The moment his eyes snapped open, I knew I was screwed.

  They weren’t human anymore.

  The whites had vanished—swallowed up by a slick, bottomless black that didn’t reflect light so much as consume it. His pupils were gone. Just oily voids sucking at the edges of reality.

  And then the bag moved. Not just a twitch. Not a shuffle. It shifted.

  It reared up on its straps like a cobra. The zipper split wide, jagged metal teeth unfolding outward like a grotesque grin. Inside, not cloth. Not padding.

  A mouth.

  Wet. Quivering. Lined with rows of twitching, uneven fangs. Pink and raw and eager.

  The thing lunged.

  Pure instinct took over. I caught it midair, fingers burning like I’d grabbed hold of a stovetop covered in wet hair. The bag thrashed, squirming like a living thing—and not like an animal. Like something that had only read about animals in a pamphlet once and decided to give it a go.

  It was wet, and hot, and pulsing. Not in a good way.

  I did the only thing I could think of.

  I threw it.

  Straight up. Uselessly. Desperately.

  It twisted midair, snapping itself back toward me like a heat-seeking parasite—

  But Lily moved.

  Too fast for my eyes to track. One second, she was beside me, the next—WHUMP.

  It landed square on her shoulder, teeth digging in.

  She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry out.

  She snarled, head jerking as the bite tore into her arm, blood soaking the edge of her blouse. One knee dropped. Her nails sharpened into talons, eyes flaring with soft, embered gold. She ripped into the creature like she was mad at it for daring to touch her.

  And then Elly was there.

  Flickering like a glitch in the alley’s light. A ripple of static, a stutter in the air. One moment human, the next something else entirely—her eyes sharp and green, gleaming with unnatural focus. Her fingers became claws, striking with surgical speed.

  RIP—TEAR—SHRIEK

  The bag screamed. Not from its mouth—no, that was busy gnashing and drooling—but from its body, like the whole thing was one enormous lung built for anguish.

  The guy staggered.

  Clutching his ribs, the same spot Elly had hit the bag.

  “Oh,” I muttered. “They’re—connected.”

  The delivery man’s head snapped toward me like a broken toy. His smile hadn’t faded. It had widened.

  Euryale didn’t hesitate.

  She descended on him like a hammer in heels—one elegant, devastating leg snapping out in a perfect arc. Her heel struck his chest with a crunch, driving him into the brick wall hard enough to knock loose plaster.

  He crumpled—but his smile didn’t break.

  And when he coughed—It wasn’t blood.

  What came out was moving. Black sludge, twitching like a pile of beetles soaked in tar.

  “Okay, nope,” I said, backing away from it like a man facing his own grave.

  Lily yanked the bag off her shoulder and hurled it to the ground. It writhed, still snarling, its mouth open and gasping like a fish on land.

  Elly stomped down hard on it, her foot phasing slightly as if reality itself couldn’t agree what her boot was made of.

  The bag popped.

  A geyser of black ichor sprayed upward, misting the alley walls in oily tears.

  The guy shrieked in pain, clutching his chest like his heart had just been ripped out—but even then, even then—

  He grinned.

  And then he spoke. Low. Too low. Something I couldn’t hear with my ears so much as feel in the marrow of my spine.

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  A phrase. A command. A sound that tasted like static and copper. And then—He was gone.

  Not like teleporting. Not a blink. Not even smoke and sparkles.

  He just… folded out of reality. Shadows closed around him like a mouth, and he vanished into nothing. The alley fell silent.

  My own ragged breathing was the loudest thing left.

  Elly flicked black slime off her fingers with a hiss. “Well. That thing’s going to suck to track.”

  “Wait.” I blinked. “We’re letting him go?”

  Euryale rolled her eyes. “We’re not letting him do anything, Dan. That was some kind of cloaked phasing spell. Anchorless.”

  Lily inspected her shoulder. It was healing—slowly. But wrong. The skin was angry, like the bite had left behind more than just holes.

  She caught my stare and smirked. “What, worried about me now?”

  “Yes! I threw a cursed delivery bag at you!”

  She grinned wider. “Danny, that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me all week.”

  “You need a new social circle.”

  Elly wiped her claws on a napkin that materialized out of nowhere. “That wasn’t some feral ghoul or rogue demon. That thing was sent.”

  “Sent?” I echoed. “Like... with intent?”

  Euryale crossed her arms. “They know you’re claimed, Dan, but that means nothing if your claimers are not able to protect you. They’re testing our defenses.”

  I blinked. “Wait. I smell like—what, supernatural property?!”

  Lily nodded. “Absolutely. You’re like a marked snack cake. Easy pickings. Smells like Elly’s code, my aura, and Eury’s psychic residue. All stacked up on top of whatever makes you a Null.”

  “And they can smell that?”

  “Some smell it. Some can taste it,” Elly muttered. “And some of them like that flavor.”

  “Oh great,” I said. “So, I’m a cursed Twinkie.”

  Lily gave me a wink. “With a very gooey center.”

  “I hate all of this.”

  Euryale dusted herself off. “We need to get out of here before someone sees that stain and tries to Glimmr it.”

