1 Prologe

Farvald Island, 2023

As always, the island was working against him.

Zavion Farvald sighed as he took in the tree outside his office window. The tree was still missing its leaves. In almost any other place in the world, trees would have leaves in the middle of summertime. But as if the island was warning people away from it, the weather in July was always under thirty degrees. Zavion thought, just for a moment, that perhaps people ought to listen to the island, after all, very few people knew what lurked in the woods, the waters, and the mountains of Farvald.

Zavion sighed and sat back down at his desk. His office was much too stuffy for his taste. Literally everything was made out of wood; the desk, the floor, the walls. Zavion still wasn't sure how the lamp on his desk had been made, but he didn't particularly care. He had a bazillion things to do, and worrying about wooden lamps was not one of them. Firstly, he had to take a call. A glance up at the clock hanging above the office door told Zavion that the caller was late. Lovely.

"Z, there's something you need to see," A voice shouted from behind the door. Zavion sunk lower into his seat and waited for his brother, Finnian, to enter the office. Sure enough, the dark wooden door was pushed open and Finnian entered the room. Zavion took in his brother's messy brown hair and wild hazel eyes, and immediately, he knew whatever his brother had found wasn't good.

"What is it, Finn?" Zavion raked a hand through his own brown hair, which-if not for the fact that it had been combed down-was almost identical to Finn's. Both of the brothers were exhausted.

"You aren't going to like it," Finn told him as he laid a manilla file on Zavion's desk. Zavion grabbed the file and opened it. Finn was right; Zavion didn't like what was in the file. The file was thin, but it held all that Zavion needed to know. The Arizona Rouges, as they were known, had made another attack. Of course, this came as no surprise to Zavion, who had been dealing with the rogue rebellion since he had taken over as alpha of North America. However, this didn't mean that he enjoyed seeing the devastation the rogues were capable of creating.

The only picture in the file depicted an aerial view of a small town that had been almost completely blown apart. All that was left of the buildings surrounding the town's square was rubble, and all that was left of the small neighborhood in the town was fire. The rest of the file was just lists of casualties, damage, and who was suspected of planning the attack. For a brief moment, Zavion wondered when Finn-who was also his beta-had found the time to put the file together.

"Alright," Zavion sighed," Put together a forensic team to analyze what's left of the town and tell me what they find. In the meantime, tell the Trackers currently after the Arizona Rouges to get their act together. They're failing miserably at their job." Finnian nodded, picked up the file, and started to leave the office. "Wait, Finn, ask Aura what's up with Dabria, will you? She's causing a ruckus in the house." Zavion wasn't wrong. The demon that lived in the Farvald family's basement was causing the house to shake at all hours of the day, and it was driving the family insane.

"Sure. And on that note, Aura wants to go to the mainland tomorrow, and she wants to know if you'll come?"

"I doubt I'll have the time, sorry."

"Don't worry about it." And with that, Zavion was alone in his office again.

_____________

Elsewhere in Farvald Manor, Aurellia Farvald stood over a giant orange mixing bowl, stirring and whisking and blending the bowl's contents together. Aurellia, as the only witch in the family, was always locked up in her little tower, making some potion or another. This time around, Aurellia was attempting to make another batch of unholy water. The nineteen-year-old witch was nearly an expert on the potion, as she had made it so many times before, but that didn't mean something couldn't go wrong.

Once the mixing bowl had started to emit a grey-ish smoke, Aurellia turned around and looked over the shelves that lined the walls of the circular stone tower. The brunette grabbed two small vials and turned back to the wooden table that sat in the center of the tower. Standing in front of the mixing bowl again, Aurellia uncorked one of the vials, this one labeled Lemon's Tears. Using the measuring spoons sitting on the table next to the bowl, Aurellia measured out two teaspoons of the syrupy, yellow substance. To the uninformed eyes, the substance could easily be mistaken for honey.

