The bell above Frostmere's library door didn't ring—it *screamed*. A rusted iron shriek that sent pigeons exploding from the eaves as Elin slipped through the threshold, Ash's shadow merging with hers in the slanted afternoon light. Three weeks had passed since the river battle, yet the town still flinched at the werewolf's human guise—a broad-shouldered stranger with stormcloud eyes and hands that trembled when holding teacups.
"Keep your gloves on," Elin whispered, brushing ash from his woolen sleeves. The library's air tasted of mummified roses and betrayal, its vaulted ceiling lost in cobweb constellations. Shelf after shelf loomed like sentinel tombs, leather-bound spines bearing titles in dead languages.
Ash's nostrils flared. "They lied," he murmured, fingertips grazing a genealogy ledger. "Our stories... rewritten in librarian ink."
They moved through the labyrinth, dust motes swirling where Elin's skirts disturbed centuries of silence. Her pulse quickened at the Restricted Section's iron gate—left suspiciously ajar. The grimoire awaited on a lectern veiled in shadow, its cover etched with thorned runes that pulsed faintly crimson.
"*Blood and Bone Chronicles*," Elin breathed, translating the embossed title. Ash's gloves left smoldering prints as he lifted the tome.
What unfolded wasn't history, but heresy.
Illuminated pages depicted wolf-headed knights kneeling before a silver-haired queen, their claws dipped in holy water. A marginal note in faded copperplate revealed the truth: *"Lycanthropy not curse but covenant—gift of Luna Regina to her chosen paladins."* The betrayal came in 1489—a cabal of alchemists led by one Magnus Thornfield, who distilled werewolf essence into an elixir granting immortality... at the cost of sanity.
"They turned us into *drugs*," Ash snarled, veins bulging as the pages fluttered to reveal Thornfield's crest—a phoenix devouring a wolf, identical to the buttons on the corrupted beast. Elin's fingers found the illustration of the "Cup of Clarity," a chalice shaped from entwined wolf and woman, said to purify tainted blood.
A floorboard creaked.
Tommy Hargrave slunk from behind Dante's *Inferno*, his rat-like eyes reflecting the grimoire's hellish glow. The town drunkard reeked of juniper gin and desperation. "Well, well," he drawled, brandishing a pistol with a barrel filed into a serpent's mouth. "The demon whore and her pet found Thornfield's bedtime story."
Ash moved faster than humanly possible—a blur of wool and wrath pinning Tommy against Shelley's collected works. Leather-bound *Frankenstein* thudded to the floor as the gun clattered away.
"*You knew*," Ash growled, his voice slipping into the subsonic register that made windowpanes vibrate. Tommy's cheeks bloated violet until Elin intervened.
"Wait! Look at his neck." Beneath grime, Tommy's skin bore faint scarification—the phoenix-wolf crest.
Ash recoiled as if scalded. "Thornfield's mark. You're a *Harvester*."
Tommy's laughter bubbled with hysteria. "Not by choice! They take orphans from the workhouse, brand us, make us sniff out relics." His trembling hand revealed a vial of mercury-like liquid sloshing with black filaments. "Serum's rotting my guts, but it lets me track this." He pointed at Elin. "*Her*."
The revelation hung like a hanged man's shadow. Elin touched her throat where Ash's claws had marked her—the cut now healed into a silvery rune resembling the Cup's engraving.
"You're the key," Tommy wheezed. "Thornfield's descendants need virgin blood touched by lycan magic to activate the Cup. That's why the corrupted ones came—to harvest you before the next lunar eclipse."
Ash's fist shattered a marble bust of Socrates. "How many know?"
"Enforcers already in town. Disguised as the new pastor and his 'sisters'." Tommy convulsed suddenly, black bile spraying the grimoire. The pages absorbed it hungrily, runes glowing brighter.
Elin pressed her handkerchief—now permanently stained with Ash's essence—to Tommy's lips. "Where's the Cup?"
"Beneath... the chapel..." Tommy's eyes rolled back, his final breath whispering a name that turned Ash to stone: *"Lysandra."*
The library plunged into silence. Somewhere, a clock chimed thirteen. Ash cradled the grimoire like a dead lover, his tears sizzling holes in the vellum.
"Who's Lysandra?" Elin dared ask.
"My sister," Ash rasped. "The serum... Thornfield tested it on her first."
They fled as twilight bled across the shelves, the grimoire secreted beneath Elin's cloak. The forest welcomed them with a shiver—trees bending away from an unseen wind, their roots exposing skeletal hands clutching rusted daggers. Ash's transformation began at the tree line; shirt seams split as fur rippled across his back, human hands twisting into claws that scraped sparks from stones.
"Don't look," he snarled, the words mangled by elongating fangs.
Elin looked anyway.
His metamorphosis was a brutal ballet—vertebrae cracking like gunshots, jaw unhinging to accommodate saber-length canines. When it ended, seven feet of primal elegance stood before her, the scar from her handkerchief now a silvery crescent on his flank. He bowed his massive head, allowing her to mount.
They raced through a landscape gone feral. Moonflowers snapped at their heels, their petals lined with teeth. Owls swooped low, their eyes glowing with the same phoenix-wolf sigil that doomed Tommy. When the chapel ruins loomed—a jagged silhouette clawing at the stars—Ash halted so abruptly Elin tumbled into dead nettles.
The clearing swarmed with figures in puritanical black, their faces obscured by plague doctor masks. Between them floated a glass coffin radiating cold blue light. Inside lay a girl preserved in heartbreak perfection—raven hair coiled like sleeping serpents, lips parted in eternal scream. Lysandra.
"Still playing knight-errant, brother?" The lead enforcer removed his mask, revealing Ash's face aged by centuries of hatred. "How noble. How *pathetic*."
Ash's howl shook earth from roots. Elin scrambled behind an oak as werewolf clashed with abomination—Thornfield's elite enforcer shifting into a chimera of man and scarab beetle, its carapace dripping acid.
Chaos became Elin's ally. She darted through the melee, the grimoire's pages guiding her to the chapel's crypt entrance. Ancient wards flared as she crossed the threshold, necrotic magic plucking at her hair like skeletal children.
The Cup waited on a pedestal of fused bones, its chalice swirling with liquid moonlight. But as Elin reached out, the walls whispered warnings in Lysandra's voice: *"Blood of the cursed, heart of the pure—only joined may the vessel endure."*
Outside, Ash's pained roar shook dust from the ceiling. Elin didn't hesitate. Plunging her hand into the Cup, she let its razored edge slice flesh. The chalice drank greedily, her blood mingling with centuries of sacrificed lycan queens until...
The explosion blinded.
When vision returned, Elin stood holding not a cup, but a living helix of silver and shadow—the merged essence of every werewolf soul trapped by Thornfield's curse. Across the clearing, the enforcer disintegrated mid-snarl, his stolen immortality unraveling.
Ash collapsed beside Lysandra's coffin, human again and weeping. The preserved girl's eyes fluttered open—not with madness, but clarity. "Lucas?" she croaked, touching his stubbled cheek. "You kept your vow."
Dawn found them in the chapel's ashes. Lysandra slept under Elin's cloak, her fingers intertwined with Ash's. The grimoire lay open to a final page Elin hadn't noticed before—a sketch of two girls beneath the Wolf's Tear constellation, one dark-haired, one fair.
In the margin, fresh ink still glistened: *"The Cup chooses twin daughters—destroyer and redeemer. Let the blood games commence."*
Somewhere beyond the smoke-choked trees, church bells tolled a false matins. The new pastor was coming.