Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
Scorch doesn’t wait. His veins burn full incandescent, that molten red blazing up his throat and into his jaw.
The roar tears out of him, not a sound so much as a force, the dragon beneath his skin asserting itself in a wave of pressure that cracks the stones around his feet and sends two of the nearest scions stumbling backward, clutching their heads.
Before the echo dies, he’s throwing Soul Fire, great curving walls of it arcing left and right to create a burning barrier between us and the bulk of the feral mass.
The fire doesn’t touch wood or stone, it burns precisely what it intends to burn and nothing else, that dragon intelligence directing every lick of flame.
“Left flank!” Dread’s War Sense has already processed the room, and he throws himself bodily into the three scions that spill around Scorch’s fire wall, catching the first by the throat and slamming him into a pillar with a force that cracks the stone.
His eyes ignite, gold-white and terrible, as the Dreadfield unspools outward in an invisible pulse.
The scion in his grip goes rigid, no longer fighting but frozen, locked inside whatever primal nightmare Dread’s power floods through the nervous system of anything unlucky enough to be caught in its radius.
The two behind him stumble, hands flying to their own faces, mouths open in screams they can’t quite produce.
Hades is already speaking.
I don’t understand the language.
I’m not sure it is one, not the way language usually works.
It’s something older, something that vibrates rather than traveling through the air.
His hands are moving in short, precise gestures, and from the cracks between the flagstones, from the dark beneath the broken pews, something responds.
Skeletal shapes haul themselves up through the floor with a grinding patience that makes my skin crawl even though they’re on our side, pale bones assembled and purposeful, closing the gaps in Scorch’s fire wall with eight feet of necromantic authority that even starving vampires hesitate to approach.
Sloane moves around me with her hands already crimson-gold-lit, heading for the nearest captive scions at a pace that suggests she has absolutely no intention of fighting if she can help it.
Her Bloodfire builds in the cup of her palms, not destructive, not the burning wall that’s in her arsenal, but something different, something that seems to call rather than destroy.
“I can purify the influence,” she says, mostly to herself, already crouching beside the first cowering figure who has pressed themselves against a fallen pillar rather than charging. “Hold the line. Give me time.”
Rogue hasn’t moved from in front of me. His eyes are gold, that deep, burning amber that means his wolf is fully present, extremely unhappy, that complete shift that doubles his strength in a matter of seconds.
Valeria watches all of this with the patience of someone who has seen more battles than any of us have lived years, then she smiles and moves toward Crave as if she has all the time in the world.
“You can’t win this, Draven,” she says, almost conversational, as two scions flank her without being commanded, responding to her the way blood answers hunger, instinctive and undeniable. “I have been building this for over two hundred years.”
Crave steps to meet her, his shadow peeling away from the wall, spreading, and the ancient cold of him fills the space between them. “You’ve been in exile for over two hundred years,” he says. “There’s a difference.”
They collide, and the church shakes. I drag my attention back to the scions still circling, still hungry, still bearing down on the fragile line that Hades’ skeletal warriors are holding at the center of the main hall, and I make myself look at them, not as threats, but as people.
The way Rogue taught me, back at the cabin, back when I was the one shackled to something I couldn’t control.
One of them meets my eyes. A young man, who couldn’t be more than twenty, his face hollowed out by weeks of starvation, his eyes red, wild, and absolutely terrified beneath the hunger.
I know what he’s drowning in.
I’ve been there.
“Hey,” I say, loud enough to cut through the noise, and his frantic movement stills for just a fraction of a second.
“I know you can hear me. Underneath it. I know the hunger is everything right now, I know it’s so loud you can’t think past it.
” I keep my voice steady, even though the sire command is still whispering at the back of my skull like a splinter lodged somewhere I can’t reach.
“But you can fight it because I did. And I’m standing right here. ”
The young man blinks.
It’s not much. It’s barely anything. But it’s enough for Rogue to move, smooth and fast, catching him by the shoulders before the hunger can close back in, holding him with a grip that contains rather than harms, his wolf presence pressing into the scion’s bloodlust the same way it presses into mine.
Steadying.
Anchoring.
The young man stops fighting and starts trembling, and there is something so desperately human in that trembling that my chest squeezes hard enough to hurt.
Sloane is there in moments, her Bloodfire settling against his skin in a wash of warm light, burning Valeria’s influence out of his blood like smoke from a wound, and he makes a sound that is somewhere between agony and relief.
Somewhere behind me, Valeria screams something at Crave in a language I don’t speak.
The church shakes again, as the battle rages around me.