For the first time in the weeks since I woke up in a warehouse and no idea what I’d become, I feel something that might, if I’m very careful, be the beginning of purpose.
I let it sit there without analyzing it to death.
It’s enough…for now.
Chapter Twenty-Five
CHARLIE
The basement smells of old stone and older magic.
Sloane has been down here for the better part of an hour, and whatever she’s been doing in the time it took Rogue to convince me not to follow her has transformed the space into something I barely recognize. Symbols ring the concrete floor in what appears to be ash and salt, their edges crisp and deliberate, forming a circle wide enough that I could lie flat in the center and not touch the boundary with my fingertips. Candles squat at the compass points, their flames burning a deep, arterial red that has nothing to do with the color of the wax.
Oracle stands to the far left. His phoenix fire banked low behind his eyes but present, a warm amber glow that tracks every movement in the room.
Hades is at the right. Still as a grave marker, his pale hands clasped, white eyes reading something in the shadows that the rest of us cannot see.
And Crave is behind me.
I don’t need to look because his presence fills the basement.
Rogue stands at my shoulder, close enough that his sleeve brushes my arm every time either of us moves.
“You understand what this means,” Sloane says. She’s crouched at the edge of the circle, adjusting one of the salt lines with the focused attention of someone who knows exactly how badly it can go if the detail isn’t perfect. Her veins are faintly luminous beneath her skin, that crimson-gold shimmer that means her power is already stirring, already listening. “If the connection opens, she will feel it. She’ll feel you.”
She doesn’t say Valeria’s name.
She doesn’t have to.
But my mouth goes dry.
“She’s in my blood either way,” I say. “She’s been there since the night she turned me. I’d rather we use that against her than keep pretending it doesn’t exist.”
Sloane looks up at me, and her Crimson Sight is fully active, her eyes reading me not as a face but as a map of lineage and intention, seeing the sire mark Valeria carved into my bloodline the night she unmade me and remade me as something else.
Whatever Sloane sees makes her exhale slowly through her nose. “She turned you on purpose,” Sloane says quietly. “Which means she built something into that mark… a tether. This ritual is going to pull on it.”
“Then it pulls,” I say. “Find out where she is.”
Rogue’s hand finds the small of my back, palm flat and warm, and the steadiness that radiates from him moves through me like a tide coming in, pushing back the cold that wants to settle in my chest. “I’ll be right here,” he murmurs, low enough that it’s only for me.
I step into the circle. The moment my feet cross the salt line, the air changes. There’s no dramatic sound, no visible shift, but my skin prickles from scalp to sole, and the candle flames shiver in unison despite the absence of any breeze. I lower myself into the center, cross-legged, hands resting on my knees. I tell myself to breathe, even though I don’t technically need to, even though the habit is purely psychological now, because it helps, because it reminds my body that I still have a body. That I’m still here, still Charlie, still the person who woke up one morning knowing all her favorite songs, hating mornings, and being absolutely terrible at parallel parking.
Sloane kneels in front of me, outside the circle’s edge. She produces a short, silver-handled blade from her belt.Practical.No ceremony in the gesture, just competence, and somehow that’s more reassuring than theatrics would have been.
“This is going to hurt,” she says, not as an apology, but as honest information.
“More than being turned?” I ask.
Something complicated moves across her face. “Different.”
She takes my right hand, turns it palm-up, and draws the blade across the meat of my palm in one clean stroke. The pain is sharp, bright, and immediate, and then it spreads, and that’s when it stops being simple. Blood wells up, vivid and dark in the candlelight, and Sloane presses her own fingers to the wound, her touch burning faintly, the crimson-gold light in her veins flaring brilliant at the contact. The smell of scorched iron fills the air, the signature scent of her magic waking, and then she begins to work.
Hemomancy doesn’t look like anything from the outside. There’s no dramatic explosion of power, no visible thread of magic to follow. What happens is far more invasive and quieter than that. It’s the sensation of something reaching into my blood, reading it the way a person reads a letter, running careful fingers over lines of meaning, tracing sentences back toward their source.
The sire mark pulses.
A pressure deep in my chest, deeper than physical, and the pulse feels like a finger pressing on a bruise I didn’t know I had. It throbs with a presence that is not mine. A presence I recognize the way you recognize a smell that makes your stomach turn, not because it’s unfamiliar, but because of everything it’s attached to.
