Chapter Seven
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Tessa
The cold wakes me.
Not the normal Alaskan cold that seeps through windows and makes you burrow deeper into blankets. This is different. Wrong. It crawls across my skin like living ice, raising goosebumps and making every hair on my body stand on end.
I open my eyes and immediately wish I hadn’t.
Frost spreads across my ceiling in patterns that shouldn’t exist. Spirals and geometric shapes that pulse with a faint blue light, growing and shifting like something alive.
My breath comes out in white clouds despite the heat pumping through the clubhouse, and the air tastes like metal and old snow.
The mark on my shoulder burns.
Not hot. Cold. Like someone’s pressing dry ice directly against my skin, and the pain radiates down my arm in waves that make my fingers go numb. I bite back a gasp and sit up, pulling the blanket tighter around myself even though I know it won’t help.
That’s when I see it.
In the corner of my room, near the window, the shadows are moving. Not the normal shift of darkness when headlights pass by outside. This is deliberate. Purposeful. A tendril of black ice slides along the wall, leaving frost in its wake, and as I watch, it grows thicker, more solid.
More real.
My heart slams against my ribs. Every instinct screams at me to run, but I force myself to move slowly, carefully, swinging my legs out of bed. The floor is freezing beneath my bare feet, cold enough to hurt, and I can see my breath coming faster now, panic trying to claw its way up my throat.
The shadow reaches the door.
It pools there for a moment, pulsing like a heartbeat, then slides underneath, thin as paper but somehow three-dimensional, wrong in a way that makes my brain ache to look at it directly.
It’s leaving my room.
Going into the hallway.
Going toward the others.
“No,” I whisper. Then louder, “No.”
Instinct takes over.
I throw open my door and step into the hallway, and the cold hits me like a physical wall.
It’s worse out here, so intense it steals the breath from my lungs.
Frost coats every surface, the walls, the floor, the doors and the emergency light near the bathroom flickers and dies, plunging half the hallway into darkness.
The shadow slides along the wall opposite me, heading for the stairs. It’s bigger now, maybe three feet across, and I can see shapes forming within it, suggestions of claws, of teeth, of something that was never meant to exist in this world.
And it’s humming.
Not a sound I can hear with my ears but something I feel in my bones, in the mark on my shoulder, in the very marrow of me. A frequency that resonates with something ancient and hungry, and every pulse of it makes the frost on the walls grow thicker.
I have two choices, hide in my room and let this thing hunt the clubhouse unchallenged, or do something about it.
Fuck hiding.
“Fire!” I scream, my voice cracking with cold and fear. I slam my fist against the nearest door, Vex’s door. “Wake up! Something’s in the building!”
I move to the next door, pounding hard enough to hurt my hand. “Get up! Now!”
The shadow stops.
It turns, though it has no eyes, no face, I can feel its attention lock onto me like a predator spotting prey. The temperature drops another ten degrees in an instant, and my next breath feels like swallowing razors.
Then it lunges.
The shadow explodes across the hallway, no longer a creeping tendril but a wave of black ice and malevolent intent.
It moves faster than anything that size should be able to, and I barely have time to throw myself backward before claws of frozen darkness slash through the space where I was standing.
They hit the wall instead, and wood splinters with a sound like gunfire. Frost spreads from the impact point in a starburst pattern, and I can see actual gouges carved into the timber, deep enough to expose the insulation behind.
“Help!” I’m screaming now, scrambling backward on my ass, my feet slipping on the frost-slicked floor. “Somebody help!”
Doors slam open all at once.
Vex is first, of course he is, exploding out of his room with his eyes already white and glowing. He takes in the scene in a heartbeat, me on the floor, the shadow looming, the frost everywhere, and snarls like an animal.
“Get back!” he roars, positioning himself between me and the creature.
Prophet appears at the top of the stairs, barefoot and shirtless but somehow still commanding. His eyes go wide when he sees the shadow, and he starts chanting in a language I don’t recognize, his hands moving in complex patterns that leave trails of golden light in the air.
More doors open. Blade, Fury, Ranger, Hollywood, they pour into the hallway, weapons drawn, their various supernatural natures on full display. White eyes, elongating claws, skin that ripples with barely contained power.
The shadow doesn’t retreat.
It expands instead, spreading across the ceiling and walls like oil on water. Tendrils shoot out in multiple directions at once, and suddenly it’s not one threat but a dozen, each one tipped with claws of black ice that look sharp enough to cut through bone.
