Chapter 9 Aurora
The world tilted beneath me. My ears started ringing with a high-pitched noise, and I leaned forward slightly to stop the room from spinning.
“He’s—” My voice cracked, and the words died in my throat. I swallowed, tried again. “But I thought he was dead.”
Conin. The silver-haired outlier who’d pulled me from the wreckage of Father’s zeppelin. The varcolac who’d spoken of duty and proving our commitment to the Republic with such fierce conviction that his words had carved themselves into my bones. Now trapped inside one of those… abominations.
Derzelas, have mercy.
I’d witnessed what Souleaters could do—their savage glee when ripping through flesh and bone. My pulse thrummed in my ears. The thought of Conin’s soul imprisoned in that twisted shell made me want to retch.
“We have to do something!” I blurted. My hands trembled, blood buzzing beneath my skin like a thousand angry wasps. “We have to save them—your brother, Phoenix, everyone else.”
The silence that followed crushed down like an iron weight. My thoughts raced in dizzying circles, each one coming back to the same horrifying question: Was Phoenix—Ditoa—aware when she died? Was some part of her still trapped, conscious, watching through eyes that no longer obeyed her will?
God. Every mission report, every battle strategy suddenly felt like a cruel mockery. We’d been killing our own people.
I’d been killing them.
Selena steepled her fingers together, her face turning analytical. “Is this ‘mental link’ you have with your brother a clan thing? Like your magic?”
Radu dragged his fingers over his eyebrow. “You could say that.” He poured himself a cup of kafea, unaware—or unperturbed—he spilled the liquid on the table. The bitter scent filled the air between us. “The closer the ties, the stronger the connection.”
He took a measured sip, then stared at me over the rim. That look carried volumes that words couldn’t touch. “The Republic believes this war ends when the Creators awaken, correct?” he asked, too calm for someone who already knew the answer to that.
“Yes.” I nodded, if only to humor him. “When the Creators are scheduled to awaken.”
The tension in his shoulders, the careful neutrality of his tone—Radu was leading somewhere, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to follow.
“And your Creators’ blood powers will defeat these creatures?”
“Of course,” I answered without hesitation. The Sons of Derzelas were the most powerful immortals to ever walk the earth. This wasn’t blind faith, but cold, hard fact.
Radu’s features turned hard as stone. “And what would happen if the enemy’s army carried full immortal blood? Would the First Originals, powerful as they may be, stand against thousands of such creatures? Possibly even more?”
The way his chin lifted slightly in a subtle challenge sent fire through my veins. I wanted to refute his outrageous claim, to cite the countless tests conducted on Souleater blood samples. None had ever come back with full immortal blood.
Not that he gave me a chance to answer.
“But first you need to understand how these creatures harvest their victims.” His penetrating gaze swept from me to Selena and back again. “How they capture what you might call the soul.”
“It’s not the actual soul they take, but an impression of it—a copy,” Pearl interjected. She shrugged at my confused expression. “It’s difficult to explain in simple terms.”
Harbinger nodded. “They perform what we’ve named ‘the kiss of death,’” he said. “But they require functioning brain tissue. They can’t feed on just any corpse.”
“I imagine intact brain matter is scarce on the battlefield,” Selena barged in, her voice taking on that detached, clinical tone she used when discussing her work. Brain physiology always captivated her, for some peculiar reason.
“Very scarce.” Gale’s gentle voice broke through. “That’s why we often run into multiple creatures sharing identical voices. Phoenix is likely still out there, trapped in another Souleater.”
Ember’s sob broke the silence.
My chest tightened for her. She and Phoenix had been inseparable since conscription—two balaurs forged in the same fires. I couldn’t fully grasp her loss, not when I still had Selena, but the thought of losing my best friend was unbearable.
Pearl wrapped an arm around Ember’s trembling shoulders, murmuring soft reassurances in her ear. Quakelord ducked beneath the table, emerged with an unmarked bottle of mead, and splashed a generous portion into a clean cup. He took a deep pull himself before sliding it toward Ember.
Harbinger’s commanding voice snapped my attention back to him before I could see if she accepted the offering.
“Pearl’s right,” he said. “They don’t harvest souls in the way people imagine. What they take are echoes, fragments of consciousness. Even when they carry these pieces, communicating with mimicked voices is impossible. They only replicate the final seconds before death.”
