Rule #12: your cloak is to be feared.

Beware the hellfire in your veins.

That is what so many fear, after all

for it burns with a power beyond even us,

and its only desire is to conquer your very soul.

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As ash floated by in the frigid midnight, Mori looked on in horror.

She stood at the edge of a blackened ring that was once grass. Charred squares of stone marked the spots where barns and a farmhouse once stood. Fires still raged along whatever wooden beams had survived the battle. Fractured bones mixed with the soot, burned clear to the marrow from the flames that had scorched them.

She couldn’t even tell how many of the sheriff’s men had died here, as most of the ruins lay in thick piles of ash, but dozens of shattered steel blades stuck out from the gray lumps that were once men.

With Cricket on her shoulder, as awestruck and breathless as she was, Mori’s throat tightened. She couldn’t breathe. The carnage left a hollow hole in her heart, and for the first time, the churning rage that always burned within her faded to a flicker. In her icy shock, she couldn’t even speak.

It hit her in waves, each worse than the last, and her mind went blank as she forced herself to take it all in.

The scorched bodies, nothing but shriveled corpses and blackened skin.

Soot-stained outlines on the stone, roughly shaped like humans but with no bones to mark their fall.

A charred skull in the center of the aftermath, too small to be from an adult.

At the sight, a cold jolt of shame stabbed Mori clear through the heart. She pinched her eyes shut, finally breaking her breathless study of the death around her, and she bit back bitter tears.

To think any blood-sister of hers could’ve done this hurt worse than any betrayal she had ever known.

This was what happened when an angel lost control. Mori could never let herself forget what any of them—or what she—could become if they let their hellfire control them.

She swallowed hard in a failed attempt to clear her throat, and she forced herself to face this head on. Her boots crunched across the dying cinders, and every step stoked the lingering heat in the ruins. A deep red glow of still-sizzling embers marked her path through the carnage. Ribbons of smoke wafted off of the one roof that had survived the onslaught, nothing but timbers and a charred frame.

She stood at the center, gaping at the carnage, still unable to fully process what she was seeing.

“Mori,” a woman said.

She and Cricket flinched in unison, as Tia’s voice had mercifully snapped her from her racing thoughts. She peered over her shoulder to see both of her sisters waiting at the edge of the warzone, their hair billowing in the ash-stirred wind. Soot had already stained patches on their leather armor.

In her horrified daze, she had forgotten they were even there.

Lottie stared at the ruins, and the red glow from the dying fires cast horrified shadows across her face. Sol peered from the depths of her hair, only his head exposed to the elements, and Lottie’s familiar gaped at the aftermath with a virtually identical expression to his master.

Tia, however, watched Mori with an intense expression Mori couldn’t quite place. Those sharp blue eyes narrowed, and she wore the sort of stern frown that only an older sister could master. Lex perched on her shoulder, and though specks of dark ash clung to Lex’s bone-white fur, he didn’t seem to notice. The shape-shifting creature lowered his head in a somber bow to those who had died here.

Mori met her older sister’s intense gaze just as Tia gently shook her head. The subtle movement told Mori everything she didn’t want to hear.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Tia had surrendered. To her, Ava was already dead.

“We don’t know what happened.” Mori once again scanned the blackened soot around her as silver-gray pinpricks of ash floated by. “This could be something else. A feral dragon, maybe.”

“Seriously?” Tia raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Those are almost as rare as we are, Mori. Besides, I would’ve sensed it. Even after they’re gone, their lingering energy is hard to miss.”

Since Tia was the only one of the three who had encountered a dragon shifter, they would have to take her word for it.

With a deep frown, Mori studied Tia’s face. Those bright blue eyes narrowed, as though they could carve holes deep in anyone’s soul, but Mori didn’t look away this time.

That little comment only raised more questions.

Not long ago, Tia had disappeared for months, and she had come back hardened. Quieter. More ruthless and controlled than ever before. Though she had brought beautiful new weapons as gifts for them all, that was the only hint of whatever had happened during her time away. To this day, she refused to tell anyone where she had been. They didn’t know where the weapons she’d given them had come from, or what that new glowing blue tattoo on her wrist signified. Whatever she had done out there, it had forever changed her.

