“Four on your left, brother.” Hades doesn’t even raise his voice. “Handle it.”
I’m already moving.
The four scions peel off and come for me hard, and I let my wolf rise higher, the world narrowing into scent, motion and threat. I track all four of them at once, the frantic scrape of movement, the sharp bite of fresh hunger rolling off them, the erratic rhythm of bodies still learning what they are. Their frenzy makes them loud, and I smell confusion underneath the aggression. They don’t want to be doing this, and that matters because it changes how I move.
I take the first one down with a controlled strike, claws hooking around its arm to redirect its momentum rather than rip it apart, bringing it hard into the stone wall so it slumps. The second catches me across the jaw, a solid hit, enough force to snap a human head sideways, and I let the momentum carry me, turning with it, using it to pivot and drive my claws back into the scion’s sternum. Ribs flex—they’re not broken, but the breath punches out of it.
Three and four come together, and I take the hit because there’s no clean way around it, both of them colliding with me and driving me back three stumbling steps into one ofthe skeletal warriors. The necromantic bones close around the nearest scion’s arms with quiet authority, and I wrench free of the other, driving my claws into its chest as I twist away.
Reyna drops from the second-floor gallery like she was born for nothing but this moment. Her Tempest Core ignites mid-fall, and the thunder that rolls through the church isn’t from outside, it’s from her, from the storm compressed inside that former-combat-medic body, erupting through her palms in white-gold arcs that strike the cluster of scions reforming near the altar with absolute violence. Her spear crackles into existence in her hand, the metal singing with captured lightning.
“Left flank is getting messy,” she calls to me, sounding almost offended by it. “Do something about it, Rogue, or I swear to every god I’ve outlived—”
“On it,” I growl.
Then I feel it.
A sound I couldn’t hear with my ears, even if I tried, but something deeper, something threaded through the part of me that recognized Charlie the moment I first caught her scent, goes tight, cold, and terrible. She’s somewhere behind me. She went low, circling wide with Sloane to get around the thick of the crowd, and something is pulling at her. I can feel the pull through her, the way you’d feel a rope jerked from the other end. Valeria is reaching through the sire compulsion even now, mid-battle, mid-catastrophe, still trying to claim her.
I spin.
Charlie has gone very still in the middle of the chaos, and that stillness is worse than anything else in this room. Worse than the shrieking scions, worse than the crumbling stone, worse than the ancient battle detonating in the main hall behind me. Charlie stands among the wreckage with her hands at her sides and her face blank in the terrible way of someone being hollowed out from the inside, Valeria’s consciousness sliding into hersthrough the open channel of sire compulsion, trying to wear her like armor.
Her eyes have gone red, not feral red. Valeria red.
“Charlie.” I cover the ground between us in seconds, not touching her yet, keeping myself in her peripheral line of sight. “Charlotte, look at me.”
She doesn’t.
Her body takes half a step toward Valeria’s position, and something raw and furious tears open in the middle of my chest. I push my wolf through every tether that connects us, shoving it outward deliberately, the way you’d press your hand against a wound to slow the bleeding, flooding whatever channel links us with everything the wolf is and means and wants.
Warmth.
Pack.
Home.
Mine.
The words don’t have a voice, but they have weight.
You’re stronger than her…
You arenother weapon.
Her fingers curl.
You aremine.
Charlie blinks. The color in her eyes shifts, red bleeding back to the sharp, ice-bright blue I know, and the mechanical step she’d been taking stutters, then stops. A sound leaves her that’s barely sound at all, half-breath and half-grief, the noise a person makes when they’ve been holding something too tightly and finally let go. Her shoulders drop. Her hands come up to cover her face for a half-second, pressing hard, and then she pulls them away and looks at me with an expression so fierce it takes up her whole face.
“No,” I confirm, hauling the shift backward by sheer will. Bone and sinew recoil into human alignment from the waist up,but the wolf refuses to surrender below it, massive hind legs coiled and ready, claws scoring the floor. The reversal burns like molten iron through my nerves. “She’s not.”
But there are still scions chained to the walls. I see them now, the way I couldn’t in the first wave of chaos. The ones still restrained, still shackled at the wrists to iron rings bolted into the stonework. They are malnourished, wild-eyed, and shaking with a combination of feral hunger and something else, something underneath the hunger that looks a great deal like terror. These aren’t combatants, they’re captives. Valeria has been breaking them down, stripping them back to base instinct, building them into weapons from the inside out.
Charlie sees them at the same time I do.
I watch something happen in her face, the fighter’s focus giving way to something different, something that was always in her, even before the turning made bigger and more dangerous.
