Chapter Sixteen
SLOANE
The words explode out of me before I can stop them. “I’m fighting with you.”
The clubhouse goes silent. Every eye turns to me, standing next to Crave, my bare feet cold against the concrete floor.
My newly awakened senses pick up everything—Rogue’s elevated heartbeat, Scorch’s rising body temperature, the way Dread’s fear projection unconsciously leaks into the air, making it thick and oppressive.
Crave’s answer blasts through our connection, violent and immediate, protective instinct fused with raw terror, hitting me like a punch to the ribs. “No.” His voice carries the weight of a thousand years of authority. “Absolutely not! You need more training, and now, there’s no time.”
“Excuse me?” Heat rises in my chest, my Bloodfire stirring to life like a sleeping dragon opening one eye. I twist to face him, take a few steps back, and straighten my shoulders. With a confidence I didn’t possess twenty-four hours ago, I lock eyes with Crave. “You do not get to decide this.”
“I’m your president.” He crosses his arms, trying for calm, but the fear pushing through our connection gives him away.
Not fear of the fight, but fear of losing me.
“And more than that, I’m the one who made you what you are.
You’ve been a Blood Witch for hours, Sloane.
Not even a day. You can barely control your Bloodfire. Walking into combat now would be—”
“Would be what?” I interrupt, my voice rising.
The layered quality it now carries makes the windows rattle slightly.
“A moment ago, you said I could be the force that tips the scales in our favor. Nothing has changed.” My hands clench into fists, and crimson-gold light pulses beneath my skin in rhythm with my accelerating heartbeat.
“You gave me this power, Crave. You forced it on me to save my life, and now you’re telling me I’m too weak to use it? ”
“That’s not what I—” He starts moving toward me, but I hold up a hand.
“Don’t!” The word comes out sharp, cutting. “Don’t you dare say you’re protecting me. This isn’t about protection. This is about control. You want to lock me away in some safe room while you and your brothers go die fighting my fight.”
“It’s not your fight!” His voice rises to match mine, and shadows in the room start reaching toward him, responding to his agitation. “Viktor is after me. The Coven is coming for me. You’re collateral damage in a war that started centuries before you were even born.”
“Then why did you save me?” The question tears out of me, raw and demanding.
“Why did you give me your blood if you were just going to treat me like some fragile thing that needs protecting? Why make me into this…” I gesture to myself, to the marks crawling across my ribs, to the power humming beneath my skin, “… if you never intended to let me actually be what I am?”
His jaw locks, his teeth grinding audibly.
Then the wave hits—love, fear, possessiveness, and a brutal, unyielding refusal to put me in danger.
“Because I can’t watch you die!” The words tear out of him raw and unforgiving.
There’s no attempt to soften them, no apology waiting behind the truth.
He lets it stand between us, brutal and exposed, daring me to do something about it.
“Because in millennia of existence, you’re the first thing that’s made me feel anything other than hunger, boredom, and endless-fucking-darkness.
And I’ll be damned if I let you throw yourself into danger before you’re ready. ”
“Ready?” I laugh, and it comes out bitter, sharp.
“When will I be ready, Crave? A week? A month? A year? How long do you expect me to sit on the sidelines while people die because of me?” My Bloodfire surges higher, responding to my fury.
I feel it crackling under my skin, begging for release.
“Eden’s screaming about death. Oracle’s prophesying doom.
Your entire club is mobilizing for war. And you want me to, what?
Stay in your room and wait to see if you come back? ”
“Yes!” He closes the distance between us in a blur of vampire speed, gripping my shoulders. “Yes… I want you safe! I want you alive! Is that so fucking unreasonable?”
“It is when I could be the difference between your survival and your death!” I shove against his chest, and to both our surprise, he actually staggers back a step.
My new strength. My new power surprises us both.
“I burned through Reyna’s Divine Armor, Crave.
I stopped a heart and started it again. I can feel every supernatural being in this building, each one a candle in the dark. I’m not fucking helpless!”
“You’re untrained!” His eyes flash that dangerous silver-black, the predator bleeding through.
“One wrong move, one loss of control, and you could kill everyone in this room, including yourself. Including me. Do you understand that? Your power isn’t just dangerous to our enemies, it’s dangerous to everyone around you until you learn to control it. ”
The words hit like a slap. His terror rushes through me in a surge, heavy, unfiltered, directed at the threat looming over me, not from me.
