Page 19 of Shadow

Itwasme.

There was no separating the man from the beast. But watching her that night, I realized she was more dangerous than I first thought. Not because she was a threat to my people, but because she reminded me of something I had lost long ago: A connection to my humanity.

The question was, could I trust her? Or would I have to kill her before she learned too much?

I had studied Shadow Warrior history with smoldering resentment.

My childhood had been ripped away, replaced with a dark cage of anger and shame. I hadn’t cared where we had come from or what had made us different.

I hated it. And I hated my father for forcing his monstrous heritage on me. It was his fault that I carried a beast inside, something I considered grotesque and unnatural.

When puberty hit, Beast started making his presence known.

My hatred turned inward. I despised my fucking self more than anything else. I hadn’t been some comic book superhero. I had been a freak, constantly suppressing the urge to let the monster out. I even had to limit eating meat to keep Beast subdued.

For a growing boy, it was a cruel punishment. I was always hungry, gnawingly, desperately hungry. That feeling haunted me every waking hour, and even now, as a man, I had a thing about food.

I never wanted to feel that relentless, empty ache again.

From the moment my father revealed our secret, I became impossible to reason with. Anger had poured out of me like venom. I couldn’t speak without a sharp edge to my words. When I couldn’t find the right ones, I let my fists or claws do the talking.

I destroyed my room in one fit of rage and obliterated the kitchen in another. I ran away twice, thinking I could escape what I was.

My life hadn’t started to change until the day my uncle arrived.

My father, worn down by months of my rebellion, turned to his brother for help. Greystone hadn’t lectured me or tried to break my anger. Instead, he taught me to embrace Beast.

He believed our time in hiding would end sooner rather than later. While my father clung to the old ways of secrecy and self-restraint, Greystone began quietly reshaping the Shadow Warrior legacy.

For years, he had worked to change the lives of young, dysfunctional Shadow Warriors like me. He had seen what the older generation refused to see. We couldn’t keep pretending to be something we weren’t.

Even when the world started to crumble, when bombs reduced cities to ash and the first hellhounds tore through humanity, my father still tried to hold on to his quiet farmer’s life.

Greystone, on the other hand, had been preparing. He had been training Shadow Warriors as young as twelve, teaching them to fight and embrace the beasts within.

He prepared me too.

I excelled under his guidance, learning to train others, to lead boys through the same transformation I once feared. When the war escalated and humankind faced annihilation, my father and the older men who suppressed their inner beasts for generations finally stepped forward.

I hadn’t agreed with sending them to the front lines. They hadn’t been ready for war. But I respected Greystone’s decisions. He believed in their strength, even after decades of denial.

They went to fight, to defend humanity, while the rest of us trained for one singular purpose: to survive. No matter the cost, no matter what happened to humankind, Greystone made sure the Shadow Warriors would endure.

We lost countless Shadow Warriors, but my uncle had been right. Our survival always depended on our ability to adapt. It was in our blood, ingrained in every cell.

I didn’t fight alongside humans until the final two years of the war. My father died not long after I joined the ranks of Shadow Warriors on the battlefield. My uncle survived the hellhounds, only to be killed in the aftermath, during humanity’s betrayal when they tried to contain us.

To say I hated them didn’t even begin to cover it. There was no human word strong enough to express the depths of my contempt.

My attention shifted to Marinah. Her expression flickered with something I couldn’t place, and before I could stop myself, the words spilled out.

“How badly do you want to live?”

Her face froze in shock, but I didn’t give her time to answer.

“I don’t trust the Federation, and I have no idea why they sentyouof all people to try to smooth things over.”

She straightened in her chair, the gold flecks in her dark eyes burning brighter, but I held up a hand, cutting off her protest before it began.

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