Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“The scions Valeria’s built her army from, they’re not beyond saving.
” Sloane’s gaze moves across us, direct and certain.
“My Bloodfire can purify the sire influence she’s forced on them.
We don’t have to destroy every person she’s turned.
We can free them.” Something moves through the room, quiet but real, a collective recalibration.
Because we all know what it costs to kill, and we all know what it means to be something monstrous through no fault of your own.
“We go in to end Valeria. Not to massacre the people she used.”
The silence afterward isn’t disagreement.
It’s acceptance.
Scorch exhales a slow stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “I can work around Bloodfire,” he says, which, coming from him, is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
“Right.” Crave’s gaze sweeps the table one final time. “Gear up. We leave in—”
“I’m coming too.”
Every head turns.
Charlie’s voice is steady, filling the room without apology. Her chin is up, and her hands rest flat on the table in front of her, mirroring Crave’s earlier posture in a way I don’t think she’s consciously aware of.
The word leaves my mouth before I can dress it in anything diplomatic. “No!”
Her eyes find mine.
She doesn’t flinch either.
“You’ve been a vampire for a month, Charlie.
” My voice comes out lower than I intend, the edge in it not anger but something rawer, the part of me that spent weeks watching her bleed, struggle, and fight her own body for control.
The part that cannot stand the idea of walking her into a church full of feral newborns and an ancient vampire with a sire command aimed directly at her.
“A month. The church will be crawling with Valeria’s influence, and you’ve already proven she can reach you through that connection. It’s too—”
“Dangerous?” She finishes the word before I can, and there’s no heat in it.
No sarcasm. “I know. I’ve already thought through every version of this argument, Rogue.
I know what the risks are.” She looks around the table, and there’s something settled in her expression now that wasn’t there a month ago, a resolve that was earned, not borrowed.
“Valeria built her army from people like me. Frightened people who woke up feral, starving, and completely alone. No one there is going to be able to reach them the way I can, because none of you have been them.” Her gaze comes back to mine.
“I’m the only person in this room who understands what it feels like to be inside that hunger and find your way back out of it.
And you know it… Crave excluded, of course. ”
The room is quiet.
I look at Crave.
He’s watching Charlie with that ancient, unreadable expression he wears when he’s already made a decision and is simply waiting for the moment to say it out loud. His shadow shifts on the wall behind him, independent and restless. “She’s right,” he says.
Two words.
That’s all it takes.
Something hot and sharp moves through me, not anger at Crave, not even disagreement, because every part of my rational mind acknowledges that Charlie’s argument is sound. It’s something older than logic. The part of me wired to put my body between her and anything with teeth.
“Crave—”
“She’s proven herself.” His gaze holds mine, steady and without apology.
“In the compound attack. With the captured scions. She did what none of us could have done, because she reached them from the inside. We may need that same ability to reach Valeria’s scions before we lose them entirely.
” He pauses. “She comes, Rogue. You keep her in your sightline. You do not let that sire command get a foothold. Do you understand me?”
The directive is clear. The responsibility lands squarely on my shoulders, which is exactly where Crave intends it to sit.
I exhale through my nose.
He’s not asking.
He’s making a demand as my Bloodguard.
Asshole.
“Understood.”
Charlie doesn’t look triumphant. She looks like someone who knows what they have just signed up for and isn’t taking it lightly. The gravity of it sits on her the same way it sits on the rest of us, and somehow that makes it easier to bear.
“Gear up,” Crave says again, standing, and just like that, the meeting is over.
The next twenty minutes are a controlled kind of chaos, the familiar ritual of preparation that every brother moves through in their own way, the compound shifting from stillness to readiness with the quiet efficiency of people who have done this before.
Scorch moves through the space nearest the door, rolling his shoulders in slow rotations, that familiar loosening motion, like he’s shaking something out of his joints that’s been sitting there too long.
The veins along his forearms pulse faintly with heat, molten threads rising to the surface as his dragon stirs, and I watch him take one long drag from his cigarette before grinding it out under his boot and leaving the butt on the floor for someone else to deal with—his version of a pre-mission ritual.
Nobody says a word about it.
Near the wall, Dread stands with his eyes closed, one hand wrapped around the bronze coin he keeps in his pocket, the one with his mother’s name worn nearly smooth on one face.
His jaw moves faintly, the way it does when he’s pulling himself back from the edge, anchoring to the human parts of himself before the divine takes over entirely.
The air around him is cool and slightly charged, the Dreadfield contained for now, barely.
The vest Hades pulls on, at first glance, looks like plain black leather.
It isn’t. I’ve seen it up close. The bone-pale material woven into the inner lining isn’t decorative.
It’s necromantic armor, fragments of something old and consecrated, stitched into place with thread that hums at frequencies the living shouldn’t hear too closely.
He runs one thumb along the collar seam with the focused care of someone checking that every death ward is seated correctly, his expression as calm and unhurried as it ever is, like a man making sure he remembered his keys before walking out the door.