Aurora inhaled deeply, her voice dripping with mockery. “Ah, the sweet fragrance of innocence… How unfortunate this little human arrived too soon. Had she delayed until after the next dark moon, I might’ve introduced you to Fabian’s true self.”

Fabian. Yvette recalled the name—Aurora’s doomed lover, slain mid-transformation by the Marquis.

“Madness consumes you,” Randall replied coldly, closing the distance between them. His spear flashed, its razor tip lunging for her chest.

Aurora snatched the blade, but whether by design or grim chance, its momentum drove it deep into her distended abdomen. Severed fingers clattered to the floor. Yet she remained eerily calm as Randall strained to withdraw his weapon, only to find its buried half had dissolved.

“Come, Fabian—greet our guest,” Aurora cooed, her neck contorting unnaturally until her skull hung limp against her collarbone.

From her spine, a second head emerged—a young man’s visage swathed in glistening amniotic film. Its muffled voice rasped:

“Love me… as I love you… my angel… My other half… Without you, I wither…” The head sagged silent.

Yvette shuddered. The newborn head’s murmurs evoked a restless fetus before its final stillness.

Aurora’s body jerked alive. With puppet-like motions, she clawed open her belly, revealing no organs—only a writhing nest of golden tendrils beneath a mucous membrane. The tendrils glowed with malevolent indigo phosphorescence.

Randall crumpled, clawing at his eyes as smoke curled from his seared flesh.

Ultraviolet light. Though invisible to humans, Yvette’s attunement to electromagnetic energy flared in recognition. She lunged forward, diverting the lethal rays into harmless heat. Aurora’s violet haze, she realized, masked true UV emission—likely an ability granted by her parasitic cargo.

When the glow faded, Aurora’s primary head snapped upright, giggling, while Fabian’s dangled behind like a grotesque growth.

“Still breathing?” Aurora sneered, caressing her lover’s dormant face. “That fossilized tyrant robbed me of Fabian’s mortal form. But I adapted. I devoured him. Now he gestates within—ready to be reborn under the Star Apostles’ grace!”

“Delusion,” Randall croaked, his face blistered, eyes seeping blackened blood. “You’re their puppet…”

Aurora’s composure shattered. “Blasphemer! The Star Daughter will restore him! That night—watching silver nails pierce his heart—burned vengeance into my soul. Your death begins my reckoning!”

Behind Yvette, Randall whispered, “Go. I’ll stall her…” His spear lengthened as he fed it fresh blood.

Aurora laughed—a shrill, brittle sound. “Let her flee? How naïve!” Her whistle summoned a pack of snarling wolf-beasts from the corridors.

“Your master’s precious creeds—‘honor your word, else be honorless’—did you swear to shield her?” Aurora taunted. “My brood craves new stock. Let’s see if human women breed better with wolves…”

“Harm her, and the Veilguards will hound you,” Randall warned.

Aurora scoffed. “Kill her, and the Church flails blindly. Beg on your knees, oathkeeper—grovel—and I’ll spare her. Choose: honor… or her flesh?”

“Don’t!” Yvette snapped before Randall could reply. Honor wasn’t worth this viper’s sport.

She hefted Randall—then hurled him into a reeking sludge trench.

“What—?!” he sputtered, blinded but shielded by the muck’s grimy embrace.

Yvette shattered a vial, flames billowing around her. Channeling her gift, she transformed the inferno into pure UV fury. Lycanthropes shrieked, crumbling to char. Aurora recoiled until Fabian’s head surged forward, neutralizing the assault.

When silence fell, only Yvette stood unscathed.

“Holy Light… Traitorous blood!” Aurora hissed from behind a crimson barrier, mistaking Yvette for a sanctified hunter.

“I’m no zealot,” Yvette replied coolly. “But all threats to the Veil meet judgment. This ends now, Star Apostle.”

