Born to burn

4. LEAK II. _______________________

THE FORBIDDEN BLOOD

•

„She wasn’t meant to be found.” Elowen whispered.

„Not by us. Not by anyone. The cloaking spells weren’t just to hide her location. They were forged to suppress inheritance. Her Kekkei Genkai wasn’t supposed to awaken.” Elowen continued, a frown on her face.

„But it did.” Klaus hissed.

„Because she burned down a house, Elowen.” He spat at her.

„Without ritual. Without focus. Without even knowing who the f***k she is.” And that truth settled over them both like a tombstone. Phoenix had no training. No rites. No anchor. She wasn’t a prodigy. She was a fracture. Abomination. And still, the fire bent to her will. Klaus exhaled like he wanted to set something ablaze himself.

„And Corbin?” Klaus asked, his face tightened.

„Unaware.” The Singer looked through the papers. Klaus turned toward her sharply.

„What?” He barked.

„He doesn’t know.” She confirmed.

„Corbin Blackwood does not know Phoenix. Our scryings pulled nothing from his inner circle. No secret records. No memory threads. No oaths broken. His mate disappeared. That’s all he knows.” The Singer nodded.

„He doesn’t feel her?” Elowen asked.

„Not even a spark?” The Singer shook her head.

„She was born post-separation.” She explained.

„The mate bond was severed in trauma. Whatever connection lingered… it was buried. Drowned under blood and cloaking. Maybe even grief.” Elowen scoffed.

„He’s the Alpha of the Moonblade Pack. His territory spans eight states. He’s the second most dangerous Lycan in the Northern Quadrant and we’re just going to let him stay blind?” Klaus asked.

„Yes.” Elowen said. Flat. Final.

„She’s not his problem.” She continued. „And we keep it that way. If Blackwood discovers he has a daughter, especially this daughter? We lose more than tactical ground. We lose leverage. Loyalty. We lose a war before it starts.” Elowen was making points. Already thinking this thing through back and forth.

„Agreed. Leave him in the dark.” Klaus said and then the Singer took a deep breath. Her next words came softer, but no less cutting.

„There’s more.” A pause.

„The girl…” She hesitated for just a beat, unusual for her.

„She was raised human.” Klaus blinked once.

„Explain.” Elowen barked, not even trying to hide her annoyance.

„The enchantments did more than just hide her imprint from our systems. They didn’t simply shield her. They rewrote the arcane rules around her. Every trace of power, every echo of lineage, was drowned beneath generational spellwork so dense it mimicked mortality.” The singer lowered her head at that information.

„No magical education. No rites. No Council registration. Not even creature exposure. She’s been in and out of state care since age five. Bounced between foster homes, institutions, and temporary placements. The system didn’t just fail her. It starved her, spiritually and supernaturally.” A low whir of enchantment sounded as another scroll unsealed. This one was unceremoniously stamped by the Office of Human Integration and Welfare Oversight. Old. Yellowed. Casefile 471-BC. The Singer’s voice cut cleanly through the tension.

„Foster placement: Gregory and Michelle Langston. Legal guardians since she was nine. No formal magical affiliations. Mundanes. But the record is stained.” She paused long enough for the weight of it to settle.

„Michelle is dependent on barbiturates. Sedatives, primarily. Dosage escalated year over year. Gregory has a documented drinking problem. Sealed police reports. Both involve allegations of… inappropriate behaviour toward a minor. No convictions. No trials. Just dust and silence.” Klaus didn’t blink. He didn’t need to. His stillness was a kind of violence.

„Let me guess.” He said, voice like a blade unsheathed.

„The house that burned… was theirs.” Klaus confirmed silently.

„Correct. It was assigned to them by the Social State Guardian Agency.” The Singer didn’t flinch.

„After the incident, she was relocated. Standard protocol. New placement already processed, location still unconfirmed.” Her tone remained even, surgical.

„Whether she knows it was her power that triggered the ignition remains unknown.” A beat.

„But the Council felt it.” Her final words landed with the weight of certainty, not alarm. Not pity. Just fact dressed in frost.

„Of course we did.” Elowen said under her breath, in a language older than curses.

„You may go now.” She ordered the Singer. She placed the remaining folders on the table and, without further hesitation, left.

„The spell cracked.” Klaus remarked.

„She’s not just a breach.” Elowen added, louder this time, eyes narrow and gleaming like moonlit glass.

„She’s a child we let rot in the deepest gutters of the human world. Rejected. Undocumented. Bleeding power with no anchor. And still… she survived.” Klaus’s jaw tensed. A quiet tic in his temple the only sign of unravelling control.

„She survived what we engineered to erase her.” He said.

„What we ordained.” Elowen added.

„What we sanctioned.” His face was pale like Elowen’s hair.

„And now?” Her lips curled.

„She burns.” Klaus turned toward the window slowly. The view was little more than mist and tower shadow, but he wasn’t looking at anything. Not anymore. He was remembering. Or regretting. Or calculating something ancient, ugly, and bleeding through his future.

