Page 17 of Veil of Death and Shadow

Suddenly, his eyes latched onto mine, holding my stare for a fraction of a second. I shook my head, as if to dispel him, then tugged Sora back with me.

We ran, as fast as we could, not even stopping to discuss where we were heading.

We didn’t slow down, didn’t speak, until we were back at Frank’s.

I leaned against the familiar gray wall of the diner, my head pressing into it as I fought to catch my breath.

Sora bent over and vomited.

I grabbed her hair, fighting back the urge to do the same.

“Holy shit.” She panted, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “That was fucking unbelievable.” She glanced up at me. “We should call somebody, shouldn’t we?”

“Who? And what do we even say? That we just saw a man kill a werewolf?” I shook my head, still not fully believing what we’d just seen myself. “The phones are down anyway, right?”

She stood up. Her face was pale and covered in a sheen of sweat, her eyes sparkling and alive and so at odds with the deathly pallor of her skin. “The other one. Do you think—” A low, humorless chuckle ripped from her mouth as she leaned her head back against Frank’s door. “That couldn’t have been a vampire, right? I mean, that’s absolutely?—”

“And the third guy?” I pressed my thumb against my ring, twisting it, fighting to find a word to describe him—cataloging through every sci-fi and fantasy film I’d ever seen. “What was with him? The way the other two literally went through him—like he was just air?”

Sora’s brows furrowed.

“I mean, maybe he was a vampire too? Who knows what the hell kind of rules govern them, or?—”

“Mars,” she studied me, the adrenaline in her eyes fading into concern. “There were just two of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was no third guy.”

3

MAREENA

Present Day, Six Years after The Undoing

For as much as things were changed by The Undoing, as the world had come to call it, they also mostly stayed the same.

Six years ago, the world split into two.

Or maybe more than two.

To be honest, the details are still largely unclear. Pundits wasted their time in a desperate frenzy trying to nail down the specifics that seemed to be forever out of reach—like a goal post that moved every time you got too close to it.

One thing they all agreed on, though . . . there'd been what could only be described as a tearing of realms—the world as we knew it had expanded into . . . well, more.

Scientists didn’t have answers. Religious leaders and politicians pretended to.

New cults and religious factions started sprouting up everywhere. Some of them practically run the city now.

And it wasn’t just in The United States, it was the entire world.

A portal to hell (as some conspiracy theorists had dubbed it) had been opened, and the supernatural world had been unleashed. Some called it a demon realm, others were convinced it was an alternate universe, others swore it was the mythical land of Faerie.

I didn’t care much about arguing over the semantics. There hardly seemed a point.

All that mattered was that overnight, magic seeped into the everyday, sometimes even into people, rewiring life as we knew it entirely.

The few humans affected were changed in small, often meaningless ways. Sora and I knew someone who'd developed an unexplainable inability to walk in a straight line. But only on Tuesdays. Their Tuesday afternoon hikes through the neighborhood became nothing more than a strange, twisted meandering, as if guided by a force they couldn't control. Every other day of the week—no problem.

---