"Wait." I grabbed Future Aria's arm as she moved toward the temporal displacement device. "I need to know more."
She paused, her hand hovering over the controls. "More about what?"
"The war. What really happened." I could hear the desperation in my own voice. "You showed me ruins and mass graves, but I need to understand. How did it start? How did so many people die?"
Future Aria's expression darkened. "You don't want to see that."
"Yes, I do."
"No, Aria. You really don't." She stepped away from the machine. "Some things can't be unseen. Some knowledge changes you in ways you can't come back from."
"I'm already changed. The moment you showed me that first video, everything I believed about my life became a lie." I met her eyes. "Show me what Vincent's ritual really does. Show me why you're so desperate to stop it."
She stared at me for a long moment, weighing something in her mind. Finally, she nodded.
"Sit down," she said quietly. "And remember—you asked for this."
Future Aria walked to the largest monitor in the room and began typing commands. The screen flickered to life, showing a date stamp: October 31st, 2025. The night of the Blood Moon ritual.
"This is from Council security cameras," she said. "The ritual chamber beneath the LA headquarters."
The image showed a circular room carved from black stone. Ancient symbols covered the walls, glowing with the same blue light I'd seen in Future Aria's equipment. In the center of the room stood a stone altar, stained dark with what looked like centuries of dried blood.
Vincent was there, wearing ceremonial robes instead of his usual suit. Around him stood twelve Council members, all dressed in the same dark fabric. They were chanting in a language I didn't recognize, their voices echoing off the stone walls.
"What are they saying?" I asked.
"It's old werewolf. A summoning ritual." Future Aria's voice was barely above a whisper. "They're calling to the entity, telling it that a pure-blood descendant is ready for sacrifice."
On screen, Vincent raised his hands and the chanting stopped. The silence that followed was deafening.
"Bring her in," he said.
Two Council guards entered the chamber, dragging someone between them. The person's head was covered by a black hood, but I could see enough to know it was a woman. About my height, my build.
My stomach dropped. "Is that...?"
"That's you. Or rather, the version of you from my timeline."
I watched in horror as the guards forced the hooded figure onto the altar. She didn't struggle. Didn't fight back. It was like she was drugged or hypnotized.
Vincent approached the altar, carrying an ornate silver knife. The blade was covered in symbols that seemed to writhe and move in the blue light.
"No," I whispered. "I can't watch this."
"You have to." Future Aria's voice was hard. "You need to understand what's at stake."
Vincent began speaking again, but this time I could understand the words. He was talking about bloodlines, about ancient pacts, about awakening something that had slept for a thousand years.
The knife rose above the altar.
"Stop," I said, but Future Aria didn't move.
The blade came down.
The hooded figure—the other me—arched her back in silent agony. Blood began to flow, pooling in channels carved into the stone. The symbols on the walls pulsed brighter as the blood reached them.
And then something answered.
The ground began to shake. Not an earthquake—something else. Something deeper. The walls of the ritual chamber cracked, and through the fissures came a sound like nothing I'd ever heard. Part scream, part roar, part something that existed before language was invented.
"Jesus Christ," I breathed.
"Christ can't help us down there," Future Aria said. "Nothing can."
The video continued. Vincent stepped back from the altar as the blood began to glow with its own light. The other me—my other self—lay perfectly still, her life draining away to feed whatever was waking up below.
That's when the altar exploded.
Not with fire or debris, but with something else. A darkness that moved like liquid shadow, pouring out of the stone and spreading across the floor. Where it touched the Council members, they screamed. Not in pain—in ecstasy. Like they were experiencing the most perfect moment of their lives.
"The entity's first gift," Future Aria explained. "Enhanced senses, increased strength, extended lifespans. Everything the Council wanted."
But I could see in their faces that something was wrong. Their eyes were too bright, too hungry. When they smiled, their teeth looked sharper.
The video jumped forward several hours. Now it showed the streets of Los Angeles. Chaos everywhere. Cars overturned, buildings on fire, people running and screaming.
But the Council members weren't trying to restore order. They were hunting.
