Chapter Thirteen
CRAVE
The clubhouse looks like a war zone.
Shattered glass grinds under my boots as I survey the damage. Bullet holes pepper the walls, leaving torn plaster and exposed concrete behind. Blood stains the floor—human, vampire, and things in between—creating abstract patterns that tell stories of violence I’ve seen too many times. The acrid smell of burned vampire flesh still hangs in the air, mixing with gunpowder and the lingering scent of Sloane’s awakening.
The scent of burning iron laced with something ancient coats everything now.
My clubhouse.
My brothers.
Mysoul.
I can still sense her upstairs. Not as a thought, not as memory, but as a steady thrum beneath my ribs, a second rhythm that isn’t mine and yet feels inseparable from my own. She sleeps, her body mending itself after the transformation, after what we did together. After what I turned her into. The weight of that choice sits heavily on my shoulders.
“Prez.” Hex’s voice cuts through my thoughts. He’s hunched over his laptop at the bar counter, surrounded by monitors that somehow survived the attack. His eyes glow with an unnatural blue while his technomancy is active and is burning through every digital connection he can find. “We’ve got a problem.”
“Just one?” The words taste bitter. “That would be a fucking miracle.”
He doesn’t smile. Hex only loses his sense of humor when things are truly dire. “The supernatural dark web is on fire…literally. Someone hacked three major forums just to spread the word faster.” His fingers fly across the keyboard, screens flickering with encrypted messages and video feeds I don’t want to see. “Everyone knows about Sloane. What she is. What you did.”
My jaw clenches so hard I hear my teeth grind. “How bad?”
He pulls up a split screen, mainstream news on the left, social media on the right. “It’s holding.” The tension in his voice is the closest Hex gets to relief. “I spent the last six hours building the narrative. Every piece of footage Viktor uploaded, I’ve flagged and tagged as AI-generated. Planted metadata inconsistencies. Seeded the tech forums with frame-by-frame ‘debunks,’ lighting errors, motion artifacts, rendering tells that don’t actually exist, but humans won’t know that.” He gestures to a trending thread on the right screen.#VampireHoaxis number two worldwide. “The internet did the rest. Humans love nothing more than proving something is fake.”
I stare at the feeds. News anchors are already laughing about it.‘An elaborate AI stunt or the world’s most convincing deepfake?’The chyron rolls beneath a panel of digital forensics experts, all of them lining up to explain exactly why the footage couldn’t be real.
The irony is almost elegant.
“How long will it hold?” I ask.
“Long enough.” Hex’s jaw tightens. “The supernatural world knows the truth. But humans? They want to believe it’s fake. Makes the world feel safer. I’m just permitting them to believe what they already want to.”
I let out a slow breath. One front, at least, is contained.
The Law of Silence bends. But it does not break. Not today.“Every major faction is talking about her. Vampires, witches, demons, hell… even the fae courts are paying attention, and theyneverpay attention to anything outside their own politicalbullshit.” He spins one of his monitors to face me, and the chatter scrolls past in dozens of languages. “They’re calling her the first Blood Witch in three centuries. They want to study her. Control her. Some want to kill her before she becomes too powerful.”
“Over my dead body.”
“That’s what they’re counting on, brother.” Hex’s expression is grim. “Viktor didn’t just attack us. He orchestrated this whole thing. Got it on video, the partial transformation, the magical explosion, all of it. Uploaded it everywhere before we could stop him. TheLaw of Silenceisn’t just broken, it’s fuckingshattered.”
The words land with a physical blow. For a thousand years, I’ve upheld that law, protected it, used it to keep the supernatural world hidden from humanity, to prevent the chaos that would erupt if mortals knew what walked among them.
And inonenight, to saveonewoman, I’ve destroyed it.
“Show me,” I growl.
Hex pulls up a video. Grainy, shot from a distance, but clear enough. I watch myself give Sloane my blood. Watch her heart stop, then restart with that thunderous beat that shook the building. The crimson-gold light exploded from her body as she awakened into something that shouldn’t exist.
The video ends with her eyes opening, molten and otherworldly, and the timestamp shows it’s already been viewed seven million times across supernatural networks.
Fuck.
“There’s more.” Hex switches to another feed. “The Coven of Crows sent a message. It came through on every channel simultaneously, text, audio, video, and even some old-school blood sigils appeared on walls across the city. They made sure we couldn’t miss it.”
He plays the audio. The voice that emerges from the speakers is one I haven’t heard in centuries, but it’s burned into my memory like a brand.
