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And whatever it was, it was still hungry. And a terrifying, sympathetic resonance stirred deep within me. I was hungry.
I was starving.
20. Remiel
The house opened like a gaping, festering wound—raw and exposed. It was as if a veil of mundane reality had been torn away, revealing a horrifying structure.
The walls seemed to bleed into the very fabric of memories, their forms fading into dim, dying embers. Shadows flickered and writhed like tormented ghosts. I brushed my fingers along a doorframe’s warped, decaying wood, the touch sending a jolt of dread through me.
I found myself projected into the house’s recent past. This time, the past embraced me with open skeletal arms, eager to share.
The sitting room materialized around me. It was how it had existed two, perhaps three, weeks ago. The furniture, what remained of it, was still in place, yet it seemed distorted, its edges charred and warped. Strange, disturbing symbols were seared deep into the wood. Their intricate alien designs whispered ancient forbidden secrets of rites best left unnamed.
Dozens of vials were lined up on the mantelpiece like grotesque, silent sentinels, each softly glowing with a captured mystical light. Hues of tarnished gold, bloodred, and bruised violet shimmered alongside an iridescent oily shade that seemed to pulsate.
Labels were handwritten in a precise script, a disturbing mix of celestial script and infernal shorthand. One vial bore an inscription that read “Faun—partial decay. Essence unstable.” Another, its contents a murky, swirling gray, read “Shifter/witch hybrid—rejected. Violent incompatibility.”
I swallowed an icy knot of dread. This wasn’t murder, at least not in the way mortals understood it. It was significantly colder and far more calculated. This was a procedure. An experiment.
And then I saw the seraph.
Serion.
He stood in the center of the room, robed in what had once been pristine white but was now torn and stained. Fresh bleeding ritual markings covered half of his exposed body. His magnificent wings, the mark of his high celestial rank, were bound tight against his back with thick crimson thread.
In one hand, he held a long slender syringe, its needle glinting in the dim light. With clinical precision, he turned to the person strapped to the stone table before him.
Lysanthe.
She was restrained but not with crude iron chains. No, bonds of light, of celestial energy, held her immobile. She wasn’t flayed or visibly broken. At first, she looked intact. But her aura was fractured, glitching like a failing projection, with colors warring. As I stepped closer, drawn by the horrific display, I noticed her skin shimmer with the violent rejection of foreign shadow essence being forced into her.
He didn’t just inject her though. He drew it back out, the liquid now glowing a violet light, and then turned to the workbench, where a half-finished mask lay—black velvet and cold metal. The essence was dipped onto the fabric, and the mask drank it up, its pulse stolen.
Her body shuddered on the table, her throat arched and a silent scream tearing from her. Her fingers twitched, nails elongating and darkening into claws that hadn’t been hers only moments before. And still, she made no sound. Because her own soul, her own essence, had been systematically torn into pieces and silenced.
Her eyes were open, blankly staring at the stained ceiling. One eye was unnaturally vibrant, almost violet in hue. The other was now a dead black.
And in the corner, watching with cold satisfaction, was Valden. The vampire sire held a silver ring up to the light. “Is it ready?”
Serion nodded. “It will strip the light from her veins until she is hollow enough to carry. Once she wears this, the angel dies and only the demon remains.”
I wanted to scream. To intervene. I tried to break the vision, to pull my consciousness back to the—
Remiel!
It wasn’t Cassia’s voice. Not fully. Not the voice I knew. This one was…different. It rasped through the very walls of the house like glass shards being dragged through a raw throat.
Remiel, the voice said again—now multiple layered voices. A chorus.
The syllables cracked against my mind, wrong in their shape, as if no mortal tongue had ever been meant to carry them. And beneath that fracture, I knew it. The sound was Cassia’s. Her shadows crying my name through the tear in the veil.
The cuffs I’d placed on her pulled, the tether searing my own wrists.
Cassia was in trouble.
I ripped myself out of the projection. My soul slammed back into my physical form after the transition, which was so violent it felt like being snapped back from the edge of orbit. The real world crashed in with a disorienting roar.
No longer quiet, the house was moaning in pain. The very walls seemed to vibrate with a contained psychic agony.
