From the corner of my ear, a voice rang out:
“He’s still alive!”
I turned my head. Corwin writhed on the floor, half-pinned beneath three operatives. His skin had split across one cheek, coarse hair pushing through, his jawline stretching wider than it should, teeth gleaming sharp in the torchlight. His eyes weren’t human anymore— yellow, shot through with a feral glow that made my stomach flip. He bucked once and nearly threw two men off.
Another voice cut through, grim and urgent:
“Bind him—silver chains, quick! He’s a beast. A *were-beast*.”
A third specialist swore under his breath.
“Another freaking Henry the Eighth descendant—that guy could smash.”
My blood turned colder than the chapel stone. Corwin—like Henry VIII. Not just a madman. Something worse.
But I stayed where I was, rooted, like something in me refused to leave.
The journal in my pocket had gone hot enough to burn. The crow-shaped scar on my wrist pulsed, not just red but etched with feather-like striations, glowing faintly as though something beneath my skin wanted out. And across the room, the sarcophagus seemed to breathe, each carved line warming, glowing, alive.
Richard’s voice cracked through the air. “Sadie—don’t.”
I knew I should step back. I knew every warning sign was blazing like neon. But the words were already inside me, etched into marrow. The journal had written them, again and again, as if waiting for this moment.
Blood must answer blood.
My hand shook as I pressed it to the carved lid. Cool stone under my palm for half a heartbeat—then a flash, fire racing through my veins, up my arm, exploding in my chest. The lid groaned, stone grinding against stone, until it slid with a final shudder.
Light—white and gold, threaded with ash-black shadow—poured out in a column. I stumbled back, shielding my face as the chapel’s frescoes seemed to flicker in the blast.
And then she rose.
Queen Elizabeth. The Phoenix Queen.
Not a ghost. Not an echo. Flesh and flame and crown. Her gown shimmered like velvet spun from embers; her hair spilled red as coals down her shoulders; her eyes burned, not with fire but with something older, molten gold ringed in darkness.
I forgot how to breathe.
Behind me, Richard barreled in, gun drawn, his coat snapping like a banner. Three Vatican operatives followed, swords and relics at the ready. Their weapons looked absurd against her. Against that.
“Stand back!” Richard shouted. His voice was steady, but his jaw clenched so hard it could’ve cracked stone.
But I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Because her gaze wasn’t on them. It was on me.
Her lips curved—half smile, half curse—as if she’d been waiting four centuries to see my face.
And I knew, down to the last thread of my DNA, that this wasn’t a release. It was a beginning.
The air in the chapel thickened as if every fresco, every stone, held its breath. The Phoenix Queen stood fully revealed, her velvet gown brushing the cracked floor, her crown glimmering with sparks of firelight that weren’t from any earthly flame.
Her voice carried, not shouted but resonant, each word cutting like scripture. “They feared me. They could not kill me. So they caged me.”
Richard edged forward, pistol still aimed, though his hand trembled in a way I’d never seen. “She’s not lying,” he said under his breath. “The Vatican archives mention a binding—an operation sanctioned in Florence, 1623. But it didn’t end her. It only wounded. The reports said fire bled from her veins for three days, but still she lived.”
His eyes narrowed, his tone darkening as he spoke the next part.
“She disappeared from Europe not long after. The records are fragmented, but a merchant ledger out of Bristol lists unusual cargo—an unmarked sarcophagus, loaded under cover of night. The ship’s manifest was signed by men of the Warren family.”
Elizabeth’s head tilted ever so slightly, as if enjoying the accuracy. Richard pressed on, grim.
“They were no ordinary sailors. The Warrens were bound to her cause—wealthy traders
who later put their kin on the Mayflower. Our histories paint them as devout Pilgrims, but the Vatican suspected otherwise. That voyage was not only a pilgrimage; it was cover. They ferried relics, texts, and her… a queen in exile, hidden among crates of salt fish and woolens.”
A Vatican soldier muttered, crossing himself. “God help us. She crossed with the founders.”
Richard’s jaw tightened.
“Her prison moved with her. Locked in stone, lashed down in the hold. They thought they had hidden her forever. But she did not die. She endured.”
Elizabeth’s golden eyes flickered, pleased.
“Even your enemies tell my story more truthfully than you know.”
Her gaze snapped to me, and I felt my scar sear.
“By the House of the Crow. Your blood, girl. Your mother’s hand closed this prison on me.”
I shook my head, but before I could answer, one of the Vatican specialists spoke up. He was younger than the others, face pale under the glow of relic-light.
