The scent of my blood changes. The burning iron smell intensifies, but now there’s something else mixed with it.
Burning everything.
Crave’s arms tighten around me, and I watch his eyes widen even further as he realizes something, as he understands what’s happening.
What I’mbecoming.
“Oh fuck,” he whispers.
And then the world goes dark.
Chapter Eleven
CRAVE
The moment my blood touches Sloane’s tongue, reality fractures.
Not metaphorically, not poetically. I feel it, an actual tear in the fabric of existence, as if the universe itself is recoiling from what’s happening.
Her body convulses in my arms, every muscle locking rigid. I’ve turned hundreds of humans over the centuries, made them become my scions. I know what the transformation looks like. The pain, the writhing, the desperate gasps as mortality fights against the inevitable.
This isn’t that.
This is something else entirely.
Sloane’s heart stops. I feel it through our connection, through whatever bond formed when she first walked into my bar and woke my dormant Bloodfire.
One beat.
Two.
Three.
Then silence.
The kind of silence that comes before an explosion.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight…
Nine seconds.
Her heart restarts with a sound of thunder breaking inside her chest, and everything goes wrong in the most spectacular way possible.
Her veins blaze to life. Not a whisper of glow, but a rush of crimson-gold fire racing beneath her skin, each pulse brighter than the last. The radiance hits me with a force that makes myvision contract, not because the light hurts, light rarely can, but because a creature born from evil isn’t meant to stare directly into something this incandescent,thisalive.
The shadows around my feet recoil, startled and skittering away from the glow spilling off her skin, as if even the darkness I command can’t decide whether to bow to her… or flee. Around us, my brothers shield their eyes, backing away instinctively.
“What the fuck—” Scorch starts, but his words are cut off as Sloane’s body lifts off the floor.
My arms fall away as she rises, suspended in midair by forces I don’t understand. Her back arches violently, spine bending at an angle that should shatter bone. Her limbs dangle loose, lifeless, while her head falls back, mouth open in a silent scream.
Then an orb forms, sparkling intensely around her. It starts at her chest, a sphere of crimson and gold that expands outward, engulfing her completely. Threads of black weave in, out, and around her, drawing something from deep within her. The energy pulses with a heartbeat that isn’t hers, it isn’t mine, it’s both of ours, synchronized, colliding, fusing. My Bloodfire recognizes something in the light, reaches for it desperately, even as ancient instinct screams at me to run.
The scent hits next.
Burning iron but magnified thousandfold. It floods the clubhouse, coating my tongue, filling my lungs with every unnecessary breath. But underneath it, there’s something else. Something that smells of the first fire ever kindled, mingled with blood spilled on sacred ground, and a power so old it predates language.
The temperature spikes, plummets, and then spikes again, reality struggling to contain what’s happening inside the orb.
