Chapter Six

--- Germaine

Two weeks.

It’s been two weeks since three strangers walked into my bakery and rewired my life. Two weeks of my world tilting on its axis so fast I almost vomit. Storm sleeps in the sitting room sometimes, mouth moving as if reciting prayers to gods I don’t know; his eyes flare red like furnace coals in the dark.

The golem raids my pantry and eats raw onions like candy. Keratin keeps me on a regimen that makes my calves throb in a way baking never did.

I haven’t been to the bakery more than twice in that time. Interviews and a handful of repair jobs—Maria’s holding the fort, bless her. Mostly I spend my days outside, learning to move like a threat might actually come for me at any second. Which, if the news reports are to be believed, it will.

Keratin’s silhouette cuts the yard in half—always a blade of shadow, always a judge. He holds his sword in one hand like it’s nothing, the other tucked behind his back. He glides forward and back in a pattern I’m supposed to read like a map; I keep missing the turns. Sweat streams down my spine and stings my eyes. I blink the salt away and keep trying.

“Ow!” The sword slips from my fingers when he clips my arm with the flat. It’s not hard; it’s training. My skin smarting, I rub the spot. “Why’d you do that?”

“You were thinking of yourself,” he says matter-of-factly. “Not your opponent.”

I want to argue. I want to tell him I’m thinking of the bakery ledger, of Maria’s tired smile, of the stupid way Oliver smelled that night—cologne and promises. But the word “opponent” sticks like a cold stone in my mouth, so I swallow it.

Keratin stretches out on the grass like he’s always done this, arms propped, eyes half-closed like a cat. He looks so untouchable I almost resent him for it. “You better be ready for Storm,” he says after a beat. “I have been taking it easy.”

“Is that your version of a joke?” I pant, wiping my face with the heel of my hand. Thirty minutes and my legs feel like lead.

His smile is a small, private thing that disappears too quickly. “Storm will not.”

Of course he won’t.

Storm appears as if conjured by the mention—buff, scarred, the same animal skin he wore when he and the others appeared in my bakery, what he has on now.

He moves with an animal grace even when he stands still. “Show me what you’ve learned,” he says. His voice rolls over me like a warm tide.

I hate that my stomach flutters. I hate that my hands tighten around the sword as if the wood could anchor me to something true. “Bring it on,” I say, and mean it, because standing here and turning away is no longer an option.

He lunges before I’m ready. The world drops. The grass slaps against my cheek. He offers a palm and I refuse it—with stubbornness, with pride—and get up on my own. “You cheated.”

He grins like a wolf. “Fair. Again.”

I smear dirt beneath my eyes, warrior paint, a ridiculous habit I pick off some TV survival show but it steadies me. When his weight shifts, I close my eyes and listen—footfall, breath, the soft whisper of fabric. Keratin’s voice loops in my head: Become one with your opponent. Anticipate, don’t react.

I move.

The blade finds its mark. I feel a sting more than anything—a shallow cut along his leg. I watch in stunned silence as a white liquid beads and runs from the wound, luminous and strange, like pearl milk.

My mouth goes dry. “Why is it white?” I blurt. “Is that… infection?”

Storm brushes the dirt from his leg and laughs softly. “It’s not red like yours because I am not only human.”

Keratin is already moving toward us, closer than I expected. The look on his face changes—something like weight, like recognition. “Each clan bleeds its color,” he says quietly, reverent and sad. “The moon goddess made it that way. White bleeds white, blue bleeds blue—black bleeds black. The colors mark us.”

“The colors—” The notion lands awkwardly in my chest like an ill-fitting garment. “Wait. You’re telling me you’re wolf people. Like… literal wolves?”

Storm’s smile is sharp and lonely. “I was born of the White Wolf clan.” He looks at Keratin and it’s like the air between them tightens. “Keratin is my brother.”

There is a breath of something between the men then—memory or regret—and Keratin moves before I can process it. He drops to his knees and pulls Storm into him. It’s not theatrical; it’s bone-deep yearning and apology and relief all wrapped in one. They hold each other like two halves finding their whole again.

My stomach lurches in an uncomfortable way. I feel like an intruder in a private ritual, and I step away.

That night, over food that tastes like Nirvana and wine that feels like fire in my throat, they tell me about the clans—about the world I didn’t know existed right under the thrum of ours.

“There are four great clans,” Keratin says, his hands steady as he lifts his cup. “Each keeps five mages—five women who guard a clan’s knowledge, their visions, their protection.”

