The First Alpha stretches my limbs, a predator testing its new skin. My fingers trail through a puddle of seawater. It’s warm. Sticky. Leaves streaks like diluted blood on my skin. His skin now."Fitting," he murmurs, my voice warped into something alien, amused. "This place remembers death."Inside, I’m screaming. A raw, silent thing buried under miles of suffocating dark. Drowning. Always drowning.Then a pinprick. A sliver of light tearing through the oil-slick blackness.Mama. Cold. Arthur’s… angry.The child’s voice. Thin. Frayed. Slipping through the cracks in the Alpha’s control like smoke under a door. A hook snagged deep in my ribs, yanking.They’re here. Close.The Alpha snarls, a psychic vibration that makes my bones ache. He claws at the intrusion, shredding the fragile connection. But the echo lingers. Cold. Angry. He forces my head to turn, scanning the ruined street.There.At the end of the broken pier, where the timbers groan under the weight of the bleeding tide.Art
The sea isn’t right. It moves wrongthink, sluggish, like syrup. The waves don’t crash. They slap against the shore, wet and meaty, leaving streaks of crimson behind. The air reeks of salt and iron, clinging to my skin, my hair, the inside of my mouth. Not my mouth. His. The First Alpha stretches my limbs, testing, always testing. My fingers trail through the water. It parts like oil, staining my skin red. "Pretty," he murmurs with my voice. I scream inside my skull. No sound. Just the endless, suffocating dark. Then a flicker. The child’s voice, thin as spider silk, slipping through the cracks. Mama. We’re close. The Alpha snarls, claws at my thoughts, but the words linger. A hook in my ribs. They’re coming. The village is worse than the shore. Houses sag like rotten teeth. Shadows drip from the rooftops, pooling on the ground, twitching. The Alpha’s presence warps everything. Reality itself is unraveling. And in the center of it all Them. Arthur stands
A monastery’s broken arches clawing at a bruised sky. The scent of wet parchment and rust. Then gone. I’m drowning. Not in water in him. The First Alpha’s presence coils through my mind like smoke, thick and choking. He lets me surface sometimes. Just enough to see. To know. A game. "Watch," he murmurs, and my eyes focus. Arthur stands over a crumbling altar, fingers digging into Kieran’s collar. His knuckles are split. Fresh blood dots Kieran’s jaw. "You knew," Arthur snarls. "This whole time, you fucking knew" Kieran doesn’t fight back. His gaze flicks to the child huddled in the corner, knees drawn to their chest. Small. Too small. "It’s not that simple," Kieran says. Arthur shakes him. "The ritual needs kin-blood. That means her. Or the kid." A pause. The air tastes like lightning. Then "Or me," Kieran says softly. The First Alpha laughs in my skull. "Pathetic," the croods. "He thinks sacrifice will save you." I lash out feeble twitch of will. The Alpha
The trees bleed black. The air tastes like burnt copper. The ground beneath me breathes , rising and falling in slow, sick pulses. And the worst part? It feels like home . No. That’s not me. That’s him . The thing inside me, stretching its claws through my veins,whispering in a voice that isn’t a voice—just pressure against my skull, thick and suffocating. "Little wolf," it croons. "You are mine now." I try to scream. My mouth won’t open. I try to move. My limbs aren’t mine. I’m a passenger. A ghost. Trapped behind my own eyes as the First Alpha walks my body forward, step by step, through the bleeding forest. Arthur. The thought is a knife, sharp and desperate. He was here. He was— A flicker of memory: his face, streaked with blood, his eyes wild. The way he lunged for me, not to kill, but to hold . Like he could pull me back through sheer will. The Alpha had laughed with my throat and swatted him aside like a fly. No no no— A sound cuts thro
Slick black stone veined with something darker, something that pulses in time with the moon’s slow suffocation above us.My child is on that stone.No. Not just my child.The thing wearing their skin.It’s been whispering to me for hours. Days. Maybe forever. A voice like roots cracking through bone, like the hush of a grave settling. "Mother," it says, but it’s not my name it wants. It’s the shape of it. The sound.Arthur’s hand grips my arm, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "Lily. Look at me."I do. His eyes are wildfire—desperate, furious. Alive.He’s going to die here.The thought slices through me, clean and cold. He knows it too. I see it in the set of his jaw, the way his thumb brushes my wrist once, twice—like he’s memorizing the pulse.Kieran’s voice cuts through the chanting. "They’ve started the invocation."I don’t turn. Can’t. If I look at him—my brother, the stranger with my father’s smile—I’ll scream. Or sob. Or rip his throat out.The trees around us weep crim
Every step I take sends a shudder through the floorboards, groaning under my weight like they’re about to give way. Shadows twist along the walls, too sharp, too alive —watching. Claire’s ahead of me, her fingers brushing the doorframe of the cursed mirror room. She doesn’t look back. Doesn’t hesitate. That’s the worst part. She’s already decided. "Claire," I hiss, but my voice cracks, too loud in this tomb of whispers. She flinches, just once, before squaring her shoulders. "I can do this," she says, like she’s convincing herself. Like she’s begging me to believe it too. My stomach knots. She shouldn’t be here. Not after what happened last time. Not after Arthur — No. Don’t think about him. Not now. But the memory slithers in anyway: his voice, low and smooth as poisoned honey. "You can’t outrun blood, Lily." The dagger’s here. Somewhere. And the Council wants it. Wants her —my child. The thought sends a tremor through my hands, slick with sweat. Claire steps