“There’s precedent. Anne of Cleves’ descendants… the Kr?mer family. Every record of them vanishes after the 17th century. Some say they hunted what the Church itself couldn’t. In fact, we think there were the real Grimms – hunting the paranaormal.”
Nina’s voice broke in, sharp, almost too quick.
“I’ve read those records. They weren’t hunters—they were executioners. They purged anything that didn’t fit their doctrine. If Elizabeth stood outside their control, they would have buried her alive. Gods know they secured several of my ancestors”
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Elizabeth’s smile curved like a blade. “And so they did, Siren, So, They. Did”
Richard’s jaw clenched. “If she’s telling the truth, Nina, it wasn’t doctrine. It was necessity. A being that feeds on fire and ash, immortal—”
Candy’s voice, quiet but steady, cut through like a hearth flame.
“Phoenix lore doesn’t speak of feeding. It speaks of cycles. Death and rebirth. Transformation. If she was sealed here, it wasn’t just fear—it was fear of the next thing she would become.”
Elizabeth tilted her head, as if weighing Candy’s words.
“You brew truth with your herbs, woman. They feared the rising more than the flame.”
She turned back to me. Her expression softened, almost maternal, but her eyes still burned. “Do you know what it is to burn for centuries? To hear the world shift and change above you, yet be bound beneath stone, unable to breathe, unable to rise? All because your blood betrayed you?”
The soldiers shifted uneasily. One, older, scarred across the temple, muttered:
“The Gardner heist… the missing paintings. We always suspected they weren’t theft at all, but sacrifice. Something to strengthen her chains.”
Elizabeth’s laugh was low, bitter. “Not sacrifice. Portals. My portraits were gateways, bound in paint and gold leaf. They stole them to shut the doors. To erase my ways of walking the world. But still I endured.”
She leaned closer, and her voice dropped until it was almost intimate.
“I have been locked here since the year you call nineteen ninety. I heard Boston move above me—the Red Sox curse finally broken, the Marathon bombing, the rise and fall of presidents, the voices of mourners after towers fell. All of it carried through stone, through prayers and footsteps. I heard your people’s joy, and I heard their fear. Yet I remained in the dark.”
Her gaze caught mine and didn’t let go.
“You cannot imagine what it is to be silenced while history roars above you.”
Richard spoke through clenched teeth, never lowering his weapon.
“You call it endurance. The archives call it corruption. A queen who drank the blood of fire, whose hunger broke nations. My orders are clear: if freed, you must be destroyed.”
Her gaze flicked to him like a falcon’s.
“And yet you stand behind her.” She nodded toward me. “You aim your weapons at me, but you shield her. Tell me, son of Rome—if she commands you to spare me, will you disobey?”
Richard didn’t answer. His silence was worse than any threat. Elizabeth stepped closer, velvet whispering across stone.
“You carry her blood,” she whispered to me. “And her betrayal. Choose differently than she
- Do not chain me. Stand with me, and I will unmake your enemies. Burn the world clean beside you.”
The scar on my wrist blazed like a brand, each pulse echoing her words.
Inside me, war. My heart screamed that Martha’s blood was mine—Martha, casseroles and tea and every kind word that ever kept me alive. But this other blood, this hidden current, pulled like gravity. My ancestors, Haus Kr?mer, the crows, the journal’s whisper.
Richard’s voice in one ear: She’s dangerous.
Nina’s anger in the other: The Vatican only fears what it cannot own. Candy’s calm center grounding me: Cycles. Rebirth.
And Elizabeth, velvet and flame: You were made for this. I felt like I was splitting down the middle.
It was too much. Too fast.
But beneath it all, I felt one thing:
She wasn’t going to beg. She was going to convince.
The Spanish Chapel still reeked of incense, blood, and burned stone when the traitors made their move.
Corwin staggered against the wall, one hand pressed to his ribs where Richard’s blade had cut deep. His eyes burned with fury, but his body betrayed him—each breath came ragged, and dark stains spread across his shirt in irregular blooms.
Two Vatican soldiers rushed to his side. For a moment, a watcher on might have thought they meant to restrain him. But when the taller one slipped his arm beneath Corwin’s shoulders and hissed, “This way, sir,” The would be watcher would know the truth.
Traitors.
The chaos of the battle still churned around them—shouts echoing through the chapel, the hiss of extinguished torches, the groan of the veil stretched too thin. No one noticed when the soldiers half-carried Corwin, half morphed and burnt, down a side passage, through a service tunnel that smelled of wet earth and old lime.
At the far end, a blast of winter air knifed in. The tunnel opened onto a hidden courtyard where a black helicopter crouched like a waiting insect, rotors already ticking. Two more men stood guard, rifles slung loose, tattoos of the Templar cross visible at their throats even in the half-light.
