Aidan Cross had been broken long before the sky turned red.
He didn't remember the exact moment it happened. Not when the first bullet grazed past his cheek in Kandahar. Not when his unit walked into an ambush outside Kyiv. Not even when they burned the village in Moldova under a midnight sky full of stars that stared back like gods.
No, the break wasn't a clean snap. It was erosion.Layer by layer, something inside him had worn away.
The apartment reeked of damp concrete and gun oil.
He lived on the sixth floor of a gutted-out public housing tower in Southie. Half the floors were condemned. The elevators hadn't worked in two years. He liked it that way—no neighbors, no questions.
It was just past midnight. Aidan sat on a stained mattress, back against the wall, eyes locked on his hand.
His left forearm still pulsed with that unnatural hue. Faint veins of blue-white light beneath the skin, like frost etched into his blood. It wasn't constant—it came in waves. Like a tide, or a heartbeat that didn't belong to him.
He ran his fingers over the old scar across his wrist.Three inches. Self-inflicted.Six years ago.
The military had called it "combat stress."The priest in Bucharest called it something else.
"Blood trauma," the old man had whispered. "Some bloodlines cannot carry what they were meant to forget."
The fridge buzzed, then died.
He stood up slowly. The power grid had been down for hours, but some electronics still spasmed like they were possessed. TVs turning on. Radios whispering in Latin. Machines blinking with no power source.
He'd smashed his TV earlier that night after it spoke to him.
But his reflection lingered on the cracked glass.
Not quite right.Not just fractured—divided.
Aidan crossed to his gear locker and opened it. Military-grade, unregistered. Kevlar vest. Two Glocks. Tactical knife. Custom trench blade. A weathered book wrapped in a red cloth—his only souvenir from Moldova.He'd stolen it from the chapel after the massacre.
It had no title. The pages were brittle and handwritten in Old Church Slavonic. He couldn't read it. But every time he touched it, the burning in his arm grew stronger.
That couldn't be coincidence.
He moved to the window and pried the boards apart.
Boston had gone quiet.
No traffic. No planes. No sirens. Just flickering orange in the distance—fires in the financial district. A gunshot echoed faintly somewhere near Dorchester, followed by screams. And above it all, the moon hung swollen, bleeding light over the blackened skyline.
Something was happening to the world.And he'd felt it coming for years.
He remembered the woman from earlier. The vampire.Though even that word felt wrong.
She hadn't just been a predator—she had worshiped something. In those final moments, as her chest caved under his fist and she disintegrated into soot, she whispered a name.
"Revelari…"
He didn't know what it meant. But the sound of it rang ancient, heavy, and final.
Like the tolling of a bell that no one else could hear.
He grabbed the book again and set it on the table. Opened to a random page.
This time, something had changed.
Blood. Fresh. A circle of it, drawn across the parchment like a sigil. Not there before.
He blinked. The words shifted before his eyes, and just for a moment, he could read them:
"He who bears the severed mark shall awaken the Covenant's flame. One bloodline, broken and betrayed, shall return to burn the shadows."
Aidan's hand began to glow again.
He closed the book.
He didn't know what any of this meant—not yet. But deep down, he could feel something ancient clawing its way through the cracks in his memories.
He walked to the mirror, knelt in front of it.
His reflection flickered.
In one shard, he wore a cloak of feathers and a mask of bone. In another, his face was scorched, eyes glowing with golden light. In the third, he stood surrounded by fire—while things screamed in the dark behind him.
He touched the glass.
It was cold. But not dead.
He whispered to no one, "Why me?"
And the mirror whispered back:
"Because you were never meant to be just a soldier."