The words don’t come with command. No pressure. No leash.
This unsettles me more than the chains ever did.
‘Together,’she adds, almost… amused. ‘As it should have been.’
I don’t answer her. Not yet. Compromise from a primordial entity isn’t kindness—it’s strategy. And Lilith has never done anything without purpose.
“I’ve got you,” Crave says quietly, his voice vibrating through his chest where my cheek rests.
This time, I believe him.
I try to speak, but my throat closes around copper-thick blood, the sound that escapes barely human. Every nerve lights up in protest, not pain exactly, but the echo of it. The memory of what it cost to survive.
Through my Crimson Sight that still burns despite my exhaustion, I take in the battlefield. Bodies are scattered across concrete. Ash drifts where vampires fell. The club moves through the wreckage with grim efficiency.
Rogue half shifted, golden eyes sharp. Scorch exhaling smoke, dragon fire banked but restless as he shifts back into human form. Oracle’s phoenix flames low and steady, healing where they can.
We survived.
Somehow, impossibly,we survived.
“Oracle!” Crave’s shout cuts through the ringing in my ears. “Hades!Now!”
Footsteps pound toward us, multiple sets. The world tilts as Crave adjusts his grip, cradling me as if I’m something precious instead of the weapon I became. Heat presses against my right side, phoenix fire rolling off Oracle in waves that feel too warm. Cold seeps in from my left, death magic coiling around Hades as cold as winter given form.
“She’s burning out from the inside.” Oracle’s voice carries that timeless quality, old beyond measure, patient beyond understanding. His hand hovers over my chest, not quite touching, his magic, probing, searching, and cataloging the damage I’ve done to myself. “Her Bloodfire consumed more than blood. It fed on her life force, her mortality, everything human she had left.”
“Can you fix it?” There’s an edge in Crave’s voice I’ve never heard before. It’s not quite fear, but closer to desperation, raw and bleeding.
“Not fix.” Hades sounds clinical, detached, as if he’s discussing theoretical necromancy rather than my actual survival. “But we can stabilize. Bridge the gap between what she was and what she’s becoming.”
Through the haze threatening to drag me under, anger sparks, hot and immediate.What I’m becoming.As if I were some science experiment gone awry. As if I didn’t stand on the battlefield and decide that saving my family was worth burning through every scrap of humanity I had left.
“Stabilize her.” Crave’s arms tighten around me, possessive, protective. “Whatever it takes, you fucking do it!”
Phoenix fire cascades over me first, washing through my body in waves that should burn but don’t. Instead, it feels as though I am being unmade and reformed simultaneously, every cell igniting and rebuilding in rapid succession. My back arches involuntarily, a scream tearing from my throat as Oracle’s magic forces my Bloodfire into some semblance of order, tempering the wild, destructive force into something that won’t consume me from within.
Then Hades’ death magic follows, cold and precise, threading through the gaps Oracle’s flames leave behind. Where phoenix fire burns and renews, death magic anchors and preserves. It wraps around my bones, sinking deep into marrow, binding me to existence in ways that feel fundamentally changed from before.
The sensations war inside me.
Heat and cold.
Life and death.
Creation and destruction.
All of it spiraling through my body, weaving together into something new, something that makes my veins glow crimson-gold beneath my skin and sends small sparks of Bloodfire dancing across my fingertips.
“There…” Oracle’s voice sounds tired but satisfied. “She’ll live. But she’s not human anymore, Crave. Not even close. The transformation is complete. Whatever she was before, she’s fully a Blood Witch now. Bound to you, anchored by you, but powerful enough to stand on her own.”
“I know.” Something in Crave’s voice makes me force my eyes open, fighting through the exhaustion that wants to drag me into darkness. His silver eyes stare down at me, and the emotion swirling through them hits harder than any magic.
Pride. Fear. Love. Possession.
All of it tangled together into something that makes my breath catch.
The burning in his veins eases by degrees, the jagged edges of pain dulling as something inside him stubbornly knits itself back together. It isn’t fast. Each breath drags, each movement protests, but the damage is retreating all the same, inch by hard-won inch.
