Ethan's eyes snapped open. The world was too bright, too loud. Dust motes floated like galaxies in the slanted light filtering through moth-eaten curtains, each particle a screaming star. The scent of mildew and dried blood clogged his throat. He gagged, scrambling backward until his spine hit a cold stone wall. His hands pale, veined with blue and trembled as he pressed them to his face. Too cold. Too sharp.
Selene lounged in a high-backed chair across the room, her legs draped over one armrest. She twirled a glass vial filled with thick crimson liquid between her fingers. "Rise and shine, little hybrid," she purred. "Hungry?"
The word hungry didn't capture it. It was a furnace in his gut, a razor dragged across his veins. Ethan's gaze locked on the vial. He could hear the blood inside swish, swish like a heartbeat.
"What did you do to me?" he snarled, voice cracking.
Selene rolled her eyes. "I gave you a gift. One you're too stubborn to appreciate." She tossed the vial. It clattered to the floor at his feet, rolling in a half-circle. "Drink. Or let the hunger gnaw you hollow."
Ethan kicked it away. The glass shattered against the wall, blood oozing down the peeling wallpaper. "I'm not your pet."
"No," she said, rising in a fluid motion. "Pets are housebroken."
---
Selene's lair was a decaying Victorian mansion trapped in a perpetual twilight. Ethan stumbled through corridors lined with portraits whose eyes followed him, their subjects' faces blurred as if someone had scrubbed them from history. A grandfather clock ticked backward in a parlor, its hands shivering at his approach.
Get out. Get out. Get out.
He found a grand staircase, its banister splintered and claw-marked. The front door loomed below, barred by a rusted iron latch. Ethan hurled himself at it, his newfound speed sending him crashing into the wood shoulder-first. Pain exploded through his collarbone and then vanished, his body knitting itself back together in seconds.
"Charming effort," Selene drawled from the upper landing. "But you'll need more than enthusiasm to break a Silverthorn ward."
Ethan followed her gaze. A symbol glowed faintly on the door; a snarling wolf encircled by thorns.
"Where the hell am I?"
"Home," she said, descending the stairs. "Or close enough. This place exists in the shadows of your precious city. A pocket stitched between what's real and what's… hungrier."
She brought him a prisoner.
The man was thin, greasy-haired, his wrists bound by iron cuffs. "Please," he begged as Selene shoved him into the foyer. "I didn't see anything, I swear....."
"Ethan," Selene said, ignoring him, "meet dinner."
The hunger surged. Ethan's vision tinged red. The man's pulse thundered in his ears; ba-boom, ba-boom.
No. No. No.
He turned to flee, but his body moved faster than his conscience. One moment he was across the room; the next, he had the man pinned against the wall, fangs bared. The thief's breath reeked of stale beer and fear.
"Do it," Selene whispered. "Feel what you are."
Ethan's teeth grazed the man's jugular and the world stopped.
A pulse of violet light erupted from Ethan's chest. The thief froze mid-scream, his skin mottling gray as if he'd been dipped in concrete. Ethan staggered back, horrified.
"Nocturne Magic," Selene breathed, her amusement sharpening. "A parlor trick, but a start."
---
The wards shattered at midnight.
One moment, the mansion was silent; the next, the front door exploded inward in a shower of splinters and blue flame. A woman stood in the wreckage, her hooded cloak billowing in a wind that didn't exist. The crescent pendant glowed in her raised hand Ethan's pendant.
"Moira," Selene hissed. "Still playing hero?"
The witch lowered her hood, revealing a sharp face framed by braids the color of gunmetal. "And you're still hoarding strays. Let him go, Selene."
Ethan's head throbbed. Images flashed; Moira's face, younger, kneeling beside a hospital bed. His mother's hospital bed.
"You… knew her," he choked out.
Moira's gaze softened, just for a heartbeat. "The Coven can teach you control. She..." she glared at Selene"...will teach you cruelty."
Selene's laugh was a dagger on glass. "You think your pretty rituals will save him? He's Duskborn. The Veil bleeds where he walks."
A howl cut through the night.
They came in a swarm of smoke and teeth; shadow hounds with eyes like dying embers. Behind them strode Malachi, Varek's enforcer. His armor was obsidian, his face a porcelain mask cracked down the middle.
"The abomination belongs to the Court," he intoned.
Selene moved.
Ethan didn't see the fight, only fragments: Selene's claws raking across Malachi's chest, splattering black ichor; Malachi's sword, etched with witch runes, singing past her throat; the hounds dissolving into smoke when Moira hurled bolts of cerulean fire.
"Ethan!" Moira grabbed his arm, her grip iron. "The mirror...now!"
She dragged him to a full-length mirror framed in thorns. His reflection wavered, showing not the mansion, but a dim room lined with books.
"Step through!"
He hesitated, glancing back. Selene and Malachi were a blur of violence, the mansion crumbling around them.
"Go!" Moira shoved him.
---
The safehouse was a bookstore that defied physics. Shelves spiraled into darkness, stacked with grimoires bound in flesh and poetry collections that whispered as Ethan passed. A stained-glass window depicted a wolf howling at a fractured moon, its light painting the room in kaleidoscope shadows.
"Where are we?" Ethan rasped.
"Somewhere even the Court's hounds can't sniff," Moira said, brewing tea over a floating flame. "For now."
Ethan collapsed into an armchair. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. "What am I?"
"A problem," Moira said bluntly. "One the Coven should've anticipated." She nodded to a grimoire on the desk. Its glass cover reflected Ethan's face and behind him, the faint image of a woman with amber and violet eyes.
Aurelia mouthed two words: "Find me."