I was not dead.
The Coven, for all its theater of finality, does not waste power on executions when containment will suffice.
I was a lesson.
A door they had closed.
A proof of authority that could, if necessary, be reopened and displayed again.
What they did not account for was the sire bond.
Even folded, even compressed into nothing, the thread remained. Ancient connections do not sever cleanly. They attenuate, stretch, grow thin as spider silk, but silk, it should be noted, does not break easily. The bond to Draven, forged in a different era, survived because the Coven’s power operates on the physical plane. What exists between a sire and their oldest, deepest connections operates on something older.
The thread was there.
Waiting.
It took someone skilled enough to find it.
The witch found the thread three months ago. A competent woman, skilled enough in blood-path reading to trace mate connections across significant distances, specialized enough that locating her required six weeks of careful inquiry throughchannels the Coven has no visibility into. She was not looking for me, she was not even certain what she had found when the thread pulled taut in her hands. But she followed it, and at its terminus she found the fold in the world that was me, and with considerably less ceremony than the Coven had used to put me there, she unpicked it.
A seam, unraveled.
And she pulled me back into the world, gasping, furious, exactly as I had left it, which is to say, magnificently.
But, alas, she did not survive long enough to be proud of her work. However, I did make her do one more thing before I ended her. I brought her a lycan blood sample. She brought me a name, a location, and the satisfaction of a professional delivering a result she was proud of.
Charlotte Harris.Human, twenty-three years old, living eight blocks from the Eternal Sins MC compound with a biological compatibility with the club’s vice president that the witch described as one of the cleaner fated-mate signatures she’d seen in forty years of practice.
I thanked her genuinely, in my way. She was very good at what she did.
Then I took the name, the location, and I resolved the matter of the witch with the same efficiency I apply to all matters I’ve concluded.
She had served her purpose.
She knew my face.
She knew what I’d asked for.
The calculation was straightforward.
Charlotte Harris took less time to find in person than I’d expected. Humans with no knowledge of the supernatural world do not take precautions against it, do not monitor their exposure, do not notice when something older and more patient than anything they’ve encountered begins taking an interestin the patterns of their days. She was visible in the way all unprotected humans are visible. Creatures of habit, of routine, of the repetitive small structure of a life built without awareness that anything is watching.
I watched for two weeks before I acted.
Thoroughness is not the same as hesitation. I want that distinction to be clearly understood, even if only by me.
The turning itself was simple. Easier than most. She was strong, stronger than her human frame suggested, with a quality of resistance that made the initial transition more interesting than the routine ones I’d run in the weeks prior. Most humans don’t fight the blood once it’s in them. The biology takes over, and the personality goes under, submerged by the hunger.
Charlotte Harris fought.
All the way down, she fought.
And then, when the fighting failed, she turned the fighting inward and aimed it at the bloodlust itself instead of at me.
I had not anticipated that.
I found it…instructive.
