Chapter Seventeen
CRAVE
The Next Night
We know the Coven is coming.
Coming for me.
So, we wanted to bring the fight somewhere that we know well. Somewhere that plays to our advantage. Somewhere we all feel at home.
The first sign they’re here is that the air tastes tainted.
It’s not a scent, not a sound, but the way reality itself begins to curl at the edges, paper warping as it nears flame.
The temperature doesn’t drop but disappears, replaced by something that exists beyond cold, beyond heat, beyond any sensation the physical world was meant to contain.
I stand in the center of the street outside the clubhouse, my brothers forming a semicircle behind me. The asphalt beneath my boots feels suddenly fragile, as though the earth itself knows what’s about to descend and is considering whether it wants to remain solid.
“They’re here,” I say quietly, though everyone already knows.
Rogue shifts beside me, his lycan senses screaming warnings his conscious mind doesn’t need. “I can smell them. Fuck, Crave, I can smell them, and they don’t smell like anything that should exist.”
He’s right. The scent creeping through the air isn’t death, decay, or even the familiar copper of spilled blood. It’s absence. It’s the smell of things that were never meant to be named, never meant to walk beneath stars or breathe air meant for living things.
Scorch’s veins glow brighter, his dragon fire rising in instinctive defense. “How many?”
“Five,” I answer, my voice steady despite the dread pooling in my gut. “The full Coven of Crows. They’re not coming to talk. They’re coming to judge.”
Sloane’s fear reaches me first, sharp enough to steal my breath. Heat follows, instinctive and reactive, answering the panic before I can stop it. I ground myself, forcing calm energy outward in slow, deliberate waves, while the opposite churns low in my chest, restless and dangerous.
‘Stay inside,’ I tell her. ‘No matter what happens, stay inside.’
Her response is immediate, fierce, and absolute. ‘Like hell!’
Before I can argue, before I can send another command through the bond, the world breaks.
It doesn’t crack or shatter. It simply ceases to make sense for a handful of heartbeats. The streetlamps flicker and die, the moon disappears behind clouds that weren’t there a second ago, and in the sudden, suffocating darkness, five figures manifest.
They don’t walk into view.
They don’t appear from shadows or step through portals.
One moment, nothing.
The next, they are.
The Coven of Crows.
My former family.
The monsters who taught me what it meant to be darkness incarnate.
Khaos, the First, stands at the center, and looking at him hurts.
Not physically, but fundamentally. He’s the eldest. The Original from which all other vampires descend.
He appears as a man in his late thirties, but that’s a lie his form tells because the truth would unmake mortal minds.
He wears simple black robes that somehow contain constellations of dying stars, and his eyes, when you can bear to look at them, are voids where light goes to die.
He doesn’t speak. Khaos hasn’t spoken in five hundred years, not since he decided words were beneath something as eternal as he is.
To his right stands Thanatos, and death rolls off him in visible waves.
He’s tall, gaunt, and beautiful in the way a hurricane is beautiful, terrible, and inevitable.
His skin is pale as bleached bone, his hair black as a grave, and when he moves, I swear I hear distant screaming.
Every soul he’s ever reaped follows him, a cloak of whispers and grief.
On Khaos’ left, Erebus exists more than stands. The Void. The space between spaces. He has form when he chooses—dark skin, darker eyes, a smile that makes reality flinch away from his teeth. But sometimes his edges blur, and you can see through him to the nothing that lurks beneath all existence.
Behind them, Moros watches with eyes that see every possible future simultaneously.
The Doom Sayer. He’s younger-looking than the others, almost boyish, but that’s the cruelest joke of all.
He knows how every story ends, has seen every tragedy before it unfolds, and the weight of all that foreknowledge has carved something inhuman into his features.
And then there’s Nyx.
My sister.
The Shadow.
She steps forward, and darkness moves with her, becoming a living thing. Shadows peel away from walls, corners, and the spaces between heartbeats, all reaching toward her in reverence. Her purple eyes glow in the blackness, the only color in a world that’s suddenly rendered in shades of night.
“Hello, brother,” she says, and her voice carries the weight of a millennium of disappointment. “It’s been too long.”
“Nyx.” I keep my voice level and controlled. “I wish I could say it’s good to see you.”
