Chapter 42 Chad
CHAD
My world cracks open. The sigil was a key, and the lock was a cage of bone and blood I didn't know existed.
The bars shatter. A beast uncoils in the marrow of my bones, a thing that feels ancient and vast and ravenous, and my own consciousness—the man I call Chad—is like a flickering candle in the face of a hurricane.
Pain is the first language I understand.
A symphony of tearing muscle and snapping bone.
But the pain is distant, happening to a body I am quickly losing ownership of.
The hurricane has a voice, a low growl that rumbles in a chest that is suddenly deeper, broader.
It has a single, driving thought that drowns out everything else.
Hunger.
My—its—gaze snaps to Brynn. The first thing that it can think to anchor to.
She’s on the floor, broken and beautiful, her scent a heady mix of blood, fear, and old paper. The hunger sharpens, clarifies. It’s not for flesh. It’s for her. To claim. To possess.
My human mind screams in horror, a small sound lost in the roar.
I see her hand move, fumbling in her pocket. The glint of the sapphire-and-rubies ring. The leash.
The demon sees it too. It sees a chain. Before her fingers can close around it, my new hand—a thing of longer black talons and burning heat—is there.
I snatch the ring from her grasp. The metal is cold for a fraction of a second before the heat that now pours from me finds it.
It glows orange, then white, then melts completely, dripping between my claws like silver tears.
The magic that bound it, that bound me, sizzles and dies.
That last connection is severed.
The demon steps closer to her, a low growl of satisfaction rumbling in its throat.
But through the red haze, a final, defiant spark of clarity ignites. A last thought from me, the dying man.
Rothmere.
He’s still standing there, smug. Arrogant. He thinks he knows what he’s unleashed—that I’m a kind of wild dog, snapped out of control, about to lunge for the first thing within reach.
And he thinks he understands my bloodline. Thinks he’s outsmarted it.
But he doesn’t know the sheer power I feel burning within me… Like it doesn’t obey the rules of men. Like it doesn’t obey magic.
This bloodline… is different. Somehow, I already know it.
In my last act of will, I give the demon a target.
I turn.
The surprise on Rothmere’s face is a fleeting, exquisite thing. He sees the shift in my eyes, the deliberate focus that is not feral hunger but cold, lucid murder. He tries to raise a hand, to speak another word of power.
I don’t give him the chance. I cross the distance between us in a single, silent bound. His displacement ward shimmers, a weak heat-haze against my skin. My claws don’t even slow. They are not magic. They are simply flesh and bone and demonic will.
They find his throat.
The sound is wet and final. His human-conceived protection spells and wards are useless against this form.
His body goes limp, a puppet with its strings cut.
I hold him up for a second, watching the life drain from his shocked, icy eyes, before I rip my hand away, taking most of his throat with me.
He collapses in a heap of fine tailoring and pooling blood.
The act does nothing to sate the real hunger. It roars back, a thousand times stronger.
I turn again. Brynn is frozen, staring, her face a pale mask of terror. The silver-haired dragon girl stands beside her, also a statue of shock.
The demon wants to go to Brynn. It wants to finish what it started. It wants to hear her scream.
But the last dying ember of Chad Valgrave screams louder.
Run.
Get away from her.
Don’t let her hate you forever.
I turn my back on her, on the carnage, on the only thing in this world I—it—wants right now.
And I run. I am a blur of shadow and rage, pounding down the corridor, past the dead dragons, toward the fiery chaos of the night.
Her voice reaches me, a single, sharp cry that is both a hook in my soul and the whip that drives me on.
“Chad!”
I don’t look back. I can’t.
I burst through the shattered northeastern doors of the academy and into the forest. Branches tear at my new, hardened skin, and I don’t even feel them. The roar of battle is replaced by the roar in my own blood.
This demon wants to possess her, to mark her, to make her writhe beneath me. Not gently. Not temporarily. It wants to carve the claim into flesh and soul.
Her touch—careless, human, warm—cracked something ancient open. A seal I didn’t even know was there.
Now it wants to finish the claim. It wants to take her apart with it.
Something fragile wouldn’t survive that. Something human definitely wouldn’t.
I plunge deeper into the dark, letting the trees swallow me, close around me. Every step away from her is a war. My pulse hammers turn back turn back turn back in time with my heart. Her scent still clings to me, sweet, alive, intoxicating.
But the need to protect her is the last command of a dying man.
And I obey.
Her name drifts through my consciousness, a ghost on the wind, then fractures, then dissolves—
until there is only hunger.
Only rage.
Only the dark.