Fear of what I could do.
Fear of what I could become.
Fear that the same darkness that consumed Lilith is already reaching for me.
But underneath his fear, I also feel something else. Doubt. The tiniest sliver of uncertainty that maybe, just maybe, he’s being overprotective.
That maybe I am stronger than he’s giving me credit for.
“You don’t get to make this decision for me.” My voice drops, goes quieter, but the power in it intensifies. The air around us begins to shimmer with heat. “I chose to drink your blood. I chose to become this. And I’m choosing to fight.”
“No.” His voice turns flat, immovable. The president speaking now, not the man who holds me when the nightmares come. “Final answer, Sloane. You stay here, where it’s warded and protected. End. Of. Discussion!”
Something inside me snaps.
Not a crack.
Not a tear.
A detonation.
My Bloodfire erupts, no warning, no mercy.
Heat blasts through my veins, napalm igniting under my skin, racing outward in a violent tidal surge that steals the oxygen from the room.
My lungs lock. My muscles seize. My vision bursts, the world rendering itself in molten color, blood, flame, fear, fury.
And beneath all of it lurks something older, deeper, darker, the thing I was bred from, the thing I was always meant to become.
Beneath the fire, the voice wakes.
Lilith’s Voice.
My inheritance.
My curse.
My birthright.
It rises from the deepest part of me, not from my throat but my essence, vibrating upward as something vast and powerful drags itself through my spine.
It fills my chest with impossible pressure, stretching me, widening me, turning my body into a vessel far too small to contain the force building inside it.
I open my mouth, and the world breaks.
“ENOUGH!”
The sound hits like a shockwave, an ancient war horn forged from the beginning of time, blasting outward with the raw, unfiltered command of a being who once bent empires to her will.
It tears through the clubhouse in a ring of force so powerful the very air ripples, folding and unfolding, reality itself shuddering as it remembers who I am.
The remaining windows don’t shatter.
They explode.
Glass bursts outward in a blinding spray, shards blazing as they tear into the night, each fragment carrying my power with it as they cut through the dark.
Every light bulb combusts, plunging us into flickering darkness, before the crimson-gold aura bleeding off my skin lights the room in hellfire shades.
The floor buckles beneath my feet.
Concrete cracks open in a spiderweb pattern that races away from me, dozens of jagged fractures branching outward as the ground recoils. Dust erupts upward in plumes. The walls groan as the force of my voice pushes through them, rattling their foundations.
The air vibrates so violently that my teeth ache.
My skin burns with power.
My magic claws outward in a feral storm, demanding obedience, demanding silence, demanding everything.
And then, the shadows behind me shift.
Not ordinary darkness.
Not the absence of light.
Something sentient unfurls from the void, smoke given purpose.
A shape takes form—vast, towering, and unmistakably feminine.
A silhouette with the bearing of a queen and the wrath of a god.
Lilith.
Not her face.
Not her features.
Just the silhouette, an ancient, terrifying echo of the First Blood Witch, her presence etched in darkness and shimmering fire. She rises behind me, a guardian carved from myth, her shadowed arms lifting in a posture of protection, possession, and pride.
Magic erupts around us in spiraling orbs of gold, red, and black, each one swirling with its own pulse, orbiting us in widening rings drawn to a new gravitational center.
They spin faster, streaking trails of molten light through the air, threads of power weaving between them as if stitching reality back together around our shared roar.
Gold for creation.
Red for blood.
Black for the void she commands.
The orbs burn bright enough to paint the cracked walls in molten hues, bright enough that everyone in the room finally lifts their gaze, not to me, but to her.
Lilith’s silhouette bows its head toward mine, a gesture that is not subservient but acknowledgment.
Her presence wraps around me, a mantle of protection, armor forged from the oldest magic that ever lived. For the first time, the room doesn’t only hear my Voice…
It hears ours.
And everyone freezes.
Conversations die mid-word.
Bodies lock mid-motion.
Supernaturals who fear nothing flinch, prey caught in a predator’s shadow.
The clubhouse, the air, the world, all of it, bends.
To me.
To Lilith.
To us.
To the Voice that can unmake creation if it chooses.