After stirring the tears into the bowl, Aurellia tucked a strand of her light brown hair behind her ear and uncorked the second vial. This vial was filled with a clear liquid that could easily be mistaken for water, though the label read Essence of Jupiter. Aurellia measured out a half teaspoon of the liquid and dumped it into the mixing bowl. She stirred the liquid with a spoon made of lead since the unholy water would melt anything else. Slowly but surely, the grey smoke above the mixing bowl began to turn into clear, iridescent spheres that looked ridicoulsy like bubbles. Once all of the smoke had been cleared from the room, and only the bubbles remained, Aurellia was finished.

She sighed and closed her hazel eyes for a moment. She had been up since dawn finishing the potion, because-as any witch knows-unholy water expires very, very quickly. The girl sat down on the little wooden chair next to the table and looked up at the glass ceiling of the tower. Before she had been born, Moira Farvald had used the room as an observatory. But after it became clear that Aurellia needed a space to blow things up, Moira had decided to give the observatory up. Sometimes, though, the Farvald children and Dabria would climb the six flights of stairs to the tower and stare at the stars for hours.

'Aura, calm the demon down. Now,' a voice flitted into her head, and Aurellia recognized it as her older half-brother's. Zavion was mind-linking her. She sighed and pulled her short hair into a small ponytail before grabbing an empty vial from the shelf behind her.

'You know, it wouldn't hurt to use her name,' She thought to him as she ducked the empty vial into the unholy water, holding it under until it was full. Aurellia corked the vial and walked over to the heavy, wooden door of the tower.

'I'll use her name when she stops causing earthquakes.' Aurellia rolled her eyes, but she didn't bother responding to him. They both knew that he cared about the demon just as much as Aurellia.

On her way out the door, Aurellia blew out the single candle that lit up the small tower. Then, she began to make her descent to the basement.

________

The basement of Farvald Manor wasn't nearly as nightmarish as one would expect, but given the fact that the basement was home to a demon of death, not many wandered downstairs at all, which left just Aurellia and Dabria. The demon's room was probably the cleanest room in the house, despite the fact that the white carpet was stained with what was definitely and indisputably blood. The square-shaped room held only a bed, a desk, and a giant mirror, leaving plenty of space for Dabria's...meals. It used to unnerve the family, the fact that their resident demon could only stomach freshly murdered livestock, but everyone got used to it after a while. As long as she wasn't eating people, Dabria was pretty much left to her own devices.

"Dabria?" Aurellia whispered. The demon's room was always dark, but it seemed darker than usual, almost as if the demon was hiding something.

"Dabria? It's me, is everything alright?" Once again, Aurellia got an answer. The room shook suddenly, violently, and Aurellia was absolutely positive that something was wrong. As soon as the shaking stopped, Aurellia heard a roar from the opposite side of the room. Taking a deep breath and tramping down the fear in the pit of her stomach, Aurellia made her way over to where the demon was.

Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the extreme darkness, and she began to see clearly. Usually, her advanced eyesight would have kicked in earlier, but things were always different around demons. Aurellia was able to spot Dabria, huddled in a corner of the room, covering her face with her hands. The demon's long black hair was messy, and her red skin seemed much darker than usual. This confirmed her suspicion: something was very, very, very wrong.

"Dabria?" Aurellia asked so quietly, she wasn't sure Dabria even heard her. But the demon whipped her head around to face Aurellia, and the witch was left staring at Dabria in her pure demonic form. Normally, Dabria kept a sort of half-human-half-demon illusion up, but she had let it drop completely, revealing her pure red eyes, small, but sharp horns, and when she opened her mouth, Aurellia could see the rows and rows of sharp, bloody teeth.

"Something's wrong," the demon gasped quietly.

"I know," Aurellia placed her small hand over the demon's, and the contrast between her pale skin tone and Dabria's dark red skin was striking. "Ree, can you tell me what's wrong?" Aurellia hoped that using the demon's nickname would help her open up.

"I saw something." Dabria shuddered, and Aurellia realized that if whatever Dabria had seen had horrified the demon, then it was most certainly worse than what she had imagined.

"It's okay, it's okay," Aurellia soothed," It'll be okay."

"No, it won't." Dabria's illusion came back up, causing her horns to disappear and her eyes to become that of a human's, if you excluded her red irises. "It won't be okay. Aura, something's coming," Dabria paused and looked towards the giant mirror that hung over her bed," It's coming at the blood moon."