The silence terrified him more than the screams ever had.
For one impossible, heart-stopping moment, Lucien knew peace. The Thirst's serrated edge—a companion since his first remembered breath—vanished. The Instinct's primal drumbeat, the wolf's eternal song in his blood, stilled. The two warring halves of his soul, locked in their cage of flesh and bone, fell utterly, profoundly quiet.
The sudden ceasefire left a void so absolute it felt like falling from a great height into nothingness.
Then, fury ignited.
This peace was a violation. A theft. His entire existence was a monument to that internal war; to have it silenced by an outside force was an attack worse than any physical wound. A growl, entirely his own, tore from his throat, raw and furious. His dual-colored eyes—crimson and gold—narrowed to slits, scanning the sea of trees below as if he could burn them away with his gaze alone.
The source of that power was down there. A beacon. A challenge. An insult that demanded an answer.
The hunt was his only language, his primal scripture. He launched himself from the cliff's edge, not climbing but flowing down the sheer rock face like spilled ink, a shadow dislodged from stone. His movements were a silent promise of violence, a language of lethal grace. Stones skittered away from his preternaturally silent footfalls. The wind's mournful dirge faded behind him, replaced by the dense, living silence of the forest edge.
The Whispering Woods awaited, a tangled kingdom of secrets under a bleeding sky, and he would tear its heart out to find what had dared to touch him.
---
The moment he crossed the tree line, the world changed. The forest edge welcomed him with a wall of darkness. The Whispering Woods lived up to their name tonight. The trees seemed to lean in, their leaves rustling secrets he was not meant to hear. The bloody moonlight struggled to penetrate the dense canopy, creating a twilight world of deep shadows and unsettling, pulsating crimson patches. The air grew thick, heavy with the scent of wet earth, decaying leaves, and something else—something electric and alive.
Magic.
It coated his tongue, a taste both alluring and repulsive, like ozone and forbidden honey. His vampire eyes cut through the gloom, rendering every detail in sharp, monochrome clarity. His wolf senses painted a second world over the first—a tapestry of scent—the panicked, thrumming heartbeat of a fox cowering in its den, the musky, territorial trail of a badger, the distant, familiar scent-mark of a wolf pack that made the gold in his eye flare with a toxic mix of contempt and a longing so deep it was an ache in his soul.
He pushed it all aside, the way one might brush aside cobwebs. His focus was a blade, honed to a razor's edge on a single, thrilling thread: a scent of night-blooming jasmine and cold, clean stone, and a vibration in the air that hummed in his very bones.
This was her trail. The witch's trail.
It called to the vampire's hunger for potent, intoxicating energy and simultaneously infuriated the wolf's deep-seated, instinctual distrust of the arcane. For once, the two warring impulses within him were in perfect, terrifying agreement.
Find. Confront. Claim.
He moved like a phantom through the undergrowth, his passage disturbing nothing. Not a leaf crunched, not a twig snapped. He was a shadow among shadows, a predator in his absolute element. The deeper he ventured, the stronger the resonant pull became, a siren's song woven from moonlight and raw, untamed power. It was a physical force, tugging him toward a clearing that radiated energy like a forge.
He felt the clearing before he saw it—a palpable pressure in the air that made the fine hairs on his arms stand erect. He melted behind the gnarled trunk of an ancient ironwood, his form blending seamlessly with the deep, textured bark. He became part of the forest, a watching stillness.
And there she was.
The witch.
She stood at the center of the clearing, a slender figure bathed in a concentrated pool of moonlight that defied the red sky above. Her back was to him, that incredible cascade of liquid moonlight hair flowing down her back like a waterfall of captured starlight. The air around her still shimmered with the visible aftermath of her spellwork, charged with a latent energy that made his teeth ache.
Power clung to her like an expensive perfume, intoxicating and dangerous.
Lucien's breath caught in his chest. This was no wizened hag from coven tales. This was… something entirely new. Something potent and dangerously alluring. The fierce, possessive curiosity that bloomed within him was hotter and more urgent than any thirst.
She had reached into the very heart of his curse and imposed a temporary, shocking truce.
She owed him for that violation. She owed him for the terrifying hope of that silence.
He would have answers. He would know what she was.
With the infinite, stalking patience of the supreme predator he was, he began to circle the clearing's edge. He needed to see her face. He needed to measure the soul behind those power-weaving hands.
He took one step, then another, his weight perfectly distributed, his body a testament to controlled power.
SNAP.
A twig, hidden under a blanket of moss, snapped under his boot.
The sound was a thunderclap in the sacred silence.
The witch whirled around.
Time fractured, then stopped.
Her eyes found his in the shadows without hesitation. They were not the eyes of a frightened mortal. They were the color of a twilight sky after a storm—a luminous, piercing silver-violet that saw not just the monster lurking in the darkness, but the warring, tormented man trapped within it.
There was no fear in her gaze. Only a deep, profound, and unsettling recognition.
A mirror reflecting back his own burning, furious curiosity.