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CALLUM

T racking Edmund feels like chasing a ghost in a haunted forest.

Everything smells wrong.

The deeper we move into the outskirts—past the last few safehouses, through crumbling backwoods littered with rust and shadow—the more my instincts scream.

Kendall moves beside me, quiet and sharp-eyed, following my lead even when she’s itching to go faster. Her expression’s all steel, but her heart’s thudding hard enough I can feel it in the space between us.

“He was here,” I mutter, crouching beside a broken fencepost.

She stops. “How long ago?”

I sniff, frown. “A few hours. Maybe less. There’s blood.”

Her breath catches. “Is it his?”

I shake my head. “Don’t know. Could be.”

I brush leaves aside and find the trail—barely visible, smears of rust-colored red on a flattened patch of dirt. Something was dragged. Not far. But far enough.

Kendall crouches beside me. “Is it fresh?”

“Not warm. But not old either.”

She looks up at the trees, eyes scanning the bark. And that’s when she sees it.

“Callum,” she says, voice suddenly tight. “Look.”

My gaze follows hers.

There, carved into the trunk of a black pine—deep and precise—is a sigil.

A jagged spiral intersected by claw marks and circles, etched in a language older than most modern tongues. And it makes my stomach drop.

“Fuck,” I whisper.

Kendall kneels closer. “What is it?”

I touch the edge of the carving. My fingers come back sticky with something black.

“Blood,” I say. “Mixed with iron dust.”

“That’s… not normal.”

“No,” I say. “It’s Brood .”

Her eyes widen. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve seen this mark once before. Ten years ago. At a camp where they kept our kind locked up during the Reaping.”

I can barely say the word without spitting.

Kendall rises slowly, eyes narrowing. “What does it mean?”

“It’s a claim,” I say. “Not a warning. Not a threat. It means ‘this one belongs to us.’”

She goes pale.

I step back, letting the scent of blood and earth wash over me. I try to listen past the wind and trees—past the tremble in Kendall’s breath.

But the forest has nothing to say. Not yet.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. Elias.

I yank it out and answer without thinking, my voice clipped. “Talk.”

“You’re not gonna like it,” he says, already tense.

“I already don’t.”

“We cracked the rogue,” he says. “The one from the backwoods raid.”

“Did he say anything useful?”

“He didn’t give much... but what he did give—shit, Cal.” His voice dips, quieter. Strained. “This is bad.”

My gut clenches. “What?”

“He says Typhon’s Brood isn’t just building numbers anymore. They’ve got a weapon.”

My blood goes cold.

“Define weapon.”

“Not a nuke. Not a biochem bomb. Something worse.”

“What kind of worse?”

There’s a pause on the line. I can hear Elias shifting, like he doesn’t want to say it out loud.

“He called it The Hollowed,” he says. “Said it wasn’t alive. Not in the normal way. Not in the way we understand. Said it was buried under the city—deep—until recently.”

Kendall steps closer to me, her expression taut, eyes narrowed. I can feel the fear rolling off her skin. She already knows. Somehow, she knows .

My stomach knots. “Are they using it now?”

“I don’t know,” Elias mutters. “But the rogue… he was barely coherent. Said it could pull bloodlines apart. That it rips through memory—identity—pack ties. Like it unravels everything from the inside out.”

A chill races up my spine.

“It doesn’t kill,” Elias goes on. “It rearranges . Rewrites. Said it takes the shape of whatever it latches onto. It feeds off instinct. And when it takes enough… it changes you. Like, fundamentally .”

I can barely breathe.

Kendall's hand brushes mine. “Callum?”

She sees it in my face before I can say a word.

I cover the phone. “It’s bad.”

“How bad?” she whispers.

I uncover the speaker. “Why would they want this? Why would the Brood use something that could destroy their own kind?”

Elias sighs, low and shaken. “From what we could get out of the rogue... they want it to. He said they believe it’ll 'free' them. That it’ll break the hierarchy. Dismantle what makes us pack . They think it’ll turn us into apex predators—no weaknesses, no attachments, no orders.”

“Just chaos,” I mutter.

“They think that’s what purity is,” Elias says. “No lines, no rules. Just survival of the strongest. And this thing? This curse or spirit or entity—whatever the hell it is—it’s the tool they think will bring it on.”

“And they’ve already started using it?” I ask.

Elias hesitates. Then says, “The way the rogue said it? Like it’s already awake. Like it’s already moving.”

My jaw tightens. My throat is sand.

I hang up.

Kendall stares at me. Her usually bright blue eyes are dull now. Shadowed.

“Callum,” she breathes. “What is it?”

“They’re not just coming for us with firepower,” I say, stepping closer to her. “They’re coming for what we are . Our instincts. Our bonds . Our minds .”

She shakes her head. “That’s not possible. You can’t just… rewrite someone.”

I look her in the eye. “It is. If they’ve found something old enough. Something buried deep enough that it remembers what we were before we had control. Before we chose to be something more than monsters.”

Kendall’s throat works, and she glances down at her hands like they might give her an answer. “Do you think it has something to do with me? Or Adora?”

I hesitate.

Because yeah. I do.

I think this is all tied together—the way her power’s been shifting, the bond between them, the visions she’s had. The sudden way Adora’s instincts flipped from curious to ruthless. The way Kendall glows when she taps into her bloodline. The Hollowed isn’t some distant threat. It’s inside the story now. Woven in with them. With us.

But I don’t say that.

Instead, I touch her wrist. “We keep moving. We find Edmund. We finish this trail.”

Her jaw tightens. She nods once. But her pulse doesn’t slow.

Neither does mine.

Because now I know—this isn’t about taking over.

This is about undoing everything.

The Brood doesn’t want peace. They don’t want power in the way most people think of it. They want destruction at the cellular level. A world without bonds. Without structure. Without mercy.

They want the Hollowed to consume us.

We start walking again, deeper into the trees. But even with her beside me… I can’t shake the feeling that something’s watching us. Waiting.