One goes for Hollywood. He dodges, his movements inhumanly fast, but the claw catches his shoulder and he screams, a sound of agony that makes my blood run cold. Where it touched him, his skin turns black with frostbite, spreading outward like poison.
Another tendril lunges for Blade. He shifts mid-dodge, and suddenly there’s a massive grizzly bear where the man was standing, roaring defiance at the shadow. His claws rake through the tendril, and for a second, it seems to work, the shadow recoils, hissing.
But it’s not enough.
There are too many tendrils, too much of it, and every second it grows stronger. The frost on the walls creeps toward the doors, toward the brothers, and I can see ice forming on their skin where the cold touches them.
The mark on my shoulder explodes with pain.
It’s not a gradual burn anymore. It’s agony, white-hot and freezing cold all at once, and I cry out before I can stop myself. The sound cuts through the chaos, and suddenly every tendril stops moving.
They all turn toward me.
“Tessa,” the shadow whispers, and the voice is like glass breaking, like ice cracking on a frozen lake. “Mine. Mine.”
The tendrils converge, shooting toward me in a coordinated strike that I have no hope of dodging. I’m still on the floor, still too slow, and they’re too fast—
Vex hits me like a linebacker.
He tackles me into my room, his body covering mine as the tendrils slam into the doorframe behind us. The door explodes inward, wood and metal shrieking as they’re torn apart, and suddenly we’re rolling across his floor in a tangle of limbs.
Vex comes up on top of me, caging me with his body, his fangs fully extended and his eyes blazing white. “Stay down,” he growls.
I can’t answer. The mark is burning so badly I can’t breathe, can’t think, can only feel the pain radiating through every nerve ending. It’s like the shadow is inside me, trying to claw its way out through my skin.
Or trying to claw its way in.
Prophet appears in the destroyed doorway, his hands still moving in those complex patterns. The golden light around him intensifies, taking on a physical presence, and when he speaks, his voice echoes with power.
“By the covenant of the first seal, by the blood of the wardens, I command you: retreat!”
The shadow screams.
It’s not a sound. It’s worse. It’s a sensation that drives into my skull like nails, makes my vision white out, makes blood trickle from my nose. The mark on my shoulder feels as though it’s tearing apart, like something is trying to rip it off my body from the inside.
I scream too, and I can’t stop.
Vex’s hands frame my face, his cold fingers shocking against my burning skin. “Tessa! Look at me! Look at me!”
I try. God, I try. But the pain is too much, too overwhelming, and all I can do is sob and shake as the shadow and the mark war inside me.
Then Prophet is there, his hand slamming down on my shoulder directly over the mark.
The effect is instantaneous and brutal.
The mark goes from molten agony to absolute zero in a heartbeat, and the shock of it is so intense I convulse. But with the cold comes clarity, just for a second, and in that second I understand.
The creature can’t fully manifest here. The wards Prophet blessed this place with years ago are holding it back. But it can project through the mark. Use me as an anchor. Turn me into a doorway it can pour through.
And the only way to stop it is to break the connection.
Which means hurting me.
“Do it,” I gasp, the words tasting like blood. “Whatever you have to do, just do it!”
Prophet’s eyes meet mine, and there’s sorrow there. Regret. Then his jaw sets and he presses down harder on the mark, and his other hand begins to glow with that same golden light.
“Forgive me,” he whispers.
Then he burns it.
Not with fire. With something purer, something that feels like concentrated sunlight and righteous fury and divine judgment all rolled into one. It sears into the mark, into me, and the pain is transcendent.
I’m dimly aware of screaming. Of Vex holding me down as I thrash. Of the shadow in the hallway shrieking in tandem with me, its tendrils thrashing wildly before suddenly collapsing into themselves.
Then everything goes white.
When I come back to myself, I’m in Vex’s arms.
He’s lifted me off the floor, cradling me against his chest as though I weigh nothing, and his eyes are back to their normal dark color. The frost is receding from the hallway, melting away as if it was never there, and the emergency light flickers back to life.
The shadow is gone.
So is the agony.
The mark on my shoulder still hurts, a deep, bone-aching throb, but the burning cold is gone. I reach up with a shaking hand to touch it and find it’s different somehow. Changed. The black frost pattern is still there, but fainter, like someone tried to erase it and didn’t quite succeed.