Chapter 74 Chapter Twenty One
The Chapel of Teeth~
No outsiders ever entered here. No one lived long enough to try.
Ezra sat at the head, posture razor-straight, dressed in black that shimmered faintly beneath the candlelight. A golden pin bearing the symbol of Pride shone at his collar. His gaze swept across the others with the same calm authority that had once made priests kneel and tremble.
Lucian leaned back in his chair, one arm slung loosely over the side, his other hand absently toying with the chain on his wrist. He hadn’t said a word since entering. His crimson eyes caught the candlelight like burning glass, unreadable, dangerous.
Reuben was slouched beside him, picking lazily at a half-eaten apple. He looked bored, but the tension in his jaw betrayed the opposite.
“Can we get to the part where this actually matters?” he muttered, tossing the apple core aside. “Some of us have better things to do—like eat.”
Ezra’s eyes flicked toward him — a glance sharp enough to cut. “You’ll speak when it’s time, Reuben. Not before.”
Malachi snorted, feet kicked up on the table’s edge. “Still playing king, I see.”
Ezra didn’t even glance his way. “I didn’t bring you all here to waste time with politics,” he said, his tone cold and precise as he tossed a small blackened ring onto the table. It hit the obsidian and rolled once before stopping near Reuben’s plate. It was all that was left of one of their captains.
“One of our meeting sites was hit,” Ezra continued. “Someone sent a message.”
Enoch leaned forward, red eyes glinting under the firelight. “A message? I call that war.”
Ezra ignored him. “The fire wasn’t random. A mark was burned into the stone. Same sigil we found on the bodies we recovered.”
The room went still again. No one liked how quiet it got when Ezra spoke again.
Ezra looked around the table. “We’ve been hit three times in two months and last night, during the search through the underground ruins, we found something—something that shouldn’t even exist anymore. A symbol that was supposed to be erased.”
Ciel, the quiet one until now, tilted her head slightly, her beautiful green eyes gleaming like glass under candlelight. “What symbol?”
Ezra gestured with two fingers.
A servant in a long grey cloak stepped forward from the shadows, carrying a rectangular object draped in dark cloth. The faint clink of metal echoed as he set it onto the table before Ezra.
Ezra stood, his voice steady. “Open it.”
The servant hesitated only a breath before peeling the cloth away.
A steel box lay underneath. Its edges were rusted, and its lid had a symbol that none of them had seen in a long time.
A seven-pointed circle. Each point bearing the mark of a sin — the same crest they once carried during their years of indoctrination. Except this wasn’t their version.
Lucian’s chair creaked as he leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “That’s not the current insignia.”
“It isn’t,” Ezra said. His voice was calm, but underneath it ran something colder. “This was the old crest. The one used before the purge. Before we slaughtered the first generation.”
The air seemed to thicken.
Reuben’s face twisted. “Impossible. That symbol died with them.”
“Apparently not,” Ezra replied.
Malachi leaned in, smirking though his eyes flickered uneasily. “So what? Someone’s playing nostalgia with our old brand. Let them.”
Ezra’s tone dropped. “You think I called a full council for a nostalgic act?”
A long silence followed. Only the candles hissed.
Ciel’s voice finally broke through, soft but shaking. “That vault was supposed to have been sealed after the rebellion. No one should have had access.”
Lucian nodded once. “Which means whoever left this symbol had to be one of us. Or one of the first generation that escaped the massacre.”
Enoch's eyes darkened, shadows stretching across his face. “No one escaped.”
“That’s what we thought,” Ezra said. “But this changes everything.”
Reuben’s tone turned bitter. “You’re saying one of the bastards who made us—lived?”
Lucian clenched his fists, his lip curled into something between a smirk and a snarl. “Lived… and is still moving pieces.”
Malachi folded his arms, tone mocking but strained. “You sound like one of us again, Lust. What’s next, you going to crash out over it?”
Lucian's smile didn’t reach his eyes. “No. But I am going to find them. And when I do—”
Ezra interrupted, voice low but cutting through everything, “When we do.”
Lucian paused — then nodded, the faintest edge of a grin ghosting over his mouth.
Ciel rose slowly, her gaze locked on the sigil. “If one of the originals survived… it means they still have access to the old blood rites. This is very bad.”
The table fell silent again.
Ezra nodded once to the servant, who slid another object onto the table—a stack of blackened pages, half-burned, their ink smeared with soot.
“The fragments were found under the ruins. What’s legible mentions a project. ‘Cycle Nine.’ It lists six directors. Five confirmed dead.” He paused, tapping the final name. “One unaccounted for.”
Lucian’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “Dr. Harrow.”
Ciel’s eyes widened. “The Bloodwright.”
Ezra raised a brow. “And how do you propose we find a ghost that’s been buried for decades?”
Lucian’s smile curved sharp, but it didn’t reach his eyes, “We won’t need to find him,” he said. “If Harrow’s alive, he’ll come to us. That’s what he does—he doesn’t run. He waits, and then he strikes when he thinks we’re unprepared.”
