My hands clench into fists. “He’s challenging my authority.”
“More than that.” Rogue steps forward, his lycan eyes glowing faint gold. “He’s trying to draw them here, to our territory, to our doorstep.”
The temperature drops.
Not gradually.
Not the slow creep of cooling air.
Instantly.
As if a door to the void has opened and let winter’s corpse crawl through. I feel it before I understand what’s happening, a pressure building behind my sternum, spreading outward through my veins. My ancient instincts, honed over a millennium of survival, start screaming warnings my conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
It doesn’t announce itself. There’s no warning. One second, the room is tense but manageable, and the next, terror floods the space alive and smothering.
It starts as a whisper at the base of my skull.
Something is wrong.
Something is coming.
Something you can’t fight.
Then it grows.
The rational part of my brain knows it’s Dread’s power, knows he’s the source of this suffocating fear, but knowing doesn’t help. My body responds anyway, every cell remembering what it felt like to be prey instead of predator.
Around the clubhouse, my brothers react.
Scorch’s veins ignite, molten red crawling up his arms as his dragon’s instinct to burn flares. His breathing goes shallow, rapid. “What the fuck—”
Hex’s fingers freeze over his keyboard, his face draining of color. His eyes glaze slightly, reflecting something only he can see, probably every digital system he’s ever hacked, every ward he’s ever built, failing simultaneously in his mind’s eye.
Hades goes absolutely still, his necromancer’s calm cracking as his connection to death suddenly feels as though it’s dragging him under.
His voice comes out hoarse. “I can feel them. All of them. Every soul I’ve ever touched. They’re screaming.”
Even Rogue, my steadfast lycan VP, flinches back. His partial shift happens involuntarily, claws extending, fangs dropping, not from aggression but from pure survival instinct. The beast inside him isn’t raging.
It’s cowering.
Grizz’s Stonehide activates reflexively, his skin hardening with a sound of grinding stone, his massive frame going rigid as if bracing for an impact that hasn’t come yet.
Oracle’s flames dim to near-extinction, his ancient fire recognizing something older, something that even the First Flame respects…
Or fears.
Ronan is pressed against the wall, his usual cocky grin completely gone, one hand clutching at his chest as if he can’tbreathe. His fae blood is screaming at him to run, hide, vanish into the earth, and never return.
Jet is already halfway to phasing, his wraith form bleeding through as his body tries to escape into the space between worlds. His spectral layer is visible, writhing, and desperate.
Behind the counter, I hear glass shatter. Eden’s scream cuts off abruptly, not because she stopped, but because her banshee gift is recognizing death approaching on a scale that silences even her.This is what Dread does.
No one knows what kind of supernatural Dread is, but this is what he can manifest. He doesn’t project generic fear. He’s showing us our personal nightmares. The thing each of us dreads most, the ending we’ve spent our existence trying to avoid. And right now, every supernatural being in this room is experiencing it simultaneously.
For me, it’s worse.
Because I’m old enough to know what this feeling means.
