Interlude
DRAVEN ‘CRAVE’
Centuries Later
Most of my scions arrive screaming. The transition strips them raw, takes their mortality, and replaces it with something that doesn’t care if they survive the process.
But Valeria looks at me through all of it with burning, furious eyes, and when the transition is done, when the Bloodfire settles in her veins, and her fangs find their place, she smiles as if she’s been waiting for me her entire life.
I should have read that smile for what it is.
A warning.
Instead, I fall into her like a man who has lived ten thousand years and finally found something that surprises him.
She is extraordinary.
Wild in the way a wildfire is unpredictable, beautiful, absolute, and utterly indifferent to what it destroys.
She feeds without restraint and laughs while doing it, and somehow that laugh sounds like music instead of madness.
Khaos watches her with something approaching interest, which is the closest he ever gets to approval, and I feel something I haven’t felt since before I can remember.
Pride.
Together, we are chaos given a heartbeat.
We sweep through cities like a plague with good taste, we take what we want, drain who we want, and leave enough survivors to carry the terror forward. Valeria likes the fear as much as the blood. She says the two are the same thing, and for a long while, I agree with her.
She is mine.
I am hers.
And neither of us asks permission from anything.
For a time, nothing stands in our path.
Then the world begins to shift.
It is subtle at first. Hunts that should have been effortless feel…
observed. Streets that once emptied at the scent of us hold their breath instead of scattering.
In the forests outside Prague, in the outskirts of Vienna, in the quiet corridors between cities where monsters travel unseen, I begin to sense something that does not belong to prey.
Not defiance.
Not challenge.
A presence.
Valeria dismisses it. “Let them watch,” she says, blood bright against her mouth. “It changes nothing.”
But it does.
Because eventually, I see him.
He is the first wolf I have ever encountered who does not run from me, and that alone earns my attention.
He stands at the edge of torchlight in a village we have already claimed, gray threading his dark hair at the temples, posture unhurried.
He smells of earth, iron, and something older than either.
He does not bare his teeth.
He does not bow.
He does not join us.
He simply exists near us, for a time. Moving through the same territories, crossing paths in the dark between cities, never interfering, never retreating. And slowly, I begin to notice something I cannot name at first.
He watches.
Not with fear.
Not with fascination.
With something closer to grief.
The night I finally corner him about it, he doesn’t deny it.
He stands at the edge of a burning farmhouse.
Our work, Valeria’s idea. She wanted the light, wanted the night split open so the terror could see itself reflected back.
Flames crawl up the beams behind him, sparks lifting into the sky like dying stars, and Varro watches it all with those calm, ancient eyes that never seem to flinch.
“You are wasting yourself,” he says.
I laugh. It’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in a century.
“I am burning the world,” I tell him, spreading my arms to the fire, the bodies cooling at the tree line, the smoke thick with the memory of screams. “That is not waste.”
“Yes,” he says evenly. “That is what I mean.”
He gestures, not dramatically, not accusingly—just a slow sweep of his hand. The farmhouse is collapsing in on itself, and the villagers we didn’t bother to drain clean. Valeria spins barefoot through the smoke because the screaming has already died, and she refuses to let the night go quiet yet.
“You mistake destruction for dominion,” Varro continues. “They are not the same.”
I step closer, letting my shadow stretch long and monstrous across the dirt. “Careful, wolf.”
“I run with a pack,” he says, unbothered. “Every wolf has a purpose. Every wolf has a role. The strongest protect, the swiftest scout, the eldest counsel.” His gaze never leaves mine. “Power is not proven by how much you can tear apart.”
“And yet…” I reply coldly, “… your people spend their lives hiding from mine.”
His mouth twitches. Not a smile. It’s something older.
“We do not burn what we could use,” he says. “We do not destroy what we could build. A leader who leaves nothing standing rules only ashes.”
I stare at him, letting the fire roar between us.
“You are not only a wolf,” I state.
“No,” he agrees. “But you are not only a crow.”
That lands harder than I expected.
I scoff, turning away, because Valeria is calling for me from inside the smoke, her voice bright and impatient, because the fire is beautiful, and there is still blood worth drinking before dawn.
I leave him standing there, untouched by the chaos, untouched by the night we have broken open.
