SLOANE
The moment the Coven of Crows vanishes from the street, my Crimson Sight activates without conscious thought.
The world doesn’t just change, itinverts. Colors bleed away, dissolving into something thinner and wrong, replaced by a spectrum that exists beyond normal human perception. Everything renders itself in shades of blood and shadow, in hues that have no names because mortal eyes were never meant to see them. And what I see makes every cell in my body scream warnings my conscious mind doesn’t want to acknowledge.
The Originals didn’t leave.
Not really.
They’re still here, woven into the fabric of reality itself, a dark thread through cloth. I can see them as absence, as voids where existence should be, as tears in the tapestry of the world that pulse with something older than time. They’re watching from dimensions my human brain can’t quite process, but my Blood Witch senses understand with terrifying clarity.
Five cosmic wounds in reality.
Five entities so powerful that they don’t exist in the world so much as the world existsaroundthem.
They’re observing.
Waiting.
Ready to judge.
My breath catches as I track their presence through layers of perception I didn’t possess two days ago. Nyx hovers, a living darkness, her consciousness spread through every shadow within a five-mile radius. Thanatos hangs at the edge of death itself, his attention fixed on the boundary between life andwhatever comes after. Erebus exists as pure void, a hole in the universe that watches without eyes. Moros sees us from every possible future simultaneously, his gaze fracturing across timelines like light through a prism. And Khaos—
God, Khaos.
The First is everywhere and nowhere.
His presence saturates reality so completely that trying to focus on him makes my eyes water and my head pound. He’s not watching us from outside. Heisoutside, inside, and between, existing in a state that makes my newly awakened magic recoil in something that feels uncomfortably like worship.
“Sloane?” Oracle’s voice cuts through my vision like a blade through silk, and I gasp, blinking rapidly.
The world snaps back to normal colors. Well, as normal as my enhanced senses allow. The clubhouse materializes around me in sharp relief with cracked walls, broken windows, and bloodstains that tell stories of recent violence. But overlaying it all, I still feelthem. The Coven. Their attention is pressing down like atmospheric pressure before a storm.
“Your eyes are glowing,” Oracle continues, moving closer. His phoenix flames cast dancing shadows across his concerned face. “Brighter than I’ve ever seen. What do you see?”
“They’re still watching,” I whisper, my voice hoarse. I move toward the window where I see Crave being helped inside by Rogue and Scorch. Even from here, through two walls and thirty feet of distance, I feel how diminished he is through our bond. The Binding carved his true power, stripping it down piece by piece, leaving him vulnerable in ways that make my Bloodfire surge with protective fury so intense it physically hurts. “They never left. They’re just… outside normal perception, watching us from dimensions I don’t have words for.”
My hands glow, pulsing beneath my skin in rhythm with my racing heartbeat. The power wants to surge forward, wants toreach through those dimensional barriers andburnthe entities threatening mine and Crave’s existence.
No.I force it down, breathing through the rage.Control. I need control.
“Of course they are,” Hades mutters from his position near the bar. The necromancer’s usual calm is cracked, stress bleeding through the damage he can no longer contain. His white eyes are dim, clouded, struggling to maintain their connection to the dead. “The Coven of Crows doesn’t trust anyone, especially not a Blood Witch they’ve deemed potentially dangerous.” He looks at me, and I see genuine fear there. “They’re probably reading every thought in your head right now. Every spike of emotion. Every flicker of power.”
The thought makes my skin crawl. “Can they—”
“Yes,” he interrupts. “They can, especially Moros. He’s watching you across seventeen thousand different timelines, seeing every choice you might make, every path you might walk. And Nyx…” He glances at the shadows in the corners of the room, which suddenly seem deeper, more alive than they should be. “She’s in those shadows right now, listening, observing, and judging.”
Eden appears at my side so suddenly that I jump. Her banshee senses must be going haywire because she’s vibrating with nervous energy, her goth makeup unable to hide the fear in her purple eyes. She’s humming under her breath, not her death scream, but something quieter, more personal. A lullaby, maybe, or a prayer to whatever gods Banshees pray to.
“I feel them too,” she says softly, her voice carrying a melodic quality that makes reality shiver. “Like pressure behind my eyes or death standing just outside the door, waiting to be invited in. Except…” she trails off, her humming growing more agitated. “Except it’s not one death. It’s thousands, millions, every deaththat’s ever happened and willeverhappen, all compressed into five points of absolute ending.”
“Jesus Christ,” I breathe out.
“He won’t help you here,” Seraphine says, materializing from the direction of the stage. Her siren’s voice carries harmonics that make my body ache, each word layered with music I can almost but not quite hear. Her song has been discordant since the Coven manifested, as though their presence disrupts all natural harmony, all the beautiful patterns she normally weaves through sound. “The Divine doesn’t interfere with the Originals. They’re older than gods. Older than most of what we call sacred.”
She moves to stand with us at the window, and I see her hands trembling slightly. Seraphine, who once sang a man into a coma for touching her without permission, isafraid.
“If you lose control tomorrow, Sloane…” she continues, and her voice drops to something barely above a whisper, “… they’ll tear through this building as if it’s made of paper. They won’t only kill us, they’ll erase us. Unmake us. Erebus will turn us into voids where people used to be, and the world will forget we ever existed.”
