Chapter 87: The Fire Beneath the Fog
Morning came too soon.
I barely slept, and when I did, my dreams were nothing but fragments—golden eyes, the chamber walls, the words carved into stone: When the world forgets us, we are most dangerous.
When I walked into the kitchen, the others were already gathered. Elena had taken over the stove, frying eggs in a pan with enough aggression to make the skillet squeak. Ethan sat at the table, half-asleep, his hair sticking up in about six different directions as he typed something furiously on his laptop. Echo leaned against the wall, arms folded, quiet as ever, while Callum nursed a mug of black coffee like it was medicine. Rhea was perched on one of the stools, the ancient journal balanced in her lap, her lips moving silently as she read.
It should have felt ordinary. But it didn’t.
There was something tight in the air, a tension that had nothing to do with Gregory anymore.
And everything to do with Ravenna.
\---
“Breakfast,” Elena muttered, sliding plates onto the table. “Eat it before it gets cold. Or don’t. I don’t care.”
“You care,” Ethan said without looking up from his screen. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have seasoned it properly.”
Elena narrowed her eyes. “What makes you think I seasoned it?”
He finally looked up, fork already in hand. “Because it smells good. You act like you don’t care, but you actually care too much.”
She stabbed her fork into her eggs with unnecessary force. “Shut up, tech boy.”
He grinned, satisfied. “Thought so.”
I sat down across from them, wrapping my hands around the mug Callum slid toward me. “Anything new?” I asked Ethan.
He nodded quickly. “I’ve been digging into the altar symbols again. Cross-referencing with old pack scripts, hybrid code, and even some non-werewolf records. And I think Ravenna’s been awake longer than we thought.”
That caught everyone’s attention.
“How long?” I asked.
Ethan hesitated, then tapped a few keys, bringing up a map full of glowing dots. “At least fifty years. Maybe longer. There are signs she was pulling strings in South America in the ’70s. Disappearances, rituals, unexplained wolf surges. And guess what? Every single one of those sites lines up with Harbinger seals. She’s been testing them. Breaking them open. One by one.”
The room went quiet.
“She’s been hunting the others,” Echo said softly. “The ones who came before.”
“Not hunting,” Rhea corrected, her voice small but steady. “Collecting. Preparing.”
Elena dropped her fork onto her plate. “So what—you’re telling me she’s been building some kind of Harbinger army for decades, and now she wants to add Roxanne as the cherry on top? That’s insane.”
Callum’s voice was grim. “Insane or not, it explains why she revealed herself now. If she already has the others, Roxanne’s the last piece.”
All eyes turned to me.
And I hated it.
I hated the weight, the silence, the way even my friends didn’t know what to say.
\---
I pushed my plate away. “What if I refuse? What if I don’t play her game?”
Echo shook her head. “Then she’ll make the game play you. Ravenna doesn’t strike me as the type to take no for an answer.”
Ethan muttered, “She probably has a backup plan for her backup plan.”
“Like you,” Elena said dryly.
He shot her a look. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Still do.”
I rubbed my temples, trying not to smile despite myself. It was easier when they bickered—it made the fear less sharp.
But then Rhea closed the journal in her lap and said, “She’s not going to wait much longer. The seals were warnings. And they’re almost all gone. When the last one breaks, there won’t be a choice anymore.”
“What happens then?” I asked.
Rhea hesitated, then whispered, “The world ends.”
\---
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Finally, Aidan, who’d been leaning quietly in the doorway, spoke up. His voice was calm, steady, but there was something fierce underneath it. “Then we make sure it doesn’t get that far.”
“And how exactly do you plan to do that?” Elena snapped. “Because last time I checked, our arsenal consists of knives, claws, Ethan’s glorified Wi-Fi router, and a lot of wishful thinking.”
“Hey,” Ethan protested, “my glorified Wi-Fi router saved your life at least twice.”
“Yeah, and it almost fried me alive the third time,” Elena shot back.
“Technicalities,” he muttered.
Aidan stepped closer to the table, ignoring them both. His eyes were fixed on me. “Rox, you don’t have to carry this alone. Ravenna wants you to feel like you’re the center of everything. But we’re not letting her take that from you.”
I looked at him, my throat tight. “And if she already has?”
He leaned down slightly, his hand brushing mine under the table—just enough for me to feel the warmth of his skin. “Then we fight to take it back.”
For a second, the room faded. The tension, the fog, the weight of the world—it all slipped away, and it was just us.
And of course, Elena noticed.
“Oh my God,” she said loudly. “Did you two seriously pick now, out of all possible times, to make goo-goo eyes at each other? We’re discussing the literal apocalypse.”
Ethan smirked. “I was wondering when someone was going to say it.”
My face heated. “We’re not—”
Aidan gave Elena a flat look. “Do you ever shut up?”
“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “Not when I can smell the tension from across the room.”
I groaned. “Can we please focus?”
Elena grinned, satisfied. “Sure. For now.”
\---
The meeting stretched on for hours. Plans were made, torn apart, remade again. Callum suggested rallying allies, but Echo warned that bringing more people in would only paint bigger targets. Ethan argued for moving locations, but Elena said running would just make us look weaker.
Finally, when the sun was high and my head ached from too many words, I stood.
“We don’t wait for her to make the next move,” I said. “We go to her.”
The room erupted in noise.
“You can’t be serious—” Elena started.
“That’s suicide,” Ethan added.
“You’ll be walking into her hands,” Echo warned.
But Aidan’s voice cut through them all. “No. She’s right.”
Everyone turned.
He met my eyes, steady and unflinching. “Ravenna’s expecting hesitation. Fear. If we show up on her ground, on our terms, we turn that fear into strength. We don’t run. We confront her.”
The others looked torn. Angry. Scared. But no one argued further.
Because they knew the truth.
One way or another, we had to face her.
And soon.
\---
That night, I stood on the balcony again, staring into the fog. The journal’s words echoed in my mind. When the world forgets us, we are most dangerous.
Maybe Ravenna thought she was the danger.
Maybe she thought I was the key.
But as the wind howled and the moon glowed silver above the estate, I made a quiet promise to myself.
If this was a test…
Then I would be the one to end it.
Not her.
Not Gregory.
Not the Hollow Creed.
Me.
Roxanne Devlin.
The last Harbinger.