I get between the scion and the door.
It sees me and stops.
Not because it’s thinking, feral newborns don’t stop because they’re thinking, it stops because I’ve placed myself in its path and my body is broadcasting something it can’t quite process. I’m prey and predator at once, the scent of vampire mixing with the signature of someone who has recently, and repeatedly, held their hunger in a clenched fist and refused to let it win. The scion tilts its head, confused, and for a single three-second window, the full-force drive toward the building falters.
I speak before it can refocus on the door. “Hey,” I say, keeping my voice low. Not soothing because soothing implies a power gap that I can’t afford to imply, but level. “Hey… stay with me a second.”
His red eyes are wild. The whites have gone the color of an old bruise, which means this one has gone at least three days sincefeeding, maybe longer, and three days of that hunger is enough to strip a person right down to the worst version of what they have become.
I know exactly what that feels like.
“I know the hunger is everything right now,” I say, and I don’t look away from those ruined eyes. I keep my gaze steady because shifting my gaze means threat-signal, and I need something different than threat right now. “I know you’re drowning in it. It’s so loud you can’t hear anything else. It’s so bad you can’t remember what it was like before, or whether there even was a before.” My voice doesn’t shake, and I’m distantly astonished by that fact. “But you can fight it… I did.”
The scion makes a sound. Ragged and torn, the kind of sound that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s rage or grief.
“I wasexactlywhere you are,” I continue, and my voice drops lower, and I mean every single word with a precision that doesn’t require decoration. “No control, no anchor, just the hunger and the dark and the absolute certainty that I was going to consume everything I touched. I thought it would never stop…” I pause for a moment. “It stops. It doesn’t go away entirely, but it stops being all you are. You’re still in there. I can see it.”
The scion’s hands, clenched into fists, tremble.
His red eyes flicker.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Something cool and heavy cuffs around both the scion’s wrists from behind, and the metallic ring of necromantic chains hitting stone carries Hades’ signature the way other people carry a scent. The scion lurches, pulls, but the chains don’t give, and the feral drive toward the building is over.
I exhale, still a human trait left over that I haven’t quite let go of. The trembling in my hands finally makes it to the surface, andI fold my fingers together in front of me before anyone can clock the shaking.
Rogue’s hand finds the back of my neck, reaching through the spike of instinct and hunger and forcing both back under control.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t need to.
By the time the perimeter is secured and the count is done, three of the five are alive, bound and seated in the yard under Hades’ watchful attention, necromantic chains and Hex’s suppression wards holding them still. The other two had been too far gone. Scorch’s fire and Dread’s fear had done what they had to do, quick and clean, and neither of the brothers looked like they’d enjoyed it.
No one looks at me strangely.
Not openly.
But I’m aware of how assessment moves through the brothers like weather, the kind of thing you feel on your skin before the sky changes, and I stand in the yard, hold myself still, and wait to see what the verdict is going to be.
Scorch is the last one to walk past me. He smells of ash and scorched metal, and there’s a burn across his left forearm that’s already half-healed, his dragon biology knitting the tissue back faster than any first-aid kit could manage. He moves with the coiled economy of a creature that has just expended significant force and is now consciously compressing itself back into something that fits inside a human skin.
He stops beside me.
He doesn’t look at me, exactly. He looks forward, jaw set, a cigarette appearing between his fingers with the ease of long habit, and he draws on it with the slow consideration of someone running calculations. “That thing you said to the small one,”he says, and I wait. “It worked,” he says, which is the whole sentence, apparently.
It takes me a moment to understand that this is Scorch complimenting me, that this flat, blunt assessment of a tactic’s effectiveness is the warmest thing he is capable of producing in the direction of someone who, until twenty minutes ago, had been treating me with the specific wariness he reserved for things that might require his fire to deal with.
“Thanks,” I say, and I mean it with more weight than the single syllable suggests.
He grunts once, then moves on.
I stare at the space he leaves behind, at the ash still drifting from the ends of his cigarette. Something settles in my chest that I haven’t felt once since the night Valeria made me into this, the first fragile molecule of belonging somewhere that was not a cabin in the wilderness and was not the radius of Rogue’s personal orbit.