"They couldn't control it," Future Aria said. "The entity gave them what they asked for, but it came with a price. An insatiable hunger. They had to feed constantly, and human blood was the only thing that satisfied the craving."
I watched Vincent tear out a man's throat with his bare teeth. Watched Councilwoman Nash chase down a family with inhuman speed. Watched people who'd raised me, trained me, trusted me turn into monsters.
"How long did this last?"
"Three months. The enhanced werewolves killed maybe half a million people before the military figured out how to fight back." The video shifted to show soldiers in hazmat suits carrying flamethrowers. "Silver bullets worked, but you had to hit them in the head or heart. Anything else just made them angry."
The next scenes were from refugee camps. Humans huddled together in military compounds, protected by barbed wire and armed guards. But even that wasn't enough. I watched werewolf shadows slip through the defenses, moving too fast for human eyes to track.
"The humans developed new weapons," Future Aria continued. "Silver gas, UV radiation, sonic weapons that disrupted werewolf hearing. But the entity kept evolving its servants, making them stronger, faster, harder to kill."
The video changed again. Now it showed werewolf settlements under attack by human aircraft. I watched families burned alive in their homes. Saw children running from soldiers who shot them down like animals.
"Both sides became monsters," I said quietly.
"That's what war does. It strips away everything civilized and leaves only the beast underneath."
The final video was the one that broke me.
It showed Marcus.
But not the Marcus I knew. This version was older, scarred, wearing military fatigues instead of his usual button-down shirts. He was kneeling in what looked like a prison cell, his hands chained behind his back.
A human officer stood over him, reading from a piece of paper. "Marcus Chen, you have been found guilty of collaboration with terrorist werewolf cells. The sentence is death."
Marcus looked up at the camera. His eyes were tired but defiant.
"I regret nothing," he said. "I chose love over fear. I chose hope over hatred." He paused. "And if that makes me a traitor to my own species, so be it."
The officer raised his gun.
"Tell Aria—" Marcus began.
The shot echoed in the small cell.
I screamed.
The sound tore out of my throat before I could stop it, raw and desperate and broken. I felt like something inside my chest had exploded, leaving only pain and emptiness.
But underneath the agony was something else. Something that made me stop breathing.
I'd seen this before.
Not the video—the actual moment. I'd watched Marcus die in that cell, heard his final words, felt my heart break as the bullet took him away from me.
"You remember," Future Aria said softly.
I was shaking now, my hands clenched so tight that my nails drew blood from my palms. "That's impossible. This hasn't happened yet."
"Hasn't it?"
She brought up another screen, this one showing medical files. Brain scans, psychological evaluations, pages and pages of data about memory suppression and neural conditioning.
"Vincent didn't just wipe your memories of your real parents," she said. "He's been conditioning you since childhood. Implanting false memories, suppressing real ones, preparing your mind to accept whatever reality he wants you to believe."
The brain scans showed areas of damage in my hippocampus and temporal lobe. Surgical damage, precise and deliberate.
"The memories are still there," Future Aria continued. "Buried deep, but intact. That's why you feel like you've seen these things before. Because you have—in dreams, in flashes, in moments when Vincent's conditioning slips."
I thought about the nightmares I'd been having for months. Images of fire and blood, of cities in ruins, of people I cared about dying violent deaths. I'd assumed they were just stress from the job.
But what if they weren't dreams at all?
"How many times?" I whispered.
"How many times what?"
"How many times has this happened?" I looked at her directly. "How many times have you tried to change the timeline?"
Future Aria's composure finally cracked. Tears started streaming down her face, and for a moment she looked exactly like what she was—a broken woman who'd lost everything and everyone she'd ever cared about.
"Seventeen times," she said. "This is my eighteenth attempt."
The number hit me like a physical blow. "Seventeen times. You've watched Marcus die seventeen times."
"I've watched everyone die seventeen times. You, Marcus, Dr. Elena, even Vincent when the entity finally turned on the Council." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Every single attempt, something goes wrong. The timeline shifts, but never enough to prevent the disaster."
"What went wrong?"
