Vera froze. “Vanessa?”

The girl nodded once. Her tone was calm, detached, but her expression — her trembling lower lip, the quick blink — betrayed something deeper.

Nicolas tried to stand but swayed, clutching his head. “What do you mean, they?”

Vanessa’s eyes flicked toward the horizon. Through the shattered archway of the cathedral, shapes moved in the smoke — not human, not Originals either.

“They finished the second sequence,” she said. “The Bellanti Council ...