Chapter Ten
SLOANE
The world explodes into violence so fast I can barely process it. One second, I’m standing in the clubhouse surrounded by supernatural beings. Next, the doors are blown off their hinges, and creatures that look like walking nightmares pour through the entrance.
Vampires.
But not like Crave.
These things are feral.
Eyes glowing red, mouths stretched impossibly wide, fangs dripping with saliva. They move like animals, but are way too fast and brutal, and they look hungry.
“Get down!” Crave shoves me toward the back of the room as the first wave hits.
I stumble behind an overturned table, my heart slamming so hard it steals the air from my lungs, and watch as the world doesn’t just erupt. It fractures.
Rogue and the others race into the room, so fast I can barely comprehend it. But Rogue’s body doesn’t just transform.
He breaks.
His body twists violently, bones cracking so loud I feel them in my teeth, muscles tearing and reforming beneath his skin. Fur erupts where skin should be, claws forcing their way from his fingers with a wet, sickening sound. My stomach lurches, bile burning the back of my throat.
This isn’t possible.
None of this is possible.
He’s not a wolf.
He’s not human.
He’s something in between, something born from nightmare, instinct, and raw, brutal power.
I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming as he launches himself at the vampires.
Claws tear through flesh like paper, fangs rip out throats in sprays of dark red that splatter the walls.
The sounds of bone, choking, snarling slam into me all at once, and my legs tremble, threatening to give out.
His snarl shakes the building, rattles straight through my chest, and something inside me cracks wide open with it. Fear. That the world that I thought I knew is gone. This one that I just learned about, that I feel part of, is falling apart right in front of my eyes.
Even through the chaos and the terror curling tight in my spine, I can see the truth of it.
He isn’t fighting to survive.
He’s fighting his way to Crave.
Holy shit.
Scorch doesn’t hold back either. The moment his power surfaces, the air changes.
My skin prickles, heat crawling over me like something alive, and instinct screams for me to run even though my legs refuse to cooperate.
His veins glow molten red beneath his skin, pulsing in slow, relentless waves that make my head spin.
I can’t look away.
I can’t breathe.
When he exhales, fire pours from his mouth.
Real fire.
A broken sound claws its way out of my throat, half gasp, half sob, as the heat slams into me from across the room.
The air ripples and warps, bending like glass left too close to a flame.
Two vampires ignite instantly, their screams cutting off as they collapse into drifting ash.
The smell of burning flesh and scorched stone turns my stomach, my vision swimming as terror and disbelief collide.
This isn’t power.
This is annihilation.
Another vampire lunges for him, and I flinch hard enough that my shoulders hit the wall behind me.
Scorch catches the creature by the face with his bare hand.
I watch, frozen, as the vampire’s head melts, skin sliding like wax, bone slumping in on itself until there’s nothing left but fire and ruin.
My hands shake violently, my pulse roaring in my ears, and the truth hits me all at once, heavy and inescapable.
Monsters are real.
And they’re standing between me and the things that want me dead.
“Keep them away from Sloane!” Crave’s voice cuts through the chaos as he moves in a blur, so much faster than my eyes can track. One moment, he’s near me, the next he’s across the room with his hand through a vampire’s chest.
He rips out the creature’s heart.
Crushes it.
Moves to the next one.
This is what he really is.
More vampires flood in through every entrance.
So many.
Too many.
And they’re moving with purpose.
In the center of the main room, Dread stands like a statue, and the air around him feels like a vacuum.
It presses in on me, heavy and suffocating, as though all the oxygen has been stripped away and replaced with pure, choking fear.
My lungs burn when I drag in shallow breaths, my skin crawling as if something unseen is brushing against my thoughts.
Panic coils tight in my chest, and I have the horrifying sense that if I meet his gaze, he’ll see straight through me.
The vampires that step within ten feet of him freeze mid-stride.
Their eyes go wide, too wide, mouths opening in silent screams as their weapons slip from nerveless fingers. They’re not seeing the clubhouse anymore. I can tell by the way their bodies fold in on themselves, the way terror steals their breath. They’re somewhere else. Somewhere far worse.
A shudder rips through me when I realize what Dread is doing.
