Chapter Fourteen
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Prophet
The sat phone feels like a fucking brick in my hand. I haven’t heard Blade’s voice since before I fell. I don’t know what hearing it will give back to me.
Lily stands at the counter with her back to me, giving me privacy without leaving, so I make the call.
Then a woman’s voice. Clear, businesslike, the voice of someone who answers phones for an MC and has learned to make nothing in her tone a variable a stranger can read.
“Crystal Creek.”
“I need Blade,” I say.
Silence, then, “Who’s calling?”
“Tell him it’s his chaplain.”
Another pause, longer. Then the line goes quiet in the specific way of someone pressing hold rather than setting a phone down.
I wait. The weight of the cut on my shoulders does something I didn’t expect.
It settles me. The leather is already warm from my skin.
The patches sit where they’ve always sat.
The body knows this weight even when the mind has lost the rest.
Then, “Yeah.”
One word, low, familiar. And I’m back at the table, Blade at the head of it. Ranger, Fury, Vex, and my chair. My brothers.
Tessa’s face. Alive. That’s the part that rises last and stays longest.
I keep my voice level. “Blade,” I say. “It’s me.”
“Prophet?”
Fuck.
“Yeah.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” A chair scrapes on his end. Someone says something I can’t make out. “Where are you?” he says finally.
“Alaska. Miles off any road. I can give you coordinates.”
“Give them to me.”
I read them off the sat phone’s display, and he takes them without comment. He’s always been the man in the room who doesn’t ask for what he already knows, and he already knows enough. I’m alive, I’m calling, I need something. The rest is logistics.
“I’ve got a situation,” I say. “Something’s been hunting me since I fell.”
“What kind of something?”
“An Ancient, Calix, one of the first to fall, older than most of what we know. He’s been at the tree line. He wants my grace... well, what’s left of it.”
“Fuck.” A pause. “What does he want it for?”
“To finish something he started a very long time ago...” I pause.
“He’s not working alone. I’ve had things at the perimeter for weeks, something running the tree line at night, a wolf that wasn’t right, movement that reads human but isn’t behaving like it.
He has people. How many, I don’t know yet. ”
“Understood.” The flat register Blade shifts into when he’s already planning. He’s quiet for a moment. Not hesitating, only processing. “How long?”
“Days. Maybe less.” I look at the window. The spruce stand in their line, patient and indifferent. “He’s deteriorating. That makes him faster, not slower.”
“What do you need?”
“All of you,” I say. “And you come on her terms.”
“Whose terms?”
“The woman whose cabin I’m in. Whose mountain this is...” I pause. “She’ll have a rifle on you the whole way in from the tree line. She won’t lower it until she decides you’re trustworthy, and she doesn’t decide quickly. You’ll introduce yourselves and wait.”
A pause. I can almost hear Blade turning this over, the sound of a man working every angle. “Who is she?”
“She’s why I’m still alive,” I say. “Her name is Lily. She pulled me out of a crater and kept me through the winter and didn’t ask for anything back. You treat her with that in mind.”
More silence. Different in quality from the first, something in it I haven’t heard from him before, or haven’t heard in whatever portion of the past I can access. Something almost careful.
“Understood,” he says.
We work through the rest of it fast, the way men who’ve sat at the same table for years work through things.
No excess, no repetition, each of us carrying our half without needing it spelled out.
He’ll bring the full team. The terrain will dictate their approach.
No road access means one thing for a group of men who are not entirely men, and we both know it.
“In their forms,” I say.
“Yeah.” No hesitation. “Two days.”
“Good.”
“Prophet.” His voice drops slightly, not softer but steadier. “You’d better be standing when we get there.”
“Working on it,” I say.
The line goes quiet. I set the phone on the table, sit with the cut on my shoulders and the coordinates still glowing on the screen, and for a long moment, I don’t do anything at all.
Lily turns around. She reads whatever is on my face the way she reads everything, clinically and thoroughly, before she lets herself react to it.
She’s been doing that since the first morning I was conscious enough to have a face worth reading.
She moves to the table and sits across from me, and neither of us speaks.
The stove ticks. Bear is somewhere behind me, the warm weight of him not quite touching my leg but near enough to be felt.
“Two days,” I say.
“Two days,” she repeats. Not a question.
“They’ll come in from the north ridge. You’ll hear them before you see them...” I pause. “They’ll be in their forms. I should tell you what that means.”
