Chapter 56 Freya's Scrying (Freya POV)
The moon was three days from full when I locked myself in the ritual room.
I'd been putting this off, making excuses, finding other work, convincing myself that maybe this one time I didn't need to look ahead. But the tension in the compound had reached a breaking point, and my grandmother's voice kept echoing in my skull: A witch who refuses to see is just a coward with powers.
Thanks, Gran. Always knew how to make a girl feel special.
I set the silver bowl on the stone altar, filled it with water from the sacred spring, and added three drops of my own blood. The liquid turned cloudy, then black, then began to shimmer with that awful iridescent quality that meant the veil between present and future was thinning.
"Goddess grant me sight," I whispered, lighting the circle of white candles around the bowl. "Show me what approaches. Show me what must be known."
The water's surface went perfectly still.
Then it opened.
The first vision hit like a fist to the chest.
Underground. Concrete walls slick with moisture and something darker, blood, so much blood. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting everything in sickly yellow-green. The facility stretched out in a maze of corridors and chambers, each one more horrifying than the last.
Bodies littered the floor. Werewolves, most of them. Some still twitching, silver burns eating through their flesh like acid. Others were just... gone. Empty shells with their throats torn out, their chests carved open.
I forced myself to keep watching even as my stomach turned.
Hunters moved through the carnage with mechanical efficiency. Black tactical gear, faces covered, weapons that gleamed silver in the bad light. They weren't fighting anymore—the battle was over. Now they were executing.
A young wolf, couldn't have been more than twenty, tried to crawl toward a side corridor, one leg dragging uselessly behind him. A hunter walked up, put a silver-tipped boot on his back, and shot him twice in the head.
No hesitation. No mercy.
"Jesus," I breathed, but the vision didn't release me.
Another corridor. More bodies. I recognized faces now, wolves from the alliance. The tall woman with the scar through her eyebrow who'd been at the last meeting. A grizzled older male who'd argued with Liam about defensive positions. A girl who couldn't have been older than sixteen, her eyes still open and staring at nothing.
Silver fire burned in one chamber… not normal flames but something chemical, something designed specifically to harm werewolves. The smoke was thick and choking. Wolves trapped inside screamed and clawed at walls that wouldn't give.
My hands were shaking so badly the water sloshed in the bowl.
Keep watching. You have to see it all.
The perspective shifted, pulled deeper into the facility. A central chamber, larger than the others. Banks of monitors lined one wall, showing security feeds from throughout the complex. Medical equipment, some of it I recognized, some of it looked like it belonged in a torture chamber. Examination tables with restraints. IV stands with bags of silver-laced solution hanging from them.
And in the center of it all: Edmund Ashford.
He stood perfectly calm amid the chaos, making notes on a tablet while screams echoed through the speakers. His white coat was pristine. Not a hair out of place. He could have been documenting a routine laboratory experiment instead of orchestrating mass murder.
A hunter approached, said something I couldn't hear. Edmund nodded, gestured to one of the monitors. The hunter left. Edmund went back to his notes.
The vision lurched, time skipping forward in nauseating jumps.
The Silver Moon rose through a skylight I hadn't noticed before, full and impossibly bright, bathing everything in that ethereal glow that made my witch blood sing even through the horror.
Vivienne stood in the central chamber.
She was... God, I didn't have words for what she was.
Her body was changing, not the violent shift of a normal werewolf but something slower, more fundamental. Silver light poured from her skin like she'd swallowed the moon itself. Her eyes were pure white, no iris, no pupil. Power radiated from her in waves that made the concrete walls crack.
The transformation was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.
Hunters backed away, weapons lowering instinctively. Even through the vision, I could feel the weight of her presence, ancient and new at the same time, human and wolf and something else entirely.
Edmund watched his daughter with an expression I couldn't read. Pride? Fear? Scientific fascination? All three?
Vivienne's mouth moved. I couldn't hear her words, but I felt them in my bones: No more.
The silver light exploded outward.
Hunters flew backward, hitting walls hard enough to leave dents. Equipment shattered. Monitors burst in showers of sparks. The very air seemed to vibrate with power that had no name, no precedent.
When the light faded, Vivienne stood at the center of a perfect circle of destruction. Fully transformed now, a wolf but not like any I'd ever seen. Larger, sleeker, with fur that shimmered silver-white and seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
She was magnificent.
She was apocalyptic.
The vision shifted again, and I wanted to scream at it to stop, to let me process what I'd already seen, but it dragged me forward relentlessly.
Edmund was running now.
His perfect composure had shattered. Blood on his white coat, not his own, I thought. He clutched his tablet like a lifeline, backing down a corridor while something pursued him. Not Vivienne. Hunters. His own people, but their movements were wrong. Jerky. Aggressive.
Infected.
Oh God.
Three hunters cornered him in a side chamber. Their faces were pale, eyes fever-bright. One of them.. a woman, was already beginning to change, bones cracking as her body tried to figure out what the hell was happening to it.
Edmund held up the tablet like it could protect him. "Stop. That's an order. I programmed the fail-safes, you can't… "
The hunters attacked.
Edmund screamed, high and thin. They tore into him with teeth that were too sharp, fingers that had become claws. His blood painted the walls in arterial sprays.