"Different things. Sometimes you didn't believe me fast enough. Sometimes Vincent moved the ritual up more than expected. Sometimes the entity woke up early, drawn by the temporal disruptions." She gestured to the equipment around us. "Each time, I tried a different approach. More evidence, less evidence, different allies, different tactics. Nothing worked."
I stared at the frozen image of Marcus on the screen. He was looking right at the camera, right at me, his eyes full of love and regret.
"In how many timelines did we...?" I couldn't finish the question.
"In seven of them, you figured out your feelings before it was too late. You told him you loved him." Her voice was barely audible. "In three of those, he survived long enough to say it back."
The tears came then, hot and desperate. I thought about the almost-kiss in the parking garage yesterday, about all the moments Marcus and I had shared over the years. All the conversations where we'd danced around something deeper, too scared or too professional to cross that line.
And now I knew that somewhere, in another timeline, another version of me had been brave enough to take that chance.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked through my tears.
"Because this is the only timeline where you've asked to see everything. Where you've pushed for the complete truth instead of running away or trying to rationalize it." She knelt down beside my chair. "In all the other attempts, you were too scared to face what Vincent really was. Too loyal to question the Council's motives."
"And this time?"
"This time, you're angry. And anger is something I can work with."
She was right. Underneath the grief and shock, I could feel fury building in my chest. Rage at Vincent for lying to me my entire life. At the Council for planning genocide. At the entity for offering power that came with such a terrible price.
But most of all, I was angry at myself. For being naive enough to believe that the people who raised me actually cared about me. For trusting a system that saw me as nothing more than a weapon to be used and discarded.
"What do you need me to do?" I asked.
Future Aria smiled through her tears. "First, you need to go back to your normal life. Act like nothing has changed. Vincent is already suspicious, but he's not sure what you know."
"And then?"
"Then you start gathering allies. Real ones this time. People who can help us when the time comes to stop the ritual."
"Like who?"
"Marcus, for starters. In every timeline where you trusted him with the truth, he chose to help you instead of following Council orders." She stood up and walked to a weapons cabinet. "Dr. Elena knows more than she lets on. And there are others—werewolves who've grown tired of the Council's authoritarian rule, humans who've figured out that something supernatural is happening in LA."
She pulled out a small device that looked like a combination phone and GPS unit. "This will help you identify potential allies. It's keyed to detect people whose brain patterns show resistance to the kind of conditioning Vincent uses."
I took the device, turning it over in my hands. It was warm to the touch, like everything else in this place.
"One more thing," Future Aria said. She handed me a small silver pendant on a chain. It was carved with symbols that matched the ones I'd seen in the ritual chamber. "This will provide some protection against the entity's influence. Wear it at all times, but keep it hidden."
I put the chain around my neck, tucking the pendant beneath my shirt. It felt cold against my skin, but oddly comforting.
"What about you?" I asked. "What are you going to do?"
"What I've been doing. Eliminating the Council members who can't be turned or reasoned with. Gathering intelligence. Preparing for the final confrontation." Her expression hardened. "And if this timeline fails like all the others, I'll try again. Nineteen times, twenty times, however many it takes."
"You'd go through all this again? Watch everyone die again?"
"To save them? Yes." She looked at the frozen image of Marcus on the screen. "I'd watch him die a thousand times if it meant there was a chance I could save him in the end."
The temporal displacement device was humming again, preparing to send me back to my own time. But I had one more question.
"In the timelines where I told Marcus I loved him," I said. "Was I happy?"
Future Aria's smile was sad but genuine. "You were the happiest I've ever seen you. Both of you were." She paused. "Don't make the same mistake I did, Aria. Don't wait until it's too late to tell him how you feel."
The blue light enveloped me, and the last thing I saw was Future Aria standing alone in her high-tech prison, surrounded by the ghosts of seventeen failed attempts to save the world.
I woke up in my car with tears on my cheeks and the taste of copper in my mouth.
But this time, I wasn't confused or disoriented. I remembered everything. Every video, every revelation, every moment of pain and hope and desperate fury.
I looked at the countdown device in my hand: 34 days, 12 hours, 7 minutes.
Then I pulled out my phone and scrolled to Marcus's contact information.
We had work to do.
End of Chapter 6