Page 14 of Echoes From the Void

A smaller tremor ripples through the room, but the combined presence of wolves and foxes seems to cushion it. Through the window, I can see the shadows in the hallway behaving normally for the first time in hours.

“You know,” Finn says, eyes drifting closed as his foxes create a blanket of starlight while my wolves stand guard, “when I imagined finding my twin, I didn’t expect to gain quite such a... extensive family.”

“Yeah, well.” I watch Leo try to demonstrate proper shadow wolf etiquette to Luna while Bishop corrects his terminology, and a fox keeps replacing Luna’s pen with little sticks of light. The room holds steady, protected by our combined power. “Apparently I have a type.”

“Oh?” Finn’s voice carries knowing amusement.

“Yeah. Complicated, overprotective, and slightly terrifying.”

“Says the girl with the shadow wolves,” Matteo comments without looking up from his mother’s now-stable medical charts.

Looking around at my strange, wonderful, complicated family, I can’t help but smile. The tremors have stopped completely where we are, though I can feel them continuing elsewhere in the building. But here, in this moment, everything feels... balanced.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Chapter 6

Matteo

My reflectionin the medical wing window shows shadow marks spreading across my skin like spilled ink, darker against my brown skin in the fluorescent lighting. The sterile hospital scent mixes with antiseptic and something else—corruption, hovering just at the edge of my enhanced senses. Inside the room, my mother’s voice rises and falls in familiar healing chants, the Hindi syllables that once soothed my childhood nightmares now a stark contrast to the violence itching under my skin.

The midnight corridor feels too small, too contained for what I’m becoming. Every sound echoes—the steady beep of monitors, the hum of machinery, the soft whisper of my mother’s sari as she moves between patients. My new senses catch everything, cataloging threats and exits with predatory precision.

“Matteo,” Leo calls softly from his position by the stairs. He’s been my anchor since high school, always knowing when the darkness rises too close to the surface. His familiar scent—sunshine and citrus and something uniquely him—cuts through the hospital sterility. “You’re doing the thing again.”

“What thing?” I force my fingers to uncurl from fists, watching shadow marks ripple across my knuckles like dark water. My jaw aches strangely, like something trying to reshape itself from within.

“The I’m-about-to-murder-someone-but-I-can’t-because-my-mom’s-watching thing.” He steps closer, his presence a warm counterpoint to my growing cold rage. His shoulder brushes mine in a gesture as familiar as breathing. “It’s kind of hot, not gonna lie, but also slightly terrifying.”

“Only slightly?” I try to joke, but it comes out more like a growl.

“Well, you know me,” Leo grins, though his eyes remain alert. “I like a little danger with my morning coffee.”

A growl builds in my throat as another wave of foreign scent hits me. Someone doesn’t belong here.

Through the observation window, I watch my mother’s hands glow with healing energy as she works. Her sari sleeve slips, revealing the henna patterns she always wears—designs for peace, for healing, for gentle things that seem further from my nature with each passing day. The same patterns she used to draw on my palms when the darkness first stirred in me, trying to guide my power toward healing.

It didn’t work then. I’m not sure it ever could have.

The intruder’s scent grows stronger, carrying hints of chemical corruption that make my new fangs itch beneath my gums. Valerie’s spy, has to be. But I can’t leave the twins unprotected to hunt. Not with Finn still unstable and Frankie drained from their power merging. The predator in me paces against its cage, demanding action.

My fingers trace the ghostly remains of old henna patterns on my palm—protection, peace, healing. My mother’s attempts to gentle my nature. But watching her in Delhi, the way she’dhandled threats to her clinic... maybe she wasn’t trying to change me after all.

A shift occurs inside me—a realization, a decision. I straighten, my senses sharpening with new purpose.

“Your aura, beta,” my mother says without turning, her hands steady over Finn’s chest where light pulses erratically. Her wedding bangles chime softly with each movement, a sound that used to mean safety in my childhood. “It grows darker.”

“There’s someone here who shouldn’t be,” I reply in Hindi, the language of home feeling strange around what seems to be... fangs? The sudden sharp points against my tongue should probably concern me more than they do, but somehow they feel right. Like my body is finally catching up to what I’ve always been. “They carry corruption.”

“Then protect us,” she says simply, continuing her healing chant. But I catch her quick glance at my changed features, her healer’s mind already analyzing what I’m becoming. “But remember—violence is not the only way.” Her voice carries the same tone she used when I was ten, after I broke a bully’s nose for hurting Leo.

“Says the woman who once threw a scalpel at a would-be thief in her clinic,” I mutter, still in Hindi. The memory is crystal clear: her perfect aim, the way she’d pinned his sleeve to the wall while continuing to bandage a child’s arm. Not a hair out of place, not a break in her healing rhythm. “You could have killed him.”

“I aimed for his sleeve, not his throat.” Her lips twitch, though her hands remain steady over Finn. “And I had excellent reason to believe he was after the children’s medicine. Just as you have excellent reason to protect your pack.”

Leo shifts to stand beside me, his natural warmth cutting through the icy fury building in my chest.

“That’s because she likes to pretend it never happened,” I tell him, grateful for his attempt at lightening the mood. “Very un-healer-like behavior.”

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