When the slick, waxy membrane glistened within Aurora’s opened abdomen, a cold recognition gripped Yvette. She’d seen this before—in Moore’s fevered dreams. The same membrane had sheathed those clawing, multi-limbed horrors from the meteor. The same corrupted violet glow pulsed here, mirroring the baleful star that had haunted Moore’s childhood skies.

Even the altar’s twisted engravings whispered double meanings. The starburst patterns worshipped the Star-Maiden, yes—but their jagged rays coiled too sinuously for mere light. Tendrils. Feelers. An artist’s rendering of the very abominations that now writhed in Yvette’s memory.

Three days after Moore’s death, the Bureau’s cleanup crew had scoured the Viscount’s sewers. They’d found traces of that same wax-like residue near the drains, but London’s filth-choked tunnels guarded their secrets. A footnote in a report, awaiting future horrors to give it context.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Yet why the divergence? Moore had hosted the Star-Apostle as a separate entity, while Aurora’s very flesh had become its nursery.

Yvette’s mind cycled back to the quivering meat-sprouts—pale and clustered like enoki mushrooms. A theory crystallized: The Apostle had puppeteered Moore’s fusion experiments. Her essence was too frail to birth its spawn outright, demanding rapid, grotesque augmentation. Not so for Aurora. As a highborn vampire—a breed closer to the Progenitors—her bloodline required no such crudities. Vampire essence flowed through generations, and Aurora, a princess of middling-high descent, made a perfect vessel.

The wolfspawn infesting the sewers echoed Moore’s hybrid abominations. Bureau files described Moore’s true form as a patchwork of stolen supers, requiring constant human flesh to stave off necrosis. Common werewolves killed for sport under the moon; these creatures fed nightly out of desperation. Their festering sores hinted at systemic rejection—too many stolen parts, too little cohesion.

Both women had been pawns. Moore, her mind warped into believing herself an evolutionary vanguard, was but a living womb. Aurora, swallowing her lover’s remains, had ingested the Apostle’s spore—a hitchhiker within the meteor’s core, now using her vampiric vitality to gestate. Those enoki tendrils weren’t a resurrection—they were the larval form of a star-borne god, awaiting birth into Earth’s soil.

The puzzle’s pieces locked into place with damning clarity: This abomination could not be permitted to flee.

Aurora recoiled as the human girl spoke, her bones vibrating with instinctive terror—the vampire’s primal dread of silver and sun. Yet this was cattle. Prey. Why then did familiarity claw at her gut? Why did panic—not her own—thrum beneath her ribs?

“Fabien?” She caressed the withered second head grafted to her shoulder. “Don’t fear. Our eternity is—”

Agitation boiled in her womb. Another consciousness scrabbled at her thoughts—retreat, retreat, complete the birth!

“It’s reading your memories,” Yvette pressed. “Recycling old phrases like a broken music box. Your ‘Fabien’ is a parasite wearing his skin—no better than a rove beetle tricking ants into feeding it.”

The second head’s earlier ramblings came back—love vows spat like broken poetry, disjointed and rehearsed. Aurora gritted her teeth as alien whispers shrieked in her skull, urging flight even as her own rage demanded vengeance.

To concede the lie now would unmake her. She’d sacrificed too much—status, kin, honor—all to clutch this shred of Fabien’s shadow. Like a gambler doubling down on ruin, she’d rather burn the world than fold. Before the meteor, her immortality had been a gray wasteland. Then came Fabien: a mortal poet scribbling verses by moonlight, too shy to meet her gaze. His adoration had been a flame in the Arctic night. Let the universe call her deluded; she’d cling to this half-life with his face until entropy’s end.

But first—vengeance. For the sacrilege. For the butchers of his flesh.

Defying the Apostle’s shrill warnings, she slashed her wrist. Blood sizzled into a serrated bone-whip. Target: the floundering in the muck. Coat him in filth to smother that accursed light-attacks. (She’d sooner perish than wallow in sludge herself.)

Yvette anticipated the feint. Aurora, for all her power, fought like an aristocrat—all theatrics, no grit. Real fighters misdirect with glances and twitches. As the whip snapped sideways, Yvette fired through her holster—gunslinger style—her altered bullet smashing Aurora’s wrist. Three more shots shattered joints.

