All Chapters of Shadows and First Blood: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The sea was quiet again. Too quiet. That’s how he knew she’d gotten away.Matrix stood at the end of the ruined pier with the waves gnawing the boards beneath his boots, salt mist burning the cuts along his cheek. The fire from the docks had eaten itself out; only the smell remained—diesel, ash, and the faint sweetness of burnt paper. Finch’s ledger had gone up like scripture.He should have felt relief. He felt rabid.Every muscle ached to move. Hunt. Bite. Finish.He pressed his hand to his shoulder—half-healed, half-rotting—and hissed when his fingers found the bullet crease. The medics had offered morphine. He’d refused. Pain was focus; pain kept him facing the right direction.

Chapter 1 — The Quiet MonthsIreland didn’t feel like safety. It felt like a pause—wet, green, endless.Three months. Maybe four. I stopped counting after the second storm knocked out the power and the only thing left to do was listen to the wind try to peel the roof off.Nik’s contacts in Dublin had kept their word. He’d sent me north to stay with Niall and Maeve Byrne, a vampire couple who’d stopped pretending to be human sometime around the famine and didn’t care to start again. They lived on the edge of a cliff outside Donegal, in a house that creaked like it remembered other centuries.

The longhouse didn’t welcome me so much as assess me.Heat rolled out first—peat smoke and iron—then the pressure under it, the low hum of layered wards like a hive behind walls. Every beam had been carved and argued with. Every threshold wore iron nails set in patterns that meant math to someone and threat to everyone else.Lucian Daire crossed the room like the place recognized his stride. Four witches lifted their heads from the big table and looked at me the way working dogs look at a new loud noise—ready, unimpressed, listening for trouble.“Brought a vampire past the line?” said the woman by the hearth. Close-cropped hair, bone bracelets, hands dusted in flour and ash. “That’s brave or stupid.”“Useful,&rd

Ireland smelled like rot and religion. The kind of place that buried its ghosts instead of burning them.Matrix stood at the edge of a broken dock, rain pouring sideways off the Atlantic. His boots were soaked, his jacket stuck to his back, and the salt wind clawed through every old scar he’d earned on the run from the Order.He’d thought he’d hate the silence. Turns out he hated the way it listened.A gull screamed overhead, but he barely noticed. His mind was fixed on the coast beyond the fog — the cliffs, the woods, the faint trace of her. Silver.Three months gone, and she still

Matrix’s POVThe wardline pulsed behind me, low and steady, like a second heartbeat I didn’t want. I spat blood into the gorse and watched it bead bright in the rain before the mud swallowed it.Shoulder burned, thigh leaking, nose broken. Every breath whistled. Silver’s blade had kissed deep enough to hum. I’d bled across three continents for less cause, but she always made it personal.Wind from the Atlantic hit cold enough to sting. The hedges hissed and shifted, making corridors that didn’t exist a minute ago. Ireland—alive in the worst way. I pushed through until the ground dropped toward a ruin crouched above the bog: one tower, one roofline, everything else chewed to bone. Shelter.