"I love you, Clara," I said. "Thank you for agreeing to marry me."She smiled, but she didn't say a word. I followed the direction of her distracted eyes to the digital clock on the restaurant wall; it was moving irregularly. It paused for a few seconds, skipped a couple of seconds and then stopped working all together.She let out a quiet breath from her lips and placed her fork on the rim of her plate, before finally turning to me."Leo, something is wrong." she said in a voice that was strangely quieter than its usual pitch and devoid of its usual warmth that was always there whenever she spoke to me."What's wrong?" I asked, pulling closer."Check your phone."I pulled the phone from my coat and peered into it. The screen didn't display zero bars or a searching signal, the network icon had simply vanished, replaced by an empty grey box. I raised my head and looked around us. The low hum of dinner conversation in the restaurant was gradually dying out. Two men at the corner table s

For a few sickening seconds that felt like forever, we fell through the air and with a loud CRASH, we slammed through a floor-to-ceiling glass window of the adjacent building, tumbling across a dark, carpeted office floor amidst a shower of heavy glass shards and metal blinds.Pain exploded through my body and I rolled over, gasping for air, the room spinning around me in the dark."Clara," I choked out, pushing myself up on bleeding hands. "Clara, speak to me!""I'm... I'm here," her voice came from under a overturned desk.I crawled over to her, grabbing her shoulders to pull her up. "Are you hit? Did the glass cut you?""I don't think so," she whispered with a trembling voice. "My shoulder just... it hurts, Leo. It feels like it's on fire."I pulled out my lighter(it was the old brass one my dad gave me) and flicked the wheel. A tiny orange flame lit up the dark office.I reached out and pulled her jacket collar back to check for glass cuts and my heart stopped.On her right should

The glass windows imploded from the screams and sent a thousand razor-sharp crystal shards across the marble boardroom as a massive, silver-furred body slammed through the glass fifty stories up. The creature crashed onto the long conference table, wooden mahogany splintering into kindling beneath eight hundred pounds of raw, dense muscle. I looked away to avoid glass shards getting in my eyes."Cover!" Cassian barked without the velvet edge of the voice he earlier talked in.The three tactical guards fired instantly, sending blue tracer rounds that lighted up the darkened suite in rapid and deafening quick succession, towards the beast. Steel and silver slugs ripped into the beast’s chest, but the wolf didn't fall. It let out a guttural roar that rattled the teeth in my jaw, and swept its massive arm across the floor, picking and launching a two-hundred-pound marble pedestal directly into two of the guards, but for their swift maneuver, they'd have been crushed against the back wall.

The cable snapped above us with a sound like the sound of a rifle being shot, and the floor dropped out from under our feet. That sickening, stomach-lurching instant of weightlessness where your heart floats up into your throat was the first feeling I had. Then came the screech of emergency brakes grinding against steel guide rails and throwing sparks through the dark cracks of the elevator doors. It slowed us down for two terrifying seconds before the secondary clamps sheared completely off. "Clara!" I screamed, wrapping my body over hers as the dark shaft rushed up to swallow us. The impact slammed the breath out of my lungs with the force of a wrecking ball, and I felt an unhealthy amount of pain surge through me. The heavy steel cage crumpled like a soda can when it struck the concrete pit of the Sub-level and the single overhead light bulb detonated into a shower of white-hot sparks. A very thick suffocating silence settled in what was left of the damaged lift. It was bro

I could hear the cold and synthetic voices of the Synod tactical squad echoing through the arch: "Flanking left. Deploy silver flash-grates. Do not damage the Priestly specimen."I was now a specimen. "Leo..." Clara gasped. "It's... it's peaking... the sky..." I looked up through a rusty iron ventilation shaft twenty feet above. The storm clouds had split cleanly open and high above the burning city, the Harvest Blood Moon hung like a severed, hemorrhaging eye, pouring a deep, suffocating crimson glare down through every crack in the earth. The fever in her blood answered it instantly and Clara let out a wet, strangled choke as black, hardened talons burst from her fingertips for a third time, slicing straight through the sleeve of my jacket. She grabbed my neck and tightened her grip like a hydraulic vise, her fangs lengthening against her lower lip. "Not now!" I roared, my voice breaking. "Clara, hold on for two more minutes! JUST TWO MINUTES!" I didn't slap my palm on her fac