Sword blazing with Holy Fire, Yvette cleaved the vampire’s womb. The fleshy mass inside recoiled, then screeched as the superheated steel cauterized it—a psychic howl that liquefied resolve. The Star-Apostle flopped onto the stones: a stillborn horror, putrescent and mewling, its feeble tendrils writhing like drowned spiderlings. Its death rattle echoed through the tunnels—a cosmic wrongness deflating into sewer stench.

Shaking off the psychic aftershocks, Yvette hauled Randal from the filth. “Apologies for the… baptism. I needed to shield you from the purge.”

To her surprise, the fastidious vampire prince bore his reeking shroud stoically. “No harm done. But what in nine hells was that scream?”

Yvette swiftly relayed the night’s harrowing events to Randall.

“What of Aurora?”

The name snapped Yvette back to awareness. She hurried to the vampire princess, who lay motionless in the sludge. Aurora’s limbs bore scorch marks from silver rounds, yet the gruesome abdominal wound was already knitting itself—a grim testament to vampiric resilience. At least she doesn’t need air, Yvette thought grimly. Drowning in sewer muck would’ve been an undignified end.

“Alive, but unconscious.”

“Your blade, Mr. Fisher,” Randall rasped, struggling upright.

Yvette stepped between him and the prone noble. “If you take her head now, you rob the Prince of vindication. Let the Cult bear the blame publicly. A trial revealing their manipulation will silence those doubting your sire’s leadership.”

Randal froze, then inclined his head. “Your counsel is sound. My judgment… falters.”

“We must move.”

Guiding the blinded vampire, Yvette shouldered Aurora’s limp form through the fetid tunnels.

“This state…” Randall grimaced as they neared the surface. “We’ll be noticed.”

“Stay with her. I’ll secure transport.”

Emerging into the street, Yvette’s sewage-soaked appearance sent pedestrians recoiling. A hackney driver waved her off: “Begone, gutter rat! You’ll soil my rig!”

“Good sir!” she implored. “Villains stole the drains! My lady fell through—her brave companion followed! Aid us to Covent Garden, and fifty pounds await!” Aurora’s finery sells the tale, Yvette calculated. Offering coin myself would see me jailed.

“Fifty quid?!” Nearby drivers prickled like hounds. A modest London home cost thrice that.

“Ignore this cur!” Rival coachmen descended. “I’ll bear you for forty!”

“Thirty!”

Returning triumphant, Yvette froze. A crowd had encircled her companions—ordinary folk entranced, slack-jawed and vacant-eyed.

“Randall…”

“Break their gaze!” the vampire hissed. “My hunger… stirs compulsions.”

They fled to the carriage. When the driver sat catatonic, Randall whispered an apology: “Starved bloodsingers… involuntarily entrance mortals. I’ll drive.”

“No.” Yvette drew the blinds and bared her wrist—slender, yet the same that had smote abominations. “Feed.”

Randall’s fangs pierced yielding flesh. Rich blood flooded his senses—then he recoiled as if branded.

“Enough?” Yvette tilted her head.

“I… What happened?” The driver blinked, flicking the reins.

Though sated, Randall trembled. Yvette’s blood lacked the celestial bouquet of Ada’s (born under auspicious stars), yet its pull had been… primal. Had her mortal frailty beguiled him?

He touched his lips, skin still humming where her pulse had thrummed.

Across town, Ulysses lounged in Yvette’s parlor, eyeing the substituted copper teaspoons. Alison prattled about her employer’s new “tutor”—a noctivagant charlatan sans books.

“Montagu’s circle, you say?” Ulysses swirled his Darjeeling. “How curious…”

The governess leaned closer. “Sleeps till dusk! Claims scholarship yet reeks of brandy!”

“Nightly excursions?” Ulysses’ smile turned vulpine. Silverware stored… Urgent errands after dark…

Time to hunt a certain wayward protégée.