16. The wolf’s killer shadow

The laboratory didn’t just smell of chemicals; it tasted of ancient rot and artificial lightning. As the Ghost Wolves—those twitching, violet-veined abominations of my father’s desperate making—scrambled out of their shattered glass coffins, the temperature in the room plummeted. They didn’t move like the wolves of the Roux pack. There was no grace in their limbs, no ancestral intelligence in their eyes. They moved with a jerky, stop-motion horror, their bones snapping and resetting with every lunging step, as if their bodies were rejecting the very muscles that drove them forward.

    I felt Girard’s hand on the small of my back, a firm, grounding heat before he stepped forward to meet the first wave. It was a silent promise, a tactile anchor in a world that had suddenly gone mad.

    “Stay behind me, Arielle!” he roared, his voice already losing its human cadence, vibrating with the subsonic frequency of the beast.

    I didn’t have time to be the damsel. I had been a Monet long before I was a Roux, and the daughter of the Syndicate didn’t hide in the shadows. A Ghost Wolf, its skin so translucent I could see the purple sludge pumping through its distended veins, lunged at me from a side corridor. It was a blur of gray fur and jagged bone. I ducked, the air from its passing chilling my skin like a winter breeze. I didn’t reach for my gun—bullets were useless against something that didn’t need a central nervous system to function. Instead, I reached for the silver-flecked combat knife Girard had strapped to my thigh before we left the estate.

    I spun on my heel, driving the blade into the creature’s thigh. The silver should have burned it, but the creature didn’t scream. It didn’t even bleed red. A thick, viscous purple sludge seeped from the wound, and the creature turned its head 180 degrees—a sickening, unnatural crack echoing off the walls—to snap its serrated teeth at my arm. I felt the heat of its breath, a foul-smelling vapor that smelled like copper and formaldehyde.

    “Arielle, drop!” Girard’s command vibrated in my skull through the Lien de Sang.

    I hit the floor just as Girard’s massive, partially shifted form collided with the beast. He didn’t just bite; he tore. He was a whirlwind of black fur and white-lightning aura, his claws shredding the Ghost Wolf with a savagery that was terrifying to behold. He was vaporizing the purple sludge with the sheer intensity of his Alpha energy before the poison could even touch his skin. But for every one he dismantled, two more stepped out of the shadows of the cooling vats.

    Dante Moretti stood on the observation balcony above us, his hands clutching the railing with a white-knuckled grip, laughing with a manic, high-pitched glee that made my skin crawl.

    “You see, Girard? Nature is a slow, clumsy designer! Science is the true Apex!” Dante’s voice cracked with madness. “You are a relic of the old world—a beautiful antique! These creatures are the future of the Moretti name! They don’t need loyalty, and they don’t feel pain!”

    I looked past the swarm of monsters to the center of the room. My father—the thing that used to be Marcel Monet—wasn’t moving. He stood amidst the carnage like a hollow statue, his violet eyes fixed on me with a terrifying, blank intensity. Through the Lien de Sang, our shared blood was screaming. It was a high-pitched frequency of wrongness that made my ears bleed. Because we shared a genetic code, I could feel the rot inside him. He wasn’t just a monster; he was a black hole, sucking the sensory life out of the room to fuel his synthetic heart.

    “Dad, stop this!” I screamed, firing my Glock into the chest of a lunging guard to buy myself a second of air. “The serum is eating you! Look at your hands! You’re disappearing!”

    “Death is just a limitation of the weak, Arielle,” the thing rasped. The voice didn’t come from his throat; it seemed to resonate from the air around him, a discordant echo of a man I once loved. It was the sound of a thousand needles scratching against a record.

    Marcel stepped forward, his body flickering like a glitching hologram. He moved with a speed that defied the laws of physics—a speed that made Girard’s supernatural agility look like a crawl. In a blur of gray shadow and violet light, he was across the room. He struck Girard with a backhand that sent the Alpha flying through a reinforced glass partition. The sound of the glass shattering was like a bomb going off.

    “Girard!”

    The bond flared with a sudden, agonizing spike of pain. I felt the impact in my own ribs, the air leaving my lungs as if I had been hit by a freight train. I scrambled toward the wreckage of the glass, shards cutting into my palms, but a hand clamped around my throat before I could reach him.

    Marcel lifted me off the floor with one hand. His skin felt like cold, wet parchment, devoid of any human warmth. Up close, I could see the violet veins pulsing under his eyes, tracing jagged paths toward his brain. He looked at me, and for a split second, I saw a flicker of the man who used to read me stories in the library of our Paris estate. But it was quickly replaced by the void.

    “You were always the best part of me, Arielle,” he whispered, his breath smelling of ozone and decay. “The only pure thing I ever touched. That’s why your marrow is the final key. Once I have the stabilization from your blood, the instability ends. I will be the permanent Apex. I will be the God of the New World.”

    I clawed at his wrist, my boots kicking uselessly at his chest, which felt as solid as lead. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs were burning, my vision tunneling into a single point of violet light. “You… have… nothing… left,” I choked out, my fingers searching for the obsidian pendant.

    From the wreckage of the glass behind us, a low, subsonic growl began to build. It wasn’t the sound of a wounded man. It was the sound of the earth breaking open. A white light began to glow from beneath the shards, growing brighter and hotter until the very air began to sing with the frequency of the stars.

    The Apex was rising, and this time, he wasn’t bringing mercy. He was bringing the end of the Monet line.