"Alfa, get down!"
The shout was the last cord of reality before the world splintered into shattered glass and blinding white light. A flashbang. My eardrums didn't just ring; they felt pierced by hot needles. I hit the hardwood floor, the scent of my mother's lavender candles instantly replaced by the sharp, metallic sting of ozone.
"Elias, the back door!" my mother screamed. Her voice sounded like it was coming from miles underwater.
I pushed myself up, vision swimming in jagged blotches of gray. Through the haze, I saw my father. He wasn't the mild-mannered history professor I'd known for nineteen years. He was a shadow moving with fluid, terrifying speed toward the hallway.
He threw a hand out, and for a split second, the air itself seemed to ripple, catching a volley of suppressed gunfire in mid-air.
"Subject is active. Code Black!" a distorted voice barked from the shattered window.
"Dad?" I gasped, throat burning. "What's happening?"
He didn't look back. "Alfa, the cellar! Don't stop! Mara, now!"
My mother grabbed my collar, her grip bruisingly strong. She dragged me toward the kitchen, but we didn't make it five steps before the roof groaned. A black-clad figure dropped through the ceiling.
He wore a gas mask shaped like a skull and swung a baton that hummed with a sickly green light, the color of concentrated decay.
My mother met him head-on. As she struck, her skin glowed with a faint, silvery luminescence. Witch. The thought flashed through my brain, unbidden. My mother is a witch?
"Get away from him!" she roared.
The man in the mask laughed, a mechanical sound. He caught her wrist, and the green light from his baton bled into her arm. I watched, paralyzed, as the silver glow in her skin turned black. She screamed—a sound of pure agony that tore through my soul.
"Mom!" I lunged, but a second soldier intercepted me, slamming a rifle butt into my ribs.
I hit the floor, air leaving my lungs in a ragged wheeze. I watched my father return, his eyes glowing a predatory amber, his fingernails lengthening into claws. He tore through the first soldier like wet paper, but there were more. Dozens more. Their weapons were synchronized, designed specifically to neutralize whatever my parents were.
"Subject is reacting to trauma," one of them said into a comms unit, stepping over my mother's limp body. "Initiate the purge."
"No," I whispered. "Please."
A man in a gray uniform, with a cold, clinical expression, walked into the ruins. He looked at my father, who was pinned by energy nets that hissed as they burned into his flesh.
"Elias Vance," the man in gray said. "To think you'd try to raise a hybrid in a suburb. It's almost poetic."
"Let him go," my father growled, blood bubbling at his lips. "He doesn't know!"
"He's a ticking time bomb," the man replied.
"And we are the disposal crew."
He drew a sleek, obsidian pistol and pointed it at my mother's head. Time slowed. I saw the trigger squeeze. The muzzle flash was a surgical, piercing blue.
The world went silent. My mother's body jerked and went still. The silver light left her eyes, fading into a dull gray. My father let out a howl, a sound filled with a grief so profound it shook the house.
The man in gray didn't flinch. He turned the gun on my father and fired twice.
My heart didn't just beat; it detonated.
Something inside me snapped. It wasn't like a bone breaking; it was like a dam bursting. A heat, hotter than any fire, surged from my spine. My blood turned into molten lead.
Kill them, a voice whispered. It wasn't mine. It was deeper, older. Break them. Feed.
"Pressure rising!" a soldier yelled, panic cracking his voice. "The boy's signature is spiking! It's not just Lycan... it's—"
"Contain him!" the man in gray commanded.
"Use the inhibitors!"
They fired. Metallic discs latched onto my shoulders. They were supposed to suppress me. Instead, they melted. The energy inside me was too volatile, the raw power of a Witch's soul fused with the primal violence of a Lycan's blood.
I stood up. I didn't feel the floor. I felt the heartbeats of every man in the room.
"You," I said. My voice sounded like a chorus of dying stars.
"Open fire!" the man in gray screamed.
A hail of bullets struck me. They flattened against a shimmering, violet-black aura that had erupted around my skin. Each impact only fed the pressure. It hurt so much I wanted to scream until my lungs burst, but the scream stayed trapped, transforming into power.
I raised my hand. I just wanted the world to end.
"Die," I whispered.
The explosion came from within. A wave of violet energy, laced with black lightning, screamed outward. It hit the soldiers first, pulverizing their bones before they could scream. The house—my only home—simply disintegrated.
When the light died, the silence was heavier than the noise.
I stood in a crater of charred wood. The moon hung cold above the ruins. Around me lay the bodies—broken gear and scorched flesh. I looked at my hands. The violet light was still dancing under my skin, visible through my veins like glowing ink. My nails were long, sharp, and stained with a residue that smelled of sulfur.
Ten feet away, my father lay motionless. Next to him, my mother.
"Mom?" I croaked.
I stumbled toward them, reaching for my mother's hand. As soon as my skin met hers, the residue on my fingers flared. A spark of black energy jumped to her corpse, and her skin began to hiss, turning into a gray, sludge-like substance.
I recoiled, a sob catching in my throat. I was destroying her. Even in death, I was hurting her.
"What am I?" I screamed into the night.
The energy inside me pulsed, a rhythmic throb like a second heartbeat. It was hungry.
In the distance, sirens began to wail.
The Organization, the police, the cleaners. They would find me standing over the bodies, looking like the monster they claimed I was.
I looked for the man in gray. He was gone, leaving only a trail of blood leading into the woods.
The pressure in my chest tightened. My vision blurred, the violet light encroaching on my sight. I couldn't stay. If I stayed, the thing inside me would finish what the soldiers started. It would turn this entire neighborhood into a graveyard.
I turned away from the ruins of my life. Every step felt like walking through deep water.
I was no longer Alfa Vance, the college sophomore.
I was an anomaly. A weapon. A monster.
And as I vanished into the shadows of the trees, the last thing I felt was the terrifying, undeniable urge to kill again.