Page 63 of The Madness Within

The command was simple.

But the moment it left his mouth, the air thickened like smoke before a firestorm. The ground trembled, not from the wolves, but from something older answering the call of blood.

Even the trees recoiled, their branches creaking like bones in the wind.

The werewolves whimpered, tails tucked, but didn’t flee. Not yet. They knew. Somewhere beneath all that fur and snarling bravado, theyknew.

They weren’t just facing death. They were facing Dorian Vale unleashed.

I would finally bear witness to the monster he claimed to be.

He stepped forward, slow and deliberate, as if savoring the inevitability of their end. Moonlight sliced across his face, catching on the twin crescents of fang peeking past his lip. His eyes, no longer human, no longer merciful, burned a deep, ancient red.

A predator’s gaze. A god’s rage.

Then the shadows moved.

They slithered from the cracks in the earth, wrenched themselves from the trees, thick and black like oil given life. They obeyed his will. Theywerehis will.

His shadows stretched and split into antlers and claws. His eyes burned silver. They lashed out, coiling around the first wolf with bone-snapping force. It shrieked, a sound that didn’t belong to a beast but something much more human, and then the flesh tore.

Dorian didn’t blink.

His hand carved through the air, and the shadows obeyed, slicing the creature open from throat to belly in one clean, horrific stroke. Blood sprayed in arcs. Steam rose from the open carcass.

Then it happened.

The fur melted away. Bones cracked and twisted. The creature's body twitched violently, and within seconds, what laid twitching in a puddle of its own blood… was a man.

Naked. Young. Eyes wide. Mouth still caught mid-howl.

The other two hesitated, but it was too late. They lunged in desperation, not strategy. Dorian welcomed them.

The first met his claws, no longer metaphorical. He caught it mid-leap, drove his arm through its ribcage, and ripped out something wet and pulsing.

The wolf crumpled in on itself, convulsing as it began to shrink and shift, snout retracting, limbs curling, fur receding. A boy, barely older than twenty, laid gasping on the forest floor, ribs shattered, heart still clutched in Dorian’s hand.

The third didn’t get far. The shadows caught it by the throat, suspending it in the air like a doll. “Mercy,” it gurgled, words barely human as the change began too early, skin rippling, fur falling out in patches, bones rearranging under its flesh.

Dorian stepped closer, his voice like frost. “You sold your soul the moment you hunted what’s mine.”

He drove his boot into the wolf-man’s chest, pinning him to the earth as the shadows carved the last of the beast from the body. What was left, bare, broken, barely alive, was a man.

All three were.

They hadn’t been just wolves. They were monsters, shifted mid-form, spines snapping, claws still twitching. Werewolves. Real.

And now?

Ravaged. Human. Mortal again. And every last one of them was dead.

Dorian stood over the carnage, slick with blood, heart still pulsing in his palm. There were no more howls. Only silence, and the stench of death reclaiming what never should’ve lived.

Dorian’s gaze turned to me. Cold. Livid. “Do you have any idea what the hell you’ve just done?” His voice was low, a growl that made my skin prickle, but I couldn’t look away. His anger burned through me, but there was something else beneath it. Something darker.

I stood, shakily, watching him with wide eyes. “I had to get out.”

“Youdon’tget to leave, Ember. Not like this,” he snapped, stepping toward me. “You think this is a game? That you can just run away without consequences?”

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