Mori and Tia hadn’t seen eye to eye since she came home. Unlike Lottie, Mori wasn’t one to simply fall in line with no explanation.

“Ava got her wings,” Tia said firmly. “There’s no other explanation. We can’t save her. She’s gone.”

“I refuse to believe that.” Mori raised her chin in defiance, and she stood her ground even under her sister’s ruthless glare.

Though Tia stiffened, Lottie spoke first.

“Just look around, murder bunny.” Lottie shook her head in disappointment, and her thick brown curls bounced around her head with the movement. “Since when are you an optimist? Look at what she did. A sane angel would never do this.”

“Unless she was provoked.”

“Right,” Tia said flatly. “I’m sure the chickens were quite a threat.”

With her arms still crossed, Tia nodded to a charred cluster of blackened feathers nearby to prove her point.

Mori’s jaw tensed, and she glared off at the edge of the forest, beyond the circle of ash and decay. “Ava is out there. She needs help, and no one else is coming.”

“Because no one else is left!” Tia snapped.

Everyone stiffened on impulse. Angel and familiar alike stared at Tia in the stunned silence that followed.

Numb with disbelief, Mori completely forgot what she had been about to say. The distant chirp of crickets filled the gaps between the dying fire’s pops and fizzles as she tried to process what she had just heard—and what she had, lately, begun to fear.

“How could you possibly know that?” Mori asked breathlessly.

Tia sighed and rubbed her eyes. The faint orange light from the nearby embers cast a surreal glow over her body, and the long shadows from her fingertips danced across her face as she massaged her temple. “It’s been decades without a sighting, Mori. What are the odds that I’m wrong?”

Mori cleared her throat with a rough cough. Deep down, she couldn’t bring herself to accept it, and she shoved the thought aside to avoid the surge of grief that was trying to drown her from within.

“Fine,” she snapped. “If that’s true, then it’s all the more reason to save one of the last of our kind, Tia. We owe it to Ava to at least try.”

“No,” Tia said firmly, in the fierce and final tone she reserved for delivering orders.

Mori’s knuckles cracked as her entire body stiffened with barely restrained rage. “Then I’ll go alone.”

Instead of responding, Tia’s eyes flashed with a bloody warning.

Mori squared her shoulders as she braced herself for the worst. This would probably hurt, but she didn’t care. She was right, even if no one else wanted to admit it.

“Law #2,” Tia said firmly. “Obey your command. We’re not going.”

“Law #3,” Mori shot back at her. “Protect your sisters.”

Though Mori was lost in her bubbling grief and rage and utter fear, she felt a quiet flicker of gleeful mischief. It was barely a whisper in her soul, an impulse that was almost impossible to sense at all, but she felt it all the same.

Even now, when the world felt like it was ending, she couldn’t resist tempting fate with her older sister’s wrath. At this point, it was just part of her nature.

Tia’s laws had kept them alive, but damn if Mori didn’t love using them against her.

With an irritated scoff, Tia squared her shoulders and slowly closed the distance between them. “If Ava has her wings, then she’s no longer our sister, and Ava as we know her is dead.”

“One way to find out,” Mori snapped back, refusing to budge.

When Tia finally closed the gap between them, they stood nose to nose. In the dying heat of the ruins, they met in a tense standoff, each refusing to give an inch to the other.

Silence stretched between them as the flames slowly died. The wind howled in the distance, carrying with it the haunting melody of a siren's song and the somber cry of a winter night. The primal instinct for self-preservation warned Mori to surrender, to break eye contact and give her commander the respect she was owed, but she forced herself to meet her fierce glare.

Mori’s heart pounded in her chest, but she didn’t budge. She didn’t flinch. Her resolve didn’t flicker. If they didn't make a decision soon, they would never be able to coax Ava back from the brink.

Tia’s eyes flashed red, and the air around them instantly warmed. The glowing lines on her body hummed to life as she accessed the depths of her magic, and heat radiated from her skin.

Yep, this was going to hurt.

A lot.