But his words follow me.
Not like an accusation.
Like a warning.
Stubborn old wolf.
***
I don’t notice when Valeria starts moving without me.
It happens slowly, the way rot happens, from the inside out, invisible until it isn’t.
She comes back with blood on her hands I haven’t watched her earn.
She makes decisions I haven’t been part of.
She turns three humans without asking, then three more, building her own small court of freshly made scions who look at her the way she once looked at me.
Valeria is not hiding it.
She doesn’t think I’ll object.
She’s right that I don’t, not at first.
It’s the direction of it that eventually catches my attention. The Coven has laws for reasons even I respect. The Law of Silence exists because, without it, we are hunted.
Valeria knows this.
Valeria doesn’t care.
She has started to move like something that believes itself untouchable, and the cold, ancient part of me, the part that was made from darkness and therefore understands it better than she ever will, recognizes what she’s becoming.
A problem.
For the Coven.
For me.
I am still deciding what to do about it the night the Coven of Crows comes.
One moment, smoke drifts lazily above the ruined farmhouse, embers spiraling upward into a sky streaked with ash, and the next, the stars dim as though something vast has passed between them and the earth.
The fire lowers instinctively, its flames drawing inward, and the air tightens with a pressure that feels less like arrival and more like correction.
Black wings sweep across the dark in a single, unbroken arc.
The sound is heavy and deliberate, silk drawn across stone, and when it fades, Nyx stands before me as though she has always occupied that exact place in the courtyard.
Shadows move around her in slow currents, brushing the edges of the firelight until the flames shrink back from her presence.
Her purple eyes rest on me without heat or curiosity.
“She broke the Law,” Nyx says.
The words settle into the space between us with the quiet finality of a blade laid on stone.
Behind her, the Coven fans out with ritual precision, boots touching earth in unison, wings folding into dark cloaks that drink the firelight. They move through the courtyard like a closing net, not hurried, not uncertain, their presence reshaping the night around them.
I look past Nyx.
Valeria stands against the stone wall, smoke threading through her hair, eyes blazing with the last incandescent flare of the storm she has always been. The laughter is gone from her mouth, but the fire remains. It burns hotter now, distilled into something lethal and bright.
Her gaze finds mine.
Understanding passes between us.
The Law has never bent.
Khaos steps forward, and the air compresses.
Shadows tighten first, drawing inward as though the darkness itself is being gathered into his grasp. The courtyard falls unnaturally still, the fire flattening into a low, strained glow.
Reality loosens around her.
Valeria feels it.
Her back leaves the wall as she pushes forward, fangs bared, fury igniting in full force.
The smoke that had drifted lazily around her thickens and coils, snapping tight like chains forged from vapor.
It wraps her wrists, her waist, her throat, pinning her not to stone but to the space she occupies.
She snarls, a sound that once would have sent villages scattering.
“Draven,” she calls, not pleading, not begging.
A summons.
I move.
The instinct to reach her is immediate and absolute. The ground splits beneath my stride as I surge forward, and Nyx is suddenly there.
Her hand closes around my wrist.
It should mean nothing.
She is smaller than I am, slighter.
But it means everything.
The force that radiates from her touch halts me mid-motion, not by strength, but by Law. The air around us tightens like a noose drawn slowly. My power collides with hers and slides off, redirected, absorbed.
“Stand down,” she says, her voice quiet and edged with something older than threat.
Valeria fights harder.
The smoke tightens in response, dragging her back as she tears against it, eyes wild, furious. The distortion around her deepens, light bending inward, her outline warping like heat rising from a battlefield.
“Don’t you dare!” I snarl, straining against Nyx’s hold. The ground trembles beneath us, cracks splitting outward in a violent web.
Nyx’s grip tightens. “You cannot win this,” she says. “And you will not defy the Law for her.”
For her.
The words strike harder than the restraint.
Valeria’s eyes lock onto mine again, fury burning into something sharper, more concentrated. The smoke creeps higher, sealing her arms to her sides as reality begins to thin around her, pulling at her edges, unraveling her shape stitch by stitch.
“I regret nothing,” she spits, voice raw and magnificent.
The distortion swallows the last of her firelight.