He appraised the scent in Damien's head. It was a most complex tapestry of layered information which had his human mind struggling to process. It had grown ancient. This wolf scent was not the vital, aggressive musk of a predator on the hunt; it was dry, like old parchment-the scent of a creature who had spent more time with books than trees. This was the scent of immense age and quiet, solitary power. Instinctually triggered his blood - the cursed, intelligent blood he was still learning to understand. The blood-alien, musty, ancient places-his mother tongue, body of the lore, the past, and the answers. Selena looked at him wide-eyed, listening for his next move. The journalist in her smelled a streak, but the pragmatist emerging in her new monstrous world understood that he was the key to this particular lock. His senses, his curse - their only way in. "Stay here." He murmured, his voice low. "If anything happens, if I'm not back in five minutes, get in the car and drive away. Don't look back." "Damien, no. We do this together," she began to argue, but he silenced her with a look. It wasn't the command of a CEO, but the plea of a man stepping into a live bomb field, begging the person behind him not to follow. "This is my world, Selena. My curse. Let me be the one to knock on the door."
Reluctantly, she nodded, her expression a mixture between frustration and fear. He left her in the shadows of the opposing building and crossed the street; the world seemed to narrow until it was just him and the silent, imposing building. As he drew closer, the scents sharpened. There were the specific aromas of decaying papyrus, of iron gall ink, of fine leather bindings. Then the wolf scent was stronger, a constant, low thrum of ancient presence. The heavy oak door was cool and solid under fingertips. There was no handle. No bell. No keyhole. It was a seamless, silent statement of refusal of the outside world, and it was the only area under his hand. He ran his hand along the doorframe, his heightened sense of touch detecting a subtle variance in the texture of the stone. There, almost invisible in the dim light, was a small, intricate carving. It was a symbol he recognized instantly from his father's journals: a stylized wolf's eye, interwoven with the branches of a barren tree. The sigil of the Night Weavers, the keepers of lore. This was not a door to be opened by force. It was a gate demanding a key of a different sort. He pressed on the carving, pushed at the door, but it was as solid and unmoving as the bedrock of the city. He thought back to the journals, to the paranoid scrawls about the old ways, the forgotten rituals. The blood remembers. The blood is the key.
This was a test. A riddle for those of the bloodline. They wanted to know to whose knocking this door opened. Was it a mundane man, or it was a conquering rival clan or it was one of their own? He looked back across the street. In the darkness, Selena was a silhouette, watching, waiting, and now, coming there, he heard an internal growl. It sounded like the bell toll of doom, the greatest cause for Ash's coming sin. The thought of what he was about to do, embracing the very curse he despised, felt like a betrayal of the man he used to be. But that man was gone. He was something else now, and to protect her and to find answers he had to unleash every part of his new, monstrous self. He pulled a small, elegant pocketknife from his pants - a habit from his days of opening letters and packages, now a tool for a much darker purpose - and, with a steady hand, made a small, clean cut across the pad of his thumb. A bead of dark blood welled up, shockingly red in the gloom. It smelled of him, of Voss, of the curse. Taking a deep breath, he pressed his bleeding thumb directly onto the carved wolf's eye. He traced the lines of the sigil, anointing with his fresh, cursed blood the ancient stone.
Nothing happened for a long moment. The city hummed on oblivious to him. He felt a flicker of foolishness. Did he just get involved in something futile, melodramatic piece of theater? He was about to tell Selena that it was a dead end when he heard it. The low, grinding sound was not mechanical but a sound of stone. It seemed not to be the other sounds of the world but rather absorbed them, so created a pocket of impossible silence and motion; deep, resonant groans with which heavy oak door swung silently inward into a chasm of complete darkness. From the very air that wafted out it was lined with the sweet scent he'd detected from the street but a hundred times more potent. Millennia of buried secrets and forgotten words. He stood at the threshold of two worlds, the bright loud modern city at his back and deep, quiet ancient darkness before him. He turned and met Selena's wide astonished eyes across the street. He gave her a single sharp nod. An invitation. Her hesitation was fleeting. She looked both ways down the empty street and then crossed, her determined stride eating up the distance between them. She came to a stop beside him, peering into the yawning blackness of the descending staircase before them. The research was over. The hunt for rumors was done. They had found the door to the hidden world. Now, all they had to do was find the courage to step through it.