The dawn air was thin and colorless. The city's usual hum had not yet risen from its streets; even the crows seemed hesitant to speak.
Marc—Moonveil—stood before the small pond tucked behind the ruins of an industrial park. Its surface trembled faintly from the distant rattle of trains, a mirror for the gray sky above.
His hands were stained deep red to the wrists, the blood darkening as it dried, thick in the lines of his palms. The water at the edge shivered as he knelt and dipped them in. For a moment, the world seemed to breathe with him—slow, deliberate.
The crimson clouds spread in the reflection, blooming like underwater smoke.
He rubbed his fingers together until the last trace of Juarez's blood peeled away from the skin.
Tecciztecatl said nothing.
For once, the god was silent—not out of anger, but because silence felt appropriate. There are no hymns for this kind of death. No victory songs for executions carried out under divine sanction.
Marc stared into the ripples. His reflection was not his own. The mask had vanished, but the eyes that stared back still glowed faintly, faint enough to look like guilt trying to disguise itself as resolve.
"I don't know if that made anything better," he whispered.
It made something inevitable, Tecciztecatl replied at last. The graft's death will unbind the favor. You've taken a step the rest of us feared to take. The stars noticed.
Marc rose slowly. His cloak shimmered, the silver threads pulsing once before dissolving into the still morning air. To the drones circling above, it looked like he had simply vanished—one last flicker of light, a ghost erased by its own dawn.
---
By the time he returned home, London had woken up. The city didn't know it was breathing in the residue of a god's death; it only knew that its smog was a little heavier that morning.
The cottage was warm when he stepped inside. The scent of coffee and cinnamon lingered from breakfast Alexia had already made. She turned as he entered, her face shifting instantly from worry to relief and then to something else—concern.
She walked to him slowly, barefoot across the wooden floor. "You were out there again," she said quietly.
He nodded. "Yes."
She stopped a few feet away, her gaze tracing the faint red stains still shadowing his sleeves. "You saved people, didn't you?"
"I stopped him," he said simply.
She looked at him longer, then said, "I know you think it was necessary. But what you did out there…" Her voice trembled. "It was too brutal, Marc. The news—people saw parts of it. The screams, the way you—"
"It wasn't brutal enough," he interrupted. His voice was low, but it carried something that made her flinch. "He deserved worse. You didn't see what he did. What they've been doing."
"Then tell me," she whispered. "Tell me, so I can understand why you looked like that when you walked through the door."
Marc turned away. His body felt heavy, not from the fight, but from the knowing—that he could never explain the hill of corpses, the tubes of organs, the ritual etched into stone. Some truths only rot when exposed to daylight.
"This isn't over," he said instead. "There are four more."
Alexia's eyes widened. "Four more what?"
"El Lobo brothers. The rest of the Tzitzimen. Juarez was just one."
She pressed her hand to her mouth. "Four more men like him?"
Marc met her eyes finally. "Worse."
The quiet after that word lingered like fog.
He moved past her into the hall. She watched him, wanting to follow, wanting to hold him, but the air between them had turned thick with things unspoken. He disappeared into the bathroom, and she heard the water running.
The sound of the shower wasn't cleansing—it was ritual.
---
Steam ghosted under the door as he stepped out a few minutes later, towel slung across his shoulders. His expression was unreadable. He went straight to the lab.
The small underground room glowed with the same sterile light as the Ministry's old research floors. Tables lined with Aetherian alloys, maps, notes, photographs, the battered mask. On the far wall, a simple whiteboard.
Five names were written there.
SALVATORE. DIEGO. RAFAEL. JUAREZ. WILLIAM.
He took a marker, crossed a black line through Juarez's name.
The sound was final, deliberate.
For a long moment, he stood there staring at the list. The single black cross looked like an open wound on paper.
You're changing, Tecciztecatl said softly.
"I know," Marc murmured. "Maybe that's the point."
And the man who you were?
"He died the day I picked up that amulet."
The god didn't argue.
---
Far away, high above the ground where mortal things bled and prayed, William Lex Webb's office blazed with the sterile white of digital rage.
Glass shattered against a wall.
William stood with his hands pressed to the table, the city skyline burning behind him. "He killed Juarez," he said. "He killed my creation."
The other three El Lobo brothers—Salvatore, Diego, and Rafael—stood in silence. They looked different now. The Mantle had begun to change them, their features stretched into something otherworldly. But grief still flickered across their faces—grief and fury.
Salvatore spoke first. "Juarez was reckless. But he was still our blood. Moonveil took that from us."
William's face twitched into a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "He took my weapon from me. And he thinks he won something by doing it."
Rafael clenched his fists. "Give us the word, and we'll hunt him ourselves."
William looked at them, his pupils gleaming with the faint light of the dark lord's favor. "You'll get your chance soon enough."
He turned toward the idol standing in the corner of his private chamber. The stone face of Tzitzimimeh leered in half-shadow, the faint pulse of dark energy radiating from its eyes. William knelt before it, his voice trembling between devotion and resentment.
"My lord," he said, "you promised favor. You promised protection. He was supposed to be untouchable."
The air around him thickened. The idol's mouth cracked open like the grinding of tectonic plates, and a voice like molten metal poured through the room.
He was touched by my will, said the dark lord. But you forget, mortal: favor is not ownership. The stars do not bow to your schedules. They move in the sky as they wish. Juarez's death was written the moment he failed to learn humility.
William's jaw tightened. "And what of your promises to me?"
The darkness rippled. They stand, so long as you do. His death is a lesson. The moon's champion grows in strength because he begins to act without asking his god. That is his weakness. A vessel that refuses command is a glass that will crack. When he breaks, you will drink what spills.
The idol's light dimmed, leaving William alone in the flicker of electric fire.
Behind him, Salvatore's voice trembled with controlled fury. "What are your orders?"
William straightened, adjusting his cufflinks like a man who hadn't just knelt before a god. "Prepare the next shipment of Sangre de Luna. Refine it, make it purer. The next war won't be in shadows. It'll be in the streets."
"And Moonveil?" Diego asked.
William smiled thinly. "Let him celebrate his victory. He's written his own curse. The darker he becomes, the closer he gets to me."
The brothers exchanged glances. Their eyes glowed faintly—three embers of vengeance flickering beneath human skin.
As William turned to the window, his reflection merged with the skyline, black glass meeting black sky. For a heartbeat, the faintest shimmer of something divine—or infernal—crawled across his shoulders, the outline of wings too angular for any angel.
---
Back in the quiet countryside, Marc sat alone in his lab. The whiteboard gleamed under the single overhead light. He stared at Juarez's crossed-out name until the ink seemed to pulse like a heartbeat.
He could still feel the warmth of the graft in his hands, the way it had trembled before breaking.
He had thought it would feel like victory. It didn't. It felt like arithmetic—one less evil, one more ghost.
Alexia appeared in the doorway, wrapped in his shirt, her expression soft but wary. "You're not coming to bed?"
"In a while," he said.
She walked to him and touched his shoulder gently. "You did what you had to do," she said. "That doesn't mean you have to carry it alone."
Marc looked at her, and for a moment, the divine and the human in him both wanted to believe that.
He took her hand and held it, the warmth of her skin grounding him to the world. "I know," he whispered. "But sometimes I think I was made to carry it."
Outside, the wind stirred the trees, and in the distance, the faint echo of thunder rolled—too far to be weather, too close to be ignored.
The war was far from over.
And in the heavens above, both gods and monsters watched the man who had dared to defy them.
---