Inside the aircraft, Steve and Martha Warren sat bound and gagged, eyes wide with terror. Their chairs were bolted to the floor, makeshift restraints to keep them from being flung out mid-flight.
Corwin grinned despite the blood on his teeth. “You’ve done well,” he rasped to the men hauling him.
“Your work must continue,” one answered stiffly, avoiding his gaze. “The others are distracted. We have minutes.”
They shoved him into the helicopter’s cabin. He slumped into the seat opposite Steve and Martha, his pale face lit from below by the instrument glow. He touched the blade still clutched in his hand—a curved, ritual thing slick with his own blood—and whispered a phrase in the old tongue. Shadows trembled in the corners of the cabin, as if eager to follow wherever he went.
The pilot lifted them into the night, rotors chopping the cold air. Boston’s lights receded, dwindled to a smear of gold, then vanished as they swept out over the black stretch of water.
Martha tried to scream against the gag. Steve shook his head violently, a useless plea.
Corwin leaned forward, the movement slow and deliberate, his smile thin and cruel. “Do not fear. Your daughter will come. She always does.” Corwin snapped his burnt fingers, already healing. The co-pilot handed him a cell phone. Corwin flipped it open and pressed the only number saved. Someone ripped the gags off of Steve and Martha just as Corwin ordered “Call your daughter”
The helicopter banked south along the Connecticut shoreline, the fog swallowing it whole.
The silence broke with a sound so jarring it didn’t belong in a chapel: my phone ringing. I jumped. The screen glowed with Martha’s name.
My thumb swiped instinctively. “Mom?”
Her voice exploded through the speaker—ragged, panicked. “Sadie! Oh God—Sadie, help!”
Noise roared in the background—metal crashing, glass shattering, and then a scream that wasn’t hers. The line distorted with static, shrill enough to make me flinch.
“Mom! Where are you?” My own voice cracked, too loud, bouncing off stone.
“Don’t—” The word broke, drowned in chaos. A sound like heavy boots slamming against wood, and then only Martha’s raw scream before the call cut off.
Silence.
I stared at the screen as it went black, my pulse louder than the Vatican chants still echoing from outside.
“This is all my fault,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure to whom.
Elizabeth’s golden gaze lingered on me with predatory curiosity, as if Martha’s voice had been another pawn in her chess game.
When I turned, Nina was gone.
The realization didn’t hit like a thunderclap—it crept, a slow chill spreading up my spine. She’d been right there, shoulder squared, jaw tight. Now the space beside the Vatican soldiers was empty, only the faint sway of air to mark her absence.
One of the operatives muttered, scanning the dark corners of the chapel. “Nina’s gone!” All of our eyes moved to the fountain in the courtyard. Of Couse! Nina the helpful siren took the watery way out. What. The. Fuck!
Another cursed and held up a device—small, metallic, glinting faintly with a symbol not
Vatican-issued.
“Signal beacon. She’s been calling someone in. Not us.”
The soldier’s face tightened. “The sect. The purists. The ones who believe the Phoenix must be destroyed, no matter the cost.”
Richard’s expression cracked, fury spilling into his voice. “Damn it, Nina. You knew. You knew what was at stake. Who the Fuck has Corwin?” Richard bellowed. The female operative, the one with marine shoulders, stepped forward.
“Sir, it appears hes escaped with two of our men.”
Richard composure broke then, and I was instantly terrified. Non of us moved for a very long time. Not until we were sure he was under control.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Elizabeth broke it with a laugh that slid like silk over a blade.
“The one who caged me now cages herself. Your friend runs to the very hands that will end her. And your mother…” Her eyes caught mine, molten and merciless. “…your mother screams because the chains that bound me reach for her now.”
I staggered back. “Don’t you dare talk about her—” Her lips curved, amused.
“Then choose. End me, and her ghost will never find you. Keep me, and together we will
burn the world clean. You alone decide my death.”
Richard grabbed my arm, grounding and demanding at once.
“We secure her now. We move to find Nina. And Martha—Martha can be reached. If we keep our heads. Sadie, look at me.”
But my body felt split between them all—Richard’s hard grip, Martha’s scream still ringing in my bones, the empty air where Nina had stood, and Elizabeth’s velvet whisper curling through my veins.
The scar on my wrist pulsed again, harder now, syncing to my heartbeat until I couldn’t tell which was mine and which was hers.
I wanted to collapse. I wanted to scream.
Instead, I stood in the wreckage of trust and bloodlines, knowing every choice would damn someone.
And Elizabeth leaned closer, so close her words brushed against my ear: “You, and you alone, may decide my death.”