Chapter Twelve #2
I sit there longer than I mean to. An hour turns into two.
I let the quiet stretch, let the strange, fragile calm settle into my bones.
The world feels sharper, the edges clearer.
Even the shadows look different, less like threats and more like space I can finally breathe inside, metaphorically, without the weight of hunger crushing my every thought.
Only when the tremor in my hands fades to a faint echo do I lift my head.
Footsteps sound at the doorway.
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 the hunger 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.
Then another.
And another.
All at once, their attention snaps into place, hollow eyes finding mine as if they’ve been waiting for me to notice them. The air crushes inward, thick with a silence that feels heavier than sound. Panic spikes sharp and bright.
I try to move, to pull back, to say something, but my body refuses to answer. My mouth opens to scream, but no sound comes out, the Null Pulse swallowing my voice before it can exist.
I can’t move.
I can’t look away.
The beings move closer without stepping, forms gliding forward through space that doesn’t belong to them, and the cold deepens until it feels like frost creeping through my bones.
Hades watches me the entire time.
Not surprised.
Not alarmed.
Just knowing.
His eyes hold mine as if he can see exactly what I’m seeing, as if this world is as familiar to him as the living one is to everyone else. The runes along his skin glow faintly, and the ghosts shift subtly toward him, drawn by something inevitable.
I realize with a jolt that I’m standing at the edge of his world now.
And he’s letting me see it.
Cold sinks deeper into my bones.
It isn’t painful.
It is worse than that.
It is an absence.
The hunger inside me falters, freezing mid-lunge. My thoughts slow, stretching wide and thin until each one echoes against an endless stillness.
For a terrifying second, I feel disconnected from everything.
From Rogue’s hand around mine.
From the cabin.
From the world itself.
And it feels as though I’m standing on the edge of something vast and dark.
The veil is thin now, transparent enough that I can see what waits beyond.
Hades’ power brushes through me, not tearing, not forcing…
Just taking.
Drawing out the frantic edges, the violent urgency, leaving behind a quiet so profound it feels like being erased.
My skin prickles with frost, breathless though I don’t need breath, and the emptiness presses in harder than any pain. The ghosts blur at the edges, their forms dissolving as the Pulse reaches its peak, the world reduced to shadows, and the distant echo of my own existence.
I almost panic.
Not from hunger.
From the silence.
Then, it begins to recede.
And warmth returns slowly.
The lights steady.
The shapes at the edge of the room vanish, leaving only the cabin and the low crackle of the hearth.
Hades lowers his hand, and the cold lingers inside me, thin and sharp, but the bloodlust stays quiet, subdued beneath a layer of stillness that feels darker than peace.
“Well?” he asks softly.
My voice comes out rough, unsure, fucking terrified. “It… it felt like… standing on the other side of something.”
A faint curve touches his mouth. “You didn’t cross over. That’s what matters.”
Hesitating, my eyes meet his. “What were those things?” I ask, and Rogue jerks his head back in confusion at my question.
“What things?” he asks, but neither Hades nor I responds to him.
Hades exhales, dipping his head. “They’re the beings that are with me every second of every day.”
My shoulders slump as I sit forward, reaching out for his hand. His eyes widen, as if he is shocked by my forwardness. “They never leave?”
He shakes his head, and the thought breaks my heart. “Jesus, I bet you’d kill for just an hour of alone time?”
A flicker of a smile hints at his lips, and he clears his throat. “That’s not in the cards for me.”
Here I am, feeling sorry for myself and my situation, when this guy is living with literal ghosts following him everywhere he goes. I guess I don’t have it so bad after all. “I’m really sorry, Hades.”
He slowly pulls his hand from mine with a gentle nod. “It is all I have ever known. I think silence would be deafening.”
I weakly smile at him. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Thank you… for helping me. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome, Charlotte,” he says, then turns and walks out of the room.
I slump back into my chair as Rogue spins to me, raising a brow in curiosity. “What?” I ask.
He lets out a small chuckle. “I have no clue what just happened, but I think that is the most Hades has ever said to another human outside of the club since I have known him.”
I shrug with a smirk. “Technically not human anymore.”
“Still… what the hell happened?”
“Let’s just say, he has a lot of ghosts surrounding him.”
Rogue furrows his brows. “Is that like a metaphorical thing or—”
I shake my head, and he lets the question drop.
We sit with it, the fire burning, and my hands slowly return to warmth. Rogue stays quiet, makes no move to fill the space with reassurance or ask me to explain what just happened. He stays. I am slowly learning that this is a thing he does. He doesn’t rush me through the aftermath of anything.
An hour passes—maybe more. The trembling settles. The bloodlust, which had gone almost completely silent under Hades’ pulse, begins to whisper again, but at a volume I can ignore.
When I finally lift my head, Rogue is watching me the way he always is now, calibrated, present, patient.
“Who’s next?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer because the answer is already walking up to the door.
“Hey!” Dread suddenly appears in the doorway, letting the weight of him fill the space before he steps through it, and the weight of him is a real thing, not a metaphor, a pressure that arrives in the room ahead of his body and presses against the edges of my awareness.
My stomach tightens automatically, and my breathing shifts.
Every animal layer of my new existence registers his presence the way prey registers a predator, even though I know, intellectually, that the fear is his ability rather than my reality.
Knowing doesn’t help.
“Fear is a teacher,” he says, and his voice is low and carries the kind of weight that makes it difficult to look away from him. His eyes are steady. There’s nothing cruel in them, nothing that takes pleasure in the reaction I’m clearly having, but there’s no apology either.