“What do you mean—mages?” I ask. My spoon clinks the plate. The word sparks a small panic.

“Female,” Storm answers, voice soft. “Always female. The priestesses. They are chosen young. They never mate. They never lie with a man. By law and by fate we keep them untainted so their sight is pure.”

A part of me recoils at the austerity, at the price of isolation. “They stay single… forever?”

Storm’s face is all patience and sadness. “They live long lives—two, three, even thousands of years by some accounts. When their time comes, they pass their power to another worthy soul. It’s the only way the magic renews, the only way we preserve what keeps our people safe.”

“And if they… sleep with a man?” My voice is smaller than I intend. The question feels raw and improper.

Storm’s eyes darken. “Their visions snap shut. Their magic goes silent. We call it being tainted.” He spits the word like a curse. “The power flees. Once gone, sometimes it cannot be recovered.”

Keratin’s jaw tightens. There is a brittle edge to him—something old and unhealed. “That is why our mages are both revered and guarded like holy things. Their choices—our survival.”

My head spins with the story like perfume. Priestesses living for centuries, passing power like an heirloom. The thought of a life that long, a love never allowed—my chest constricts at the loneliness of it.

“Find a mate in our world and you become stronger,” Storm adds, switching the weight. “Mates bond like teeth to bone. You hear each other. Feel each other. You can share thought and hunger and memory across distances.”

A warm, invasive thought creeps into my mind at that—the idea of someone hearing my smallest, most stupid comforts—then retreats immediately, unwanted. My life here is made of small things: burnt crusts, Maria’s laugh, the dull ache of numbers in the ledger. Will a bond like that—one that confers power—rip me open or make me whole?

Their conversation curves and folds back to loss. Storm’s voice softens. “Keratin lost his mate,” he says simply, almost as if naming the weather. “I was foolish to leave my white clan. I thought fire would make me stronger. Instead I brought us grief.”

Keratin says nothing at first. His face is granite. Then, when he does speak, there is a thin exhale of pain that I would not have guessed belonged to him. “She was taken. The grief burned. You left those wounds untended.” He doesn’t shout; he never shouts. The words are a wound and a plea.

Storm bows his head. “I am sorry.” The apology is small and vast at once. It threads between them like something that will not let go.

I want to reach out and stitch their ragged edges, but it’s not my place. I sit with my wine and let the conversation fold into other histories—clan politics, old rivalries, the songs they sing on long winter nights.

They tell me about the mages’ ritual—how, before a mage dies, she chooses a successor. The transfer is intimate and terrifying: a naming, a touch, the smell of cedar and honey and old ink. The magic passes like breath from one throat to another. “It’s sacred,” Keratin says. “It must be kept pure.”

I think about purity like a jar—precious and breakable. I think about Storm’s apology and the way Keratin’s shoulders sagged with all the words unsaid.

Our talk drifts into practicalities—when we leave, what we pack, who we must avoid. The golem eats in silence, chewing and watching, a dwarf with attention, never leaving his place at the table.

By the time the wine gets passed around the porch and the evening hum settles like a blanket, I feel both closer to and further from some truth I can’t name. My chest is tight with more than training fatigue. There is a hungry, jagged curiosity that edges everything.

Then the sky moves.

At first I think a plane—just a trick of clouds and light. But the stars are falling, not slowly but in a scatter, streaks of cold fire slanting toward the horizon.

Storm drops his bottle with a sound like a gunshot. Keratin goes still, a statue becoming spring. The glow in Storm’s eyes changes from ember to alarm.

“Storm?” I whisper, because whispering is all I can do.

He stares up until his features drain of color. His voice is small when he says it. “They’re here.”

Keratin is already on his feet, stance shifting into a warrior’s balance I’ve only ever seen when he trains. He is iron now—ready.

Storm’s face closes into something I recognize from the funeral crowds, from sorrow-laced eyes that promise ruin. “Rage’s vanquishers,” he tells us. “The blood-drinking things.”

“Vampires,” Keratin finishes, and the syllable snaps like an omen.

Screams tear through the night. We don’t need to ask who—they are exactly where the sky shows them falling.

I hear a sound in my own throat that is not only fear. It is something else—adrenaline wired to a wild, absurd clarity. The bakery, the ledger, the small safe corners of my life flash through me like a prayer. I am terrified. I am ready. And whether I like it or not, my name is already entangled with theirs.

They look to me as if I belong in the plans. It is a look that makes my knees go faint and my heart steady all at once.

“Get ready,” Keratin orders. “There is no more time.”

And then we're moving.