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Nobody looks twice at me.

To every human I pass, I’m just some guy heading into town for coffee.

They can’t see the black wings folded somewhere beneath my skin.

They can’t see what Heaven did to them.

They can’t see that six weeks ago they were white.

I keep walking.

Coffee.

That’s all I’m doing.

Buying fucking coffee.

Except the farther I get from the clubhouse, the quieter everything inside me becomes.

Heaven used to be there all the time. I never thought about it because I never had to. That low hum sat beneath everything, steady and familiar.

Now when I reach for it, I get nothing.

But six weeks hasn’t stopped me from reaching.

It’s just taught me what I’m going to find when I do. I try outrunning it anyway. My boots eat pavement block after block, past shuttered storefronts and streetlights buzzing yellow against a sky gone the color of old bruises, and still that hollow place inside my chest keeps pace with me, patient as a shadow.

Then my Grace stirs.

Not the way it used to, warm and steady beneath my sternum. No, this is a snarl, low and sudden, twisting through what’s left of me like something caught on a hook and yanked sideways.

I stop walking.

My legs don’t ask permission before they start moving again, and this time I’m not the one choosing the direction.

What in the hell is this?

I let it pull me anyway, because arguing with the only piece of myself Heaven didn’t manage to burn out feels like arguing with my own pulse.

VESPAH

The bell over my shop door goes quiet the second I flip the sign, and that’s usually my favorite sound of the day—the hush settling in after hours of customers and small talk, the shop finally exhaling around me.

Tonight it never comes.

Two completely different powers hit me at once, so tightly fused they crash into my senses as one. The force of them knocks the air clean out of my lungs, and I double over against the counter, both palms flat on the old wood as the shelves around me blur into streaks of color.

Holy Light and hellfire burn inside the same soul, but the Grace catches my attention first. White-gold should be clean, pure, but this isn’t. Black and silver streak through it, tainting the light while hellfire burns right alongside it, twisting together into a single violent force.

I’ve spent my entire life reading resonance the way other people read faces, and I have never felt anything close to this. It isn’t a warning. It isn’t a threat. It’s a wound, raw and open, screaming from somewhere across the city loud enough that my bones ache with the force of it.

I try shoving it out of the way with everything too sharp to hold. My mother taught me that trick before I could walk steady on two legs. Breathe through it, let it pass, don’t let whatever belongs to this stranger get its hooks into you.

It doesn’t pass.

If anything, it digs deeper, curling around something inside my chest and tugging, gentle at first, then insistent, until my feet are already moving toward the door before my mind agrees to it.

SENTINEL