“Tell me,” she says.
So, I do. I start with Blade, a Kodiak bear shifter, president, the man who is my brother but also the one who keeps us all in line and alive.
Lily listens without expression. I tell her about Ranger, a werewolf, our enforcer, the kind of man whose wolf is always closer to the surface than the skin.
Her expression stays level. I tell her about Fury, a hellhound, our sergeant at arms, who walks around trailing heat in a country that runs thirty below.
Something moves across her face. Not disbelief, but the precise, controlled recalibration of a scientist receiving data that doesn’t fit the current model.
“Vampires,” she says.
“Vex. VP. Centuries old, not decades.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“These are the things of myth,” Lily says. Not arguing, but simply stating.
“They were always real,” I say. “Myth is what happens when the world decides it can’t hold the truth anymore and needs somewhere smaller to put it.”
She looks at me. “You’re a fallen angel.”
“Yes.”
“And in your MC is a bear shifter, a werewolf, a hellhound, and a vampire.”
“Among others.”
Lily stares at me. “Of course there are.”
I almost smile.
“The moose?” she asks.
“Corrupted animal.”
“Wolf?”
“Same.”
“The thing running around my mountain in the dark?”
“Probably one of Calix’s.”
Her eyes narrow. “Probably?”
“I was missing half my memory until this morning, Lily. You’re getting what I’ve got. Calix has followers. Human ones, mostly. But the corrupted animals... that’s his work. What proximity to stolen grace does to living things that aren’t built to hold it.”
She absorbs this while the stove ticks, and Bear shifts against my leg.
“Where did they come from?” she asks. “Not Calix. The others. Vex. Ranger. The hellhound.” She says it the way she says everything, clinical and direct, without apology for needing to know. “There’s no evolutionary pathway for a man who turns into a bear. So where did they originate?”
This is the question—the one underneath all the others. I’ve been waiting for her to get here since the night she stood at the window after the light came out of my hands and didn’t run, only turned and asked, ‘What was that?’
“You know the story of Adam and Eve,” I say.
She gives me a look. “I went to church twice. Once for a funeral.”
“Adam had a first wife,” I say. “Before Eve. Her name was Lilith...”
“You’re telling me Lilith was real.”
“I’m telling you Adam was real.”
She blinks. “Okay. Somehow that’s worse. God made them equal,” I say. “Same clay, same breath, same standing. But Lilith refused to submit. She left Eden on her own terms, and she did not come back.” I look at my hands on the table.
“Good for her.”
I nearly laugh. “I thought you’d say that.”
“Then you’ve been paying attention.”
“Heaven was not pleased. Adam was given Eve. She was formed differently, formed after, formed from him rather than beside him. The subordination built in from the making.”
“And Lilith?”
“Lilith went out into the world, and she was not alone in it. Other things were already there—the Primordials, the old entities, beings made of elemental force before humanity existed. She moved through them. She learned. She was the first human to exist outside the order God intended, and that made her something new...” I pause.
“Her children were the first of what the world would eventually call supernatural. Not monsters or aberrations... the result of a woman who refused the plan and built something outside it.”
Lily is very still.
“Vampires,” I say. “Shifters. The older bloodlines, hellhounds, dragons, the incubi. All of them trace back to Lilith and what she became when she chose the world outside Eden over the one inside it.”
Lily is quiet for a long time.
“Her name,” she says finally.
“Yes.”
“My name is Lily.”
“I noticed.”
“My mother named me after a flower,” she says.
“Probably,” I say. “Most things have more than one reason.”
Lily picks up her coffee, and this time, she drinks it.
When she sets it down, her voice is back to its usual register, the surgeon returning from wherever the woman went for a moment.
“So, your MC has a bear shifter, a werewolf, a hellhound, a vampire, and whatever else, and they’re all descended from the first woman who ever told God ‘no.’ ”
“In broad strokes.”
“And they’re coming here in two days.”
“Yes. Maybe sooner if they can.”
She looks at the window. “Bear will lose his mind,” she says.
“Probably.”
“I’ll look after him.”
What comes across her face then is not fear.
It’s the thing underneath fear, the thing in the chest of a person who has already decided they’ll do what needs doing, now dealing with the cost before the cost arrives.
She’s been carrying it since the porch. Since the light went out, she got me inside, kneeled in front of the chair, and said, ‘We need help,’ with the same flat certainty she brings to everything true and difficult.
I look at her across the table.