He’s showing them their worst fears. Not imagined horrors, not threats, but truths their minds can’t survive.
One vampire drops his weapon and bolts for the door, screaming like an animal being skinned alive.
Another collapses to his knees, clawing at his own face, tearing flesh and sobbing as if he can rip himself free from whatever nightmare has him trapped.
I press a hand to my mouth, bile rising, my vision blurring as dread—real dread—seeps into my bones.
Because if this is what he can do to them…
I don’t want to know what he could do to me.
I take off, trying to get away from the fear he is projecting, and I spot Hex.
He hasn’t moved from his laptop, and that somehow unsettles me more than the blood and fire.
His fingers fly across the keyboard, fast enough that they blur, but the screens aren’t normal anymore.
They glow. Symbols crawl across the monitors, runes, pulsing with an eerie blue light that makes my skin prickle.
I don’t understand what I’m looking at, only that it’s wrong in a way that feels deliberate.
“Jamming their communications,” he says calmly, like he’s commenting on the weather.
“Crashing their coordination protocols.”
A chill skates down my spine. I don’t even know how the supernatural communicates, but he does. The implications land heavily, my breath stalling in my chest.
His eyes lift from the screens and glow the same unnatural blue.
The overhead lights surge violently, bulbs flickering as power roars through the room.
I flinch, ducking instinctively while electricity arcs through the air with terrifying precision.
It doesn’t strike at random. It chooses.
Vampires convulse mid-attack, bodies snapping rigid as smoke curls from their skin before they collapse in smoking heaps.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
Fire and claws feel like chaos, but this… this feels like complete coordinated control.
And that might be the most frightening thing of all.
Hades stands near the hallway leading deeper into the compound.
The moment I see his eyes, my stomach drops.
They’re completely white, rolled back in his skull, and something inside me recoils hard enough to make my knees threaten to buckle.
This isn’t the kind of power I’ve seen from the others.
This is wrong in a way my every nerve recognizes.
When he lifts his hands, the temperature plummets. The cold slams into me so fast I gasp, breath fogging the air as frost creeps across the floor in spiraling, unnatural patterns. My fingers go numb, my chest tightens, and it feels like the room itself is holding its breath, waiting.
And then the shadows move.
A whimper slips past my lips before I can stop it.
Skeletal hands claw their way out of the dark, flesh long rotted away, fingers scraping against the floor with a sound that makes my teeth ache. Ghostly figures follow, translucent and hollow-eyed, their faces twisted in silent agony.
The dead.
My pulse hammers so hard it blurs my vision. Every instinct I have screams to run, to hide, to pretend this isn’t happening, but I can’t look away.
Bone constructs pull themselves together from nothing, snapping and locking into place as violent arcs of purple death-energy crackle around them, the air stinking of ozone and decay.
They form a wall between the vampires and the rest of the clubhouse.
When the vampires try to force their way through, skeletal hands erupt from the floor, dragging them down. Death energy surges, burning through flesh and bone alike. Their screams don’t last long.
I press myself back against the wall, shaking, tears stinging my eyes as a single, horrifying truth settles deep in my gut.
Fire can kill you.
Claws can tear you apart.
But this? This means there are worse things than dying.
As I peer at the entryway, Grizz holds the main doors.
At first, I don’t understand what I’m seeing, then my breath catches hard in my throat.
His skin changes before my eyes, flesh hardening into living stone, veins disappearing beneath granite and slate.
The sound of gunfire cracks through the room, bullets striking him with sharp metallic pings before dropping uselessly to the floor.
I stare, frozen, my mind scrambling for something, anything, that explains this.
A vampire launches at him with inhuman speed, a blur of teeth and fury. Grizz doesn’t step back, he doesn’t brace, he catches it mid-air like it weighs nothing, his body locking into place, immovable as bedrock. The impact reverberates through the room, a deep, punishing thud I feel ravage my body.
He slams the vampire into the floor.
The concrete cracks, spiderwebbing outward beneath them.
I flinch, a sharp breath tearing from my chest, but Grizz doesn’t stop.
He lifts the creature again and brings it down.
And again. And again. Each strike lands with brutal certainty until the vampire is nothing but broken ruin beneath his fists.
There’s no rage in his face. No frenzy.
Just purpose.