Her lips curve in something that might be a smile if smiles could cut.
“No, you don’t. You left us, Draven. Walked away from your family, from your purpose, from everything we built together.
” She tilts her head, and shadows coil and writhe around her, alive with intent.
“And for what? To play house with mongrels and mortals? To pretend you’re something you’re not? ”
“I left because I chose to be more than what you made me.” I feel my brothers tense behind me, ready to fight despite knowing how futile it would be. “I built something that matters. Something that protects instead of destroys.”
“Protection.” Thanatos’ voice is the sound of a final breath leaving lungs. “Is that what you call it? Is that what you were doing when you turned three humans in the middle of a city? When you exposed our world to mortal eyes and cameras for all the world to see?”
Ice floods my veins. “That wasn’t me!”
“We have footage,” Nyx says coldly, and with a wave of her hand, shadows coalesce into a screen of pure darkness.
The video plays across it, grainy, shaky phone footage showing me in the center of a downtown street—my face, my vest with the Eternal Sins MC patch clearly visible.
My fangs descended as I tear into human throats and force my blood down their dying throats.
Creating scions.
In public.
Breaking every law we have.
“That. Wasn’t. Me!” Each word comes out harder and sharper. “It’s an illusion, a shapeshifter. Viktor has someone who can project my image, make it look as if I’m breaking the Law of Silence when I’ve spent centuries upholding it.”
“Convenient,” Erebus murmurs, his void-like presence rippling. “The accused claims the evidence is fabricated.”
“It is fabricated!” My Bloodfire surges despite my efforts to control it.
“Oracle saw it in his Fire of Truth. We have a necromancer who can read death residue. We have a technomancer who traced the illusion magic signature. Viktor is framing me to force your hand, to make you execute me so he can seize control of my territory and my scion network.”
Moros tilts his head, those all-seeing eyes boring into mine.
“Interesting. The footage does carry traces of glamor magic. Subtle, but present…” He pauses.
“However, that doesn’t absolve you of your other crimes, brother.
The Blood Witch. The breaking of the Law of Balance. Those violations are real enough.”
“The girl was dying—”
“Then she should have died!” His words slam into me as a physical blow, and several of my brothers actually stagger.
“The Law of Balance exists for a reason, Draven. Humans die. That is their purpose, their function in the grand design. They live brief lives, and then they feed us. You don’t save them.
You don’t transform them into something that violates the natural order. ”
“There’s nothing natural about what we are,” I shoot back, my Bloodfire rising despite my efforts to control it.
“We’re monsters, Thanatos. We feed on the living.
We exist outside the normal flow of life and death.
Don’t lecture me about natural order when we abandoned it the moment we rose from darkness. ”
Moros speaks again, his voice layered with the echoes of every word he’ll ever speak.
“I’ve seen this moment play out in seventeen thousand different futures, brother.
In most of them, you die tonight. In some, your club dies with you.
In a few, the Blood Witch destroys everything within a hundred miles, and the supernatural world is exposed completely.
” He pauses, those all-seeing eyes boring into mine.
“And in exactly three futures, you survive. But those three paths require something you’re not willing to give. ”
“What?” I ask, though I already know the answer will damn me.
“Her,” Erebus says simply. “Give us the Blood Witch. Let me erase her from existence before she becomes what prophecy says she will. It’s the only way to maintain balance. The only way to prevent the Crimson Dawn.”
My body locks down hard. Her fury crashes through the Heart Bind, white-hot and relentless, backed by a determination that feels unstoppable. And under it all, there’s love, deep, brutal, and strong enough to make my immortal heart ache.
“No.” The word comes out flat, final. “That’s not an option.”
Nyx’s shadows surge forward, and suddenly I’m surrounded by darkness so complete, I can’t see my own hands.
Her voice comes from everywhere and nowhere.
“You would sacrifice the balance for one mortal girl? You would risk exposure, risk war between our kind and humanity, risk everything for a creature who’s existed for mere days? ”
“She’s not a creature,” I snarl, and my fangs fully descend. “She’s a person. And she’s mine! The Heart Bind—”
“Is irrelevant,” Thanatos interrupts. “Heart Binds can be broken. Painful, yes, but survivable. You’ve existed for thousands of years without her, Draven. You’ll exist for a thousand more after she’s gone.”