The rest listened and studied him in silence.
“Then we’ll be ready,” Lucian finished, voice low, a promise more than a plan.
The candles hissed and flared again, as if the chapel itself had heard and approved.
Lucian’s POV
I told Salem I’d be gone for seven days. If the coming war proved worse than my calculations, it might take longer.
But one thing was certain—
I would quicken our investigations, hasten our preparations, and return as swiftly as I could.
What I wasn’t prepared for…..was what awaited us.
The door slammed open. A servant stumbled inside, barely making it three steps before collapsing to his knees, blood dripping from his sleeve. His eyes were wide, frantic.
“They’ve surrounded us,” he gasped, voice breaking. “All sides—the ruins—”
The air turned sharp. Ezra didn’t flinch. He only rose from his chair, spine unbending, gaze colder than the stone beneath us. It hasn't been up to twenty-four hours since we had a meeting, and Dr. Harrow was already on the move?
The chapel doors groaned as we pushed them open.
A group of masked men surrounded us—there were too many of them. Their eyes glowed like burning coals, and the air around them felt charged with a strange energy. Every movement made it clear: they wanted us to feel afraid.
Enoch cracked his knuckles, a grin slicing across his face. “Finally.” He launched forward before Ezra could speak.
The first man who dared meet him got his head caved in with a single blow. The crunch echoed. Enoch didn’t stop—he tore through the next three, fists slamming into ribs and throats until bone splintered under his hands. His roar shook the ruins, more beast than man.
Reuben barreled past him, tearing into the crowd like a starving wolf. His teeth sank into the neck of a screaming soldier, ripping out a mouthful of flesh. Blood sprayed, coating his chin, and he laughed through the crimson mess. His claws gutted the next, spilling intestines across the dirt. He stuffed them into his mouth like meat off a bone.
Ezra didn’t lower himself to charge. He lifted one hand, golden light flashing across his palm, and swung it like a blade. An arc of brilliance sliced through the line ahead, splitting men clean in half. Their bodies hit the ground before their screams had finished leaving their throats. He didn’t even blink—only adjusted his collar, as if the slaughter never happened.
Ciel melted into the shadows. When she emerged behind a soldier, her dagger slipped into a spine, twisting.
Another armed man turned his blade toward Ezra, but Ciel's power wrapped around him—suddenly, the man’s eyes glazed and he drove his weapon into his own comrade’s chest instead. One by one, she made them kill each other, her lips curved in a thin smile.
I’d seen her do it before, but it never stopped being unsettling.
Malachi was slower. He snatched the axe from an enemy mid-swing, the weapon dissolving in his grip before fusing into a jagged blade of his own. He grinned, testing the weight. “Mine now.” The man tried to run. Malachi's new weapon cut him from shoulder to hip, guts spilling.
Benedict sank onto the heap of four or five corpses, staring blankly at the horror spread around him.
And me? My chains rattled as they unfurled from my wrist, glowing faintly with crimson light. I caught the first soldier by the throat with them, yanking him off his feet. His neck snapped when I pulled. Another came at me screaming—my boot crushed his knee sideways, and my fist drove into his face until his skull gave way beneath my knuckles. Warm blood slicked my hands.
The ruins echoed with screams and breaking bones. The air was heavy with the smell of blood. When the moon came out, the ground was a graveyard—bodies piled, the dirt drowned in red.
Reuben stood in the center, blood dripping down his chin. His tongue slid over his teeth as he looked at the carnage. “Delicious,” he breathed. “Enough to satisfy me—for now.”
The screaming had died out too quickly. The only sound left was the drip of blood hitting stone.
For a breath, no one moved. We should have felt triumph — the kind that comes after slaughter — but something in the air shifted.
The temperature dropped. Cold slid under my skin like ice water, crawling down my spine. Even Reuben, drunk on blood, went still with his teeth bared mid-grin. Ciel’s shoulders tightened, her dagger angled down, not up. Malachi’s smirk twitched, faltered, as though he’d just realized the joke was over.
I didn’t turn. None of us did. We didn’t have to. You can’t mistake a presence like that. It announces itself in your marrow before your eyes catch up.
The silence stretched too long. Then—footsteps. Stone groaned under the weight, like the ground itself hated carrying him.
Only then did we look.
He came through the arch of bones, draped in black, as if the ruins themselves had called him out of the grave.
Dr. Harrow.
The silence cracked as his voice slid into it, “Children playing at war,” he said. “Tell me… how long did you think you could dance before I came for you?”
Seeing him in flesh, I didn't feel fear—I’d long forgotten the taste of that—but my body still betrayed me. Every instinct screamed danger before my mind had caught up. Around me, the others felt it too.
“You murdered your maker once. For that betrayal, you will not stand free. You will wear chains until you crawl back to what you were.”
He raised his hands.