  “Glimmr?” I repeated.

  “Like supernatural TikTok.” She explained.

  I shook my head and looked at the splatter. Already fading. Just like the bag. Like none of it had ever existed.

  But I could still smell the copper. The bile. The singed air where Elly’s claws had short-circuited a nightmare.

  They were right. This wasn’t over.

  Not even close.

  I didn’t speak the whole walk back.

  Not because I didn’t have questions—oh no, I had so many questions—but because I was trying very hard not to scream in public like someone on a very visible mental break. Which, to be fair, I probably was.

  Elly and Euryale flanked me like a pair of mismatched bodyguards. Lily trailed behind, her pace a little slower than usual. She was holding her arm now, her lips tight in a way I hadn’t seen before.

  That was how I knew she was hurt: she wasn’t making jokes.

  Elly noticed it too. I could tell by the way her fingers twitched at her sides. She kept glancing back at Lily, then at me, then forward again. She was worried. And when Elly was worried? That meant something was seriously broken.

  We made it back to my apartment without incident.

  No eldritch Postmates. No haunted Uber drivers. No neighbors pretending not to see the blood on Lily’s sleeve.

  Inside, I threw the deadbolt behind us and just... leaned on the door. Eyes shut. Breathing hard. Trying not to collapse.

  “Danny,” Lily said softly, her voice lower now. Strained. “Do you have a first aid kit?”

  “Uh.” I blinked. “Sort of?”

  Elly groaned. “He has Band-Aids. That’s it.”

  “I have aspirin too,” I added.

  “Wow,” Euryale muttered. “The cutting edge of mortal medicine.”

  I fumbled into the bathroom and grabbed the little plastic box I kept under the sink. Elly already had Lily seated on the couch, unrolling the torn sleeve with a gentleness I wasn’t expecting.

  The bite wasn’t deep—more like torn skin and swelling than full-on mauling—but it was... wrong. The edges were tinged with a sickly green flush, like it was already rejecting the idea of healing.

  “Why isn’t she regenerating?” I asked, kneeling next to them. “Don’t you all, like, heal fast?”

  “She does, from mortal-caused wounds,” Elly said, her voice clipped. “But that thing wasn’t natural. Whatever it bit with wasn’t just teeth—it was soaked in something necrotic. Not poison. Not a disease. Something... deliberate.”

  “Hexed?” Euryale asked.

  Elly nodded. “I think so. Might even be tethered to that phase magic he used.”

  Lily waved them both off. “I’m fine. I’ve had worse.”

  “You’ve also had smarter,” Elly snapped. “You should’ve let it hit one of us.”

  “Excuse you?” I said, pointing at myself. “Let’s not start a ‘who should get eaten first’ contest, thanks.”

  Lily’s lips curled into a smirk, but her eyes didn’t quite match the expression. She leaned back, tired. “It hurts,” she admitted quietly. “More than it should.”

  That shut everyone up for a minute.

  “Hold her hand, Daniel?” Elly suggested.

  “Why?”

  “Willing offering of contact can heal her.”

  I reached for her hand—then hesitated. “Can I...?”

  Lily nodded.

  Her skin was burning hot, even for her. Not feverish. Like the energy inside her was trying to burn something out and couldn’t. I gave her fingers a light squeeze.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said, and for once, I wanted to believe it.

  “You don’t know that,” she whispered.

  I didn’t. But it felt like the right thing to say, and the contact seemed as if she were drawing on my energy. It didn’t hurt. It just made me feel like my coffee had worn off.

  Euryale stood near the window with her arms crossed. Watching the street like a sentry.

  Elly paced. Her foot tapped a rapid rhythm on the floor. “We need to talk,” she said finally, her voice sharp. “This wasn’t random. That was a probe.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “A test. A scout. They didn’t send him to kill you. Not yet. He was trying to gauge our defenses.”

  “They found us,” Euryale murmured. “This soon? That’s bad.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What does that mean?”

  Lily looked up, meeting my gaze with those hungry, glowing eyes. “It means you’re on the board now, Danny. And someone just flipped the timer.”

  I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me.

  Elly met my stare head-on. “There’s something I haven’t told you. About Nulls. About you. There’s a reason why people like that are starting to find you. Why they’re pushing now.”

  “And?”

  She hesitated.

  “You’re not just a fluke, Daniel,” she said softly. “You’re rare. Dangerously rare. To the right person, you’re not just a curiosity. You’re the key to something they’ve been chasing for centuries.”

  I swallowed. My mouth was suddenly very dry.

  “Key to what?”

  Euryale answered, her voice low. “To breaking the veil. To letting them in.”

  “Them who?”

  Lily smiled, but there was no humor in it. “You’ll see. Sooner than you want.”

  I sat down hard on the floor, surrounded by three supernatural women who apparently knew more about my life than I ever would.

  Outside, the sun dipped low, casting long, distorted shadows against the curtains.

  Inside, it felt like something had just shifted. Some line, some boundary, had been crossed. And the next time that thing showed up?

  I had a feeling pepper spray wouldn’t cut it.