“Black Sheep,” Terraknight rumbled from across the table.
My head jerked toward him in perfect sync with Selena’s. The vice-captain’s massive frame practically vibrated with tension, his jawline set and unrelenting. And despite the reasonable air, my mouth dried.
“Explain,” she demanded, narrowing her onyx eyes at him.
We’d been trying to decipher this sheep nonsense ever since I’d eavesdropped on their private conversation through the malfunctioning Transmitters.
“Black Sheep are Souleaters who feed off fallen outliers,” Terraknight said. “They hide among the regular Souleaters—the White Sheep.” He shot a glance at Harbinger’s, then added, “They’re the ones who remember fragments of who they were.”
My mouth opened and then closed again. All Terraknight had managed to do was raise even more questions. Before I could voice them, Harbinger took over.
“I’ve been tracking their patterns for decades.
” Eyes the color of the deepest amber gleamed as they zeroed in on me.
“The Republic has been their primary target from the beginning, and now I understand why.” He drummed his fingers on the table.
“When the purebloods fell in that first attack, they were left for the sun to dispose of them. Strategic choice during a crisis, but a damn costly one in the long run.”
He paused and gave me a look that wasn’t quite condescending, but not impudent either. It carried the bitter knowledge that came from anger and grief. He’d lost people too. Fought this war longer than anyone should have to.
I swallowed my pride and nodded for him to continue.
“When White Sheep found those purebloods before dawn,” he continued, “they got themselves the only immortal brain tissue on the battlefield. And since they share a basic hive mind controlled by something higher, any Souleater that fed on purebloods gained fragments of immortal consciousness. Pieces that grow stronger with time—”
“That’s impossible!” Selena’s face drained of color. She shot to her feet, palms slamming flat against the table. Her eyes darted back and forth; that telltale sign her brilliant mind was already racing, piecing the theories together with terrifying speed.
The sight of her even considering Harbinger’s words set a cold weight in my chest.
“Sweet Derzelas,” I whispered, “it can’t be true.”
“—and when they finally breach those walls…” Harbinger continued, unmoved by our reactions, but I couldn’t hear his voice anymore.
The image of an army of sentient monsters flooding through the Seventh Ward’s gates tore through my mind. My stomach churned, though nothing came up. This was beyond a war crime. This was a defilement of the most fundamental kind. Dark Father, what had Russkaya unleashed?
“You’re going to lose this war, princess.” The certainty in his tone broke through the fog of horror.
My nostrils flared. “The hell we are!” I joined Selena and bolted from my seat.
His choice of “you” instead of “we” wasn’t lost on me, but I bit back the burning remark. He’d made his feelings about the divide between mixed-breeds and purebloods painfully clear from the beginning. His hatred of the Republic ran bone-deep.
Terraknight circled the table with slow, measured steps, his expression made graver by the shadows playing on his face. “You both need to understand what we’re facing. This isn’t just about winning the war. It’s about stopping them from ever reaching the Republic’s walls.”
“He’s right,” Harbinger agreed. “The Souleaters grow in number every day. But what about the halfbloods? How many of us remain to fight them?”
To anyone else, he might have appeared calm, almost detached.
But I’d learned to read the signs—the slight tightening around his eyes, the tension in his jaw, the way his fists clenched at his sides.
His rage wasn’t directed solely at the Republic, I realized.
It was at the entire situation, at the senseless waste of lives on both sides.
I clenched my jaw, forcing my eyes to stay locked with his instead of dropping to the floor as shame threatened to pull them down. I didn’t have an answer to his question. The Republic didn’t track those statistics. I had barely kept count of my own fallen outliers.
His mouth tightened into a knowing line, a fleeting sadness crossing his face before the hardness returned.
“At this rate, we’ll all be gone within five years,” he said.
“People are dying faster than they reproduce in the detention camps. And those who don’t…
they fall on the battlefield.” He paused, tilted his head, and stared at me, probably waiting for the information to sink in.
It did. Like a sledgehammer straight to my skull.
But even though my brain acknowledged his words, my entire being refused to believe him. Because he was talking about the end of the world. And I wasn’t ready to accept that truth.