But he didn't die.
The wounds closed almost as fast as they were made. His body convulsed, bones breaking and reforming. The transformation was violent, nothing like Vivienne's controlled power. This was rage and agony and mutation all twisted together.
Edmund Blackthorn became a werewolf.
For maybe thirty seconds, he was glorious. Powerful. Every bit the apex predator he'd spent his life studying. He killed two of his hunters with brutal efficiency, moved with speed that shouldn't have been possible for someone who'd been human moments before.
Then his heart exploded.
Just... burst. Like a balloon overfilled with air. His body couldn't handle the change, too old, too human, too unprepared for the kind of cellular restructuring that came with the werewolf curse.
He collapsed mid-strike, reverted to human form, and died staring at the ceiling with an expression of absolute shock.
The vision held on his face for a long moment, making sure I saw every detail.
Then it released me.
I yanked my hands out of the water, gasping like I'd been drowning.
The candles had burned down to stubs. My ritual room was dark except for the moonlight coming through the high window. How long had I been under? Felt like hours. Could have been minutes.
My whole body was shaking.
I grabbed the stone edge of the altar and held on while my stomach did acrobatics. For a minute I thought I'd actually vomit, but I breathed through it, in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. The technique my grandmother taught me for dealing with particularly nasty visions.
Not enough air in the world for this one
When I could stand without my legs giving out, I stumbled to my workbench and grabbed my journal. My hands were still shaking, but I forced myself to write everything down while it was fresh. The details had a way of slipping away if you didn't capture them immediately, and these were details people needed to know.
Underground facility. Multiple levels. Silver fire and execution squads. Edmund survives initial attack but transforms. Dies from physiological failure, heart rupture. Vivienne transforms under Silver Moon, complete shift, unprecedented power. Possible bridge between species or catalyst for destruction. Outcome uncertain.
I stared at that last line.
Outcome uncertain.
That was the part that terrified me most. Usually when I scryed, I saw the future… not a future, not possibilities, but what would actually happen. The universe showing its hand before the cards were played.
But this vision had been different. Fluid. Multiple branching points where things could go a dozen different ways depending on choices not yet made.
Vivienne was the fulcrum. Everything balanced on what she chose, how she handled the power that Silver Moon would give her.
My grandmother's prophecy came back to me with perfect clarity. She'd spoken it when I was fifteen, made me memorize it even though I didn't understand what it meant:
"The silver moon child will either bridge two worlds or burn them both. She carries the blood of hunters and the soul of wolves, and her choice will define a generation. The old witch cannot see which path she takes… only that all paths lead through fire."
I'd asked what it meant. Gran had just looked at me with those cloudy eyes and said, "You'll know when you meet her. And when you do, you'll have to decide if you're brave enough to stand beside her or wise enough to run."
I hadn't understood then.
Standing in my ritual room with visions of blood and silver fire still burning behind my eyes, I understood perfectly.
Vivienne wasn't just some hybrid, some curiosity of mixed heritage. She was a genuine fulcrum point in history. The kind of person who came along once every few centuries and changed everything just by existing.
"No pressure," I muttered, closing my journal.
My hands had finally stopped shaking, but the sick feeling in my stomach remained. I'd seen death before in visions, occupational hazard of being a seer witch. But this was different. This was apocalyptic. The sheer scale of violence, the calculated cruelty of Edmund's facility, the horror of watching him become the very thing he'd spent his life hunting...
And Vivienne. God, Vivienne.
That power radiating from her had been intoxicating even through the scrying bowl. The kind of power that could reshape reality if pointed in the right direction. Or shatter it completely if mishandled.
Bridge or burn. Bridge or burn.
I needed to tell Declan. And Liam. And probably Vivienne herself, though I wasn't sure how to explain what I'd seen without sounding completely insane.
Hey, so I just watched your father become a werewolf and die horribly while you potentially ascend to some kind of moon goddess status. Also, there's going to be a lot of blood. Just thought you should know.
Yeah. That would go over great.
I left the ritual room and headed for the main compound, still feeling shaky but functional. The sun was just starting to rise, pink and gold light painting the eastern sky. Beautiful. Deceptive. In three days, that sky would be dark with the Silver Moon, and everything would change.
Halfway across the courtyard, I ran into Marcus… Declan's third.
"Freya! You look like death warmed over. Rough night?" He grinned, completely oblivious to the fact that I'd just watched the future implode.
"Marcus, I need to find Declan. Now."
His grin faded. "That bad?"
"Worse."
"Okay." He fell into step beside me. "He's in the war room with Liam. They've been up all night planning."
"Good. They need to hear this."
We walked in silence for a moment, then Marcus asked quietly, "Are we going to die?"
I looked at him… really looked. He was young, with an easy smile and the kind of optimism that came from not having seen too much horror yet. In three days, if my vision was accurate, he might be one of those bodies on the facility floor.
Or he might survive to see Vivienne bridge two worlds.
"I don't know," I said honestly. "But we're damn well going to try not to."
He nodded, accepting that, and opened the door to the war room.
Declan and Liam looked up from a table covered in maps and documents. Both of them looked exhausted… dark circles under their eyes, tension in every line of their bodies.
"Freya." Declan straightened. "What's wrong?"