Chapter 12 Ezra
Ezra
She ran from me. Me. And she’s right. I always get what I want. And I want her. But for some asinine reason, I want Aurora on her terms, not mine.
How the bloody hell did she waltz into my life and wreck everything in a matter of hours?
But I’m a patient monster. She’ll come back to me. And I’ll be waiting.
I just don’t understand why I fucking care what she thinks.
Because when she looked at me with hatred in her dark eyes, something shattered deep in my chest.
Every time I think I have things figured out, the cosmos winds up and kicks me square in the dick.
And yet, I can’t deny the thrill of a new challenge. Except this time? It feels more like a gift than a punishment.
Not sure I deserve it, but I won’t look a gift kelpie in the mouth.
The way she licked my lips before I claimed her made my shadows howl and the dark, primal thing inside me snarl. She ignites every goddamn nerve in my body.
Aurora likes a little pain with her pleasure, which pleases a side of me I’m not sure she’s ready for.
The way she moaned when I buried my hand in her hair, when I kissed and licked my way down her throat, makes my cock throb back to life, thick with the memory of her growl vibrating against my teeth.
Christ, her skin tasted like late-summer honeysuckle nectar—so fucking sweet, so ripe I could lose myself in her.
I’m glad it’s autumn. The honeysuckle is dead. And getting hard in public? Turns out that’s frowned upon by most humans.
I could have fucked Aurora last night. Could have lied. Could have convinced her it was all a dream. Could have made her feel so unbelievably guilty for even thinking I was capable of such horrible deeds. She would have fallen to her knees and taken everything I gave her.
And yet.
I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want to lie. And I didn’t want just one night. I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted more. I just don’t fucking understand why.
I call Thane the morning after my encounter with Aurora to tell him I’m under the weather and won’t be coming in for the rest of the week. He can handle things for a few days.
With the shop covered, I move on to my beautiful new puzzle.
What the hell is Aurora?
Being that close to her made me realize she isn’t human. Well, not entirely. Her body radiates a violent power that’s intoxicating.
Remembering what she whispered in my ear makes my body tremble in a soft, scorching shiver. She was sensual, commanding, and almost … regal.
And then something settles beneath my skin. A realization I can’t name yet, but it burns just the same.
My shadows stir around my ankles, feeding off the energy she left behind. I don’t stop them. I barely even notice.
I’ve come across whispers of this before, in ruined texts and forgotten tongues. Power like hers, tied to bloodlines that were supposed to be extinct. Stories I never believed.
But this doesn’t feel like fiction.
It feels like something old waking up inside me.
And I know exactly where to begin digging.
My feet move on instinct, guided by something heavier than thought.
The vault waits in silence, dark and heavy with books I never should’ve kept. The ones that speak in half-truths and riddles. The ones I’ve avoided … until now.
Entering the combination, I pull the door back and search for the book I know is lurking in here somewhere. I despise this hate-mongering, bigoted book. I kept a copy for reference, even though I’d rather shred it with my fucking teeth and set the scraps ablaze.
Finally, I find it—buried beneath a pile of manuscripts I “borrowed” from the library at Alexandria.
The sight of the ugly little flower embossed on the cover stops me cold. A ripple runs through my shadows, a strange pulse, there and gone before I can process it.
That sickly yellowed bloom shrivels at the edges, rotting from paper to pigment. The scent hits me next. Sticky, sweet, and festering, like citrus left to decay in the sun.
My stomach churns, but I force myself to pick it up.
The Culling Ledger.
It sounds cold. Clinical. Almost bureaucratic—like a catalog of monsters.
But it’s not.
It’s a kill list. A manifesto. A methodical plan to erase us.
A tidy little blueprint for genocide, bound in underborne skin and written in erevald blood.
The book doesn’t just document creatures; it classifies them. Each entry ranks a being’s threat to humanity, the best way to kill them, and which parts of their bodies are most useful to the cult’s twisted rituals.
Through research and some forceful persuasion, I uncovered something worse. The Disciples don’t just rely on zealots.
They cultivate killers, hunters drawn from the Kindled and Lustrate, trained to eliminate anything not born of man.
The Lustrate are the newly anointed, the ones still being broken down and reshaped in the Disciples’ fire.
