Page 102 of Echoes From the Void

Through our bond, memories flow unbidden—his years isolated in Blackwood’s lab, my desperate attempts to protect everyone by staying distant. Both of us, always so afraid to truly belong.

“Deal,” I whisper, though we both know these are promises we’ll likely never keep.

The void beckons, its darkness deeper than any natural shadow. Our ethereal guardians—wolves and foxes—tightentheir protective circle as corrupted essence rises to meet us. The air shimmers where our powers merge, light and shadow in perfect balance.

No more words needed. We face the abyss hand in hand, my shadows twining with his light. Below us, corruption writhes with ancient hunger. Above us, everyone we love sleeps unknowing.

We step forward.

We fall.

We choose.

Together.

As we were always meant to be.

Even at the end.

Especially at the end.

The void rises to claim us, but for the first time, we’re not afraid. We have each other. We have purpose. We have love worth sacrificing everything to protect.

My shadows merge with his light as we descend into darkness.

Together.

Complete.

Whole at last.

Chapter 35

Matteo

Wrong.

The word hits my consciousness before I’m fully awake, a primal instinct that makes my new fangs descend into killing length. The pack bonds pulse with warning, but it’s the scent that truly wakes me—or rather, the absence of it. Frankie’s familiar essence, the one my predator nature has cataloged asmate/alpha/protect, is hours cold.

I surge upward, dislodging Leo who had sprawled partly across me in sleep. My enhanced senses catalog the room in seconds: the lingering warmth in the sheets where she should be, the fading trace of her shadows like smoke in the air, the way her guardian wolf flickers in the corner like a dying flame. My shadows rise instinctively, searching for their mate.

“Matteo?” Leo’s voice carries rare tension as he wakes to my movement. Through our bond, his usual sunshine dims with growing alarm. Beside him, Bishop’s eyes snap open with Guardian alertness while Dorian’s frost spreads in agitated patterns across the ceiling.

“She’s gone.” The words emerge as more growl than speech, my control slipping as fear wars with fury. My fangslengthen further, predator instincts screaming to hunt/find/claim. “They’re both-”

The foundation shudders beneath us, cutting off my words. Through our bond, I catch fragments of Frankie’s emotions—determination, love, and something that tastes like acceptance. Like goodbye.

“The void,” Bishop says, already moving with precise efficiency. His Guardian marks pulse as he retrieves weapons that probably shouldn’t be kept by the bed. My enhanced vision catches the slight tremor in his hands—the only sign of his carefully controlled panic. “They’ve gone to-”

“No.” The word rips from my throat as I launch toward the door, shadows writhing with protective fury. But before any of us reach it, reality itself seems to buckle.

The walls groan. Glass shatters. Through the broken windows, the pre-dawn air carries a scent that makes my predator nature recoil—ancient power, neither shadow nor light, but something older than both. Something that makes my new fangs ache with instinctive recognition.

Then we see it.

The shadow beast emerges from the darkness like a piece of night gaining sentience. Its form shifts between solid and smoke, larger than any corrupted creature we’ve encountered. But its eyes...

My enhanced vision catches every detail of those eyes—depthless pools of knowledge that no mere beast should possess. They fix on me with terrifying intelligence, and something in my blood, in my newly awakened predator nature, recognizes what we’re seeing.

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