'd seen from him before.
"Zane," I was still pressed against the wall. "What the hell just happened? Who are the Harbingers?"
He turned to me, the glow fading from his eyes. "Bad news," he shook his head. "Very, very bad news."
Rook charged in, claws already extended from his fingertips. He took in the scene, the dead cultist, Zane standing over him, me huddled against the wall, and growled.
"What happened? You threw me down the damn hallway when you blew past."
"Harbinger cultist," Zane nudged the body with his foot. "They know about her."
Rook's expression darkened. "How?"
A commotion in the hallway drew our attention. Fenric appeared in the doorway, looking uncharacteristically disheveled, with Thornwick close behind.
Too bad I didn't have my phone to take a picture of him. He'd have hated it when I showed it to him later.
"We found something," Fenric announced, his voice strained. "Where the equipment exploded. A scroll fragment materialized in the debris."
Thornwick pushed past Fenric, clutching a piece of aged parchment sealed in a clear container. His face was ashen.
"This is impossible," he held out the fragment for us to see. It was covered in symbols that looked disturbingly like the ones on my arm. "This text, it's from the Codex of Fated Events. But it's been altered."
"Altered?" Fenric repeated. "That's not possible. The Codex is immutable."
"See for yourself," Thornwick pointed to a section where the blue ink seemed to shift and change, as if the letters were being rewritten before our eyes. "Someone is tampering with fate itself. Someone outside the system."
I stared at the fragment, a cold feeling settling in my gut. "What does that mean?"
A new voice answered from the doorway. "Nothing good."