The Kindled are those who have survived the process, fanatics proven through blood and devotion.
When a hunter slaughters a creature, they must bring proof to one of the Albedo, the gilded priests who oversee the rituals of death.
The Albedo determines whether a kill is worthy, but only the Dawn, the guiding light of the Disciples, makes the final judgement.
She alone bestows the highest honors, elevating the most devoted hunters to near-sainthood, granting them access to secrets, tools, and magic designed for one purpose: extermination.
Even touching this book makes my skin crawl, but I kept it for a reason. And now, something pulls gently at the back of my mind. It’s a whisper of recognition, a thread leading straight to Aurora.
The Disciples didn’t get everything right, and the book has glaring omissions—like me. But they were meticulous. They recorded every creature they encountered or believed existed, many of them now extinct because of the Disciples.
Take unicorns. Peaceful, beautiful, curious creatures who couldn’t resist the very thing that would destroy them: humans. Their trusting nature is why they’re woven into fairytales and folklore with unnerving accuracy.
And yet, the Disciples hunted them into extinction, carving their horns from their skulls to steal the potent magic inside. A ritual overseen by the Aurifex, the cult’s divine craftsmen of horror.
They called unicorns monsters. But I see the truth now.
The cult covets the very thing that sets the underborne and erevald apart from humans.
They fear them. But want to become them.
Human hypocrisy knows no bounds.
As I continue my search, I notice several other creatures that are now extinct thanks to the Disciples.
Something ugly and unwelcome knots behind my ribs.
Oh hell, is that empathy?
That’s new. I don’t give a shit about the underborne, and my feelings toward the erevald border on outright hatred. Even so, I never went out of my way to kill them. But the Disciples did. Over and over again.
As I idly flip through the disgusting little book, something unexpected grabs my attention. The notes in the margins warp, edges bleeding together.
No. No, it can’t be this.
It’s a fucking myth. Even in our world.
In my younger years, the human and underborne worlds often interacted. As humans developed language, tools, and logic, they pushed the underborne to the background, or simply murdered them, relegating them to nothing more than bloodthirsty monsters.
The erevald escaped this treatment for obvious reasons.
Because they live immortal lives, they don’t procreate as often, meaning there are significantly fewer underborne. They must either hide in the shadows or masquerade as human.
They didn’t stand a chance.
Telling stories over thousands of years resembles the telephone game that children play, where messages transform as they’re passed along.
Human stories from the past may have contained some truth, but today’s folklore and fairytales are largely twisted, exaggerated versions of those original tales.
You can thank the oral tradition and the bards who loved one-upping each other for that.
But one of the most outlandish stories I ever heard, one that I knew without a doubt was pure human bullshit, was the story of Lucifer Morningstar’s descendants.
And this story, like every story ever told, has a bit of truth woven in between the fiction and fantasy. What I know to be true sounds like a load of bollocks to humans, but for the supernatural creatures of the world, it’s merely fact.
Lucifer was one of the oldest and most powerful angels in Heaven, but he was curious, insightful, and kind.
A contradiction to the other seraphim, who prized obedience over empathy, and silence over doubt.
The bureaucracy created by the angels to run Heaven craved perfection. Well, their definition of perfection.
The increasingly strict rules for entering Heaven troubled Lucifer. He feared kind-hearted humans—good people who simply didn’t pray loud enough—were being condemned to Purgatory for erasure.
That wasn’t the world he wanted.
And when Lucifer looked around, Hell stared back at him. The underworld was never meant to be a place of punishment. It was just … space. Empty. Untended. Full of wandering souls and demons too lazy to do anything about it.
But it was still something.
Lucifer gave up everything to create a better afterlife. He was done watching Heaven turn away the broken, the queer, the defiant, and the kind-hearted souls who didn’t check all the right boxes.
He didn’t fall from grace. He walked away from cruelty.
The rest? Just angelic propaganda wrapped with holy PR.
He built a kingdom, a sanctuary, for those Heaven refused. And for that, they erased him.
But freedom has a price. To escape, he struck a deal, a heavenly pact that banished him from Earth forever. And to reach the underworld, he had to fall. A process that ripped the wings from his back, drained him of his power, and left him nothing but a husk of divinity.