Page 1 of Hellfire to Come
Chapter One
BROOKLYN
All I needed was to take one more breath.
“A breath is the genesis of existence,” I murmured, detached, as my thumb traced slow, aimless circles over my knee, somehow anchoring me to a reality I could scarcely recognize. It felt as though I would unravel completely, dissipate into oblivion, the moment that minimal contact ceased.
How did everything go so wrong, so fast? If I thought I was unprepared for the things that happened until this very moment, I sure as all hells was unprepared for the new inferno barreling toward me, ready to destroy me once and for all.
I needed to turn the helplessness I felt into anger so I could think, so I could go kill everyone who dared take my friend. Instead, here I was, like a tumbleweed rolling aimlessly through time and space with no certain destination in mind while shivers raked my frame at the most random intervals.
The tremor I felt in my bones was not fear, however, it was the echo of a soul on the brink of disintegration, haunted by the certainty that stillness meant vanishing. Because what good was I to anyone if all they did was pay for being near me.
So, with each breath, I tried to believe: believe in the lie that breath is a sacred link to my friend, a living thread connecting soul to soul, self to the universe. I rubbed at the soiled fabric of my pants again, each stroke a futile prayer to know that Alice was okay. That she was not broken the way I was. The way they broke me.
“Breath is life,” I commanded myself, hollow and stern, exhaling sharply until my breath clung to the mirror before me in a fragile fog. I’d stared into that mirror for days, after each empty-handed search for my friend, willing it to tell me where she was. Instead of answering, the mist warped my reflection into something grotesque, demonic, a visual echo of the emptiness clawing at my insides. A true picture of what I was.
Failure. Useless. Helpless.
A monster, just like those hurting Alice while I stared at myself doing nothing.
I could not find myself in the distorted reflection, nor could I find Alice anywhere in the city. The tether was severed, no matter how hard I reached or pleaded for a sign that she was near. So how could breath claim to be a bridge when I felt marooned?
If breath truly belonged to life, why did each inhale feel like erosion, like another layer of my being was flaking and drifting away, brittle as dried leaves crushed under a brutal heel?
And yet, all that remained of me was that motion. That breath was the only connection to my friend. Just one more, I urged myself. Perhaps, if I could summon another inhale, another fleeting act of will, I might wake, return to the moment before my world shattered.
“Let it be a dream,” I pleaded. A nightmare, more truthfully. But still… a dream.
Because I couldn’t look reality in the eye. I couldn’t accept that she’d just recovered from my brutal attack only to be thrown to the wolves who were ready to rip her to pieces, not without it tearing the last shred of sanity from my grasp. I couldn’t accept that Alice was gone, taken, ripped away because someone among us was a disgrace, a traitor. Because if I admitted that truth, I’d have to admit the rawest one of all: I failed her. As a guardian. As a friend. As a supposed protector of those I swore to keep safe.
Worse still…
I failed her as family.
And Alice was my family. She and Dominic were the only real family I had left.
That truth dropped inside me like lead into water, dragging with it my soul toward the gaping, cursed earth beneath me, eager to swallow my hollow shell whole. She wasn’t just another person with some invested interest in me. She was real. The one who saw me at my most pathetic—stripped of power, dignity, even hope—and didn’t flinch. She stood there when I was a mindless monster, believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. She never turned away from me. Not once. She risked her fragile mortal flesh so she could stand by my side with no questions asked regardless of her safety because, as she said, “that’s what friends do.”
She meant more to me than Veronica ever did. Just one more revelation stabbing like a nail in the coffin the Council was custom building for me. And what good did that do her? What good did I do her?
All the power I carried, all the damned gifts bestowed upon me from bloodlines…what were they worth if I couldn’t even shield her from the very monsters hunting my own dreams? Monsters that now walked freely while she paid with her human life for my mistakes.
Alice is not a human, the voice hissed in the back of my skull, sharp, sudden, enough to jolt my heart like a defibrillator.
No. She wasn’t human.
And that’s why she was taken. Why she was suffering somewhere beyond my reach. And all I could do was sit there, staring at a reflection that barely looked alive, while the universe ground on in a cruel, indifferent silence.
“Brooklyn?”
A whisper, almost lost in the hush between heartbeats was followed by the softest knock, a ghost’s caress against the polished wood. The voice as well was just a fracture in the silence, a desperate murmur from the only soul who dared reach for mine through the thundering of chaos within my being. My mate’s low voice trembled, not from anger, but from knowing. Knowing that the fortress I’d built from grief and guilt wasn’t made of stone but of glass, and still, he knocked, aching to be let in even though recognizing the price he would need to pay may be steep.
Dominic wasn’t merely asking to cross a door’s boundary, however. No, he was begging to step into the wreckage I had become, into the shadows and sorrow I wore like rusted armor, jagged and cruel. Armor I forged from despair, lined with the blades of my own guilt, and I knew, if he stepped too close, it would make him bleed.
And I… I was terrified of what he’d find inside.
So, I did what cowards do. I retreated further into the hollow shape of myself, sinking into the chair as if it might swallow me whole. I feigned absence, as though I were still out there, wandering the world for a friend I’d already lost to the night.