„She’s not a threat.” He whispered.

„Not anymore. She’s a prophecy we failed to strangle. A fire we smothered in silence… and left just enough oxygen to awaken.” Elowen whispered her voice heated with irritation.

„She’s half-weapon, half-warning.” He added, softer still.

„We buried her. Bled her. Broke every mirror so she couldn’t recognise what she was. Made sure she wouldn’t remember her name.” A breath passed. A heartbeat. The fire crackled low behind them like it agreed.

„She remembered anyway.” Klaus murmured.

„She carved it into flame.” The silence hung thick after the scroll was closed. Klaus moved first, slow and deliberate, robes whispering like dying prayers across the floor as he turned to Elowen. His eyes were sharp now. Not cold. Not cruel. Calculating. Like something cornered and clever.

„What now?” She asked, voice low. No venom. No fear. Just weight.

•

Phoenix Fay Blackwood was not just a mistake in the fabric of magical law. She was a breach in the weave itself. An anomaly born of forbidden convergence, of bloodlines that should have never been allowed to intersect. Demon. Lycan. Fae. Mage. Siren. Each dominant. Each volatile. Each meant to remain separate. She was not only dangerous. She was unquantifiable. An echo of something old that defied regulation and mocked control. She was an abomination by Council standards. But to those who understood the depth of her creation, she was something worse. A possible origin. A prototype. A myth in the making. And if they underestimated her now, if they waited too long? She would be a problem they could not contain. She would be a calamity they could not survive. Klaus didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he picked up the discarded parchment and studied the seal.

„You know what happens now.” A pause. Just enough to let it settle in the air like a death knell.

„We call the Council.” She said.

„We decide the girl’s fate.” Elowen folded her hands at her waist. Her rings clicked, silver, bone, and obsidian.

„She’s already sixteen.” Elowen’s voice dropped, low and deliberate, each word edged like spell-etched steel. „Her inheritance is stirring. Her Kekkei Genkai is waking. And it’s not just power, it’s ancestral. Elemental. It’s the Fujiwara legacy trying to claw its way out through a vessel that was never prepared to hold it.” The scrying pool hissed as her voice thickened.

„Ice and fire, just like her mother. But even Himari was trained. Tempered. Phoenix is raw. Unbound. And her body is already buckling under the pressure. Do you feel it? That pulse? That distortion in spellspace? That wasn’t just power leaking, it was heritage breaking through.” She moved closer to the edge of the pool, fingertips grazing the surface. It rippled like breath.

„Power like hers doesn’t bloom. It fights. It carves its way out. Her Kekkei Genkai doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t wait for rites or triggers. It responds to stress. Fear. Pain. And when it surges again, it will not stop at fire. It will crack ice through the walls. Shatter bindings. Ignite the air itself. She’ll become the storm and she won’t even know why.” Elowen turned toward Klaus, her eyes lit with a cold that didn’t belong in the room.

„She won’t understand what’s happening. There’ll be no vision. No warning. Just a pressure that tears through skin and spell, legacy and lie. Her mind doesn’t know how to hold it. Her body doesn’t know how to channel it. And when it fractures, it won’t be a spark.” Her voice lowered to a whisper that burned.

„It will be a detonation. And by the time she realises it’s her…truly her, it may already be too late for anyone to contain it.” A silence followed, thick and charged. Then Elowen looked up. Her voice came quietly but cold.

„Klaus, we’re not talking about a single flare of power.” She stepped toward him, shadows rippling at her heels.

„We are talking cities. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dead humans. Or worse. Exposure. Breaches in the Veil. Rifts in the boundary we swore to protect.” Klaus didn’t flinch. His jaw flexed once, then he turned back toward the table. The scroll still lay there, blood-sealed and heavy with lineage.

„She’s a violation.” Klaus snapped, voice clipped and edged.

„A living infraction of blood law. A hybrid of five species, all dominant.” He tossed the scroll like it burned, the parchment landing with a thud that echoed through the chamber.

„She is a cataclysm dressed as a child.” He spat the words like poison, as if even naming her left a taste of ash on his tongue. His gaze flicked to the scroll, then to the scrying pool, where the ripples still hadn’t settled.

„And we let her slip through sixteen years of silence.” His voice dropped, heavy with contempt, for whatever force had kept her hidden.

„She doesn’t even know what she is.” Elowen replied quietly.

„She thinks she’s human.” Klaus’s lip curled.

„Even worse.” He began to pace now, cloak trailing like smoke behind him, the flickering blue sigils under the floor reacting to his rising tension.

„She’s untrained. Unstable. Her powers are surging without regulation or anchor.” Klaus’s voice was sharp now, every syllable tight with strain.

„If her Kekkei Genkai fractures under pressure again, it won’t just be fire and ice. It’ll be rupture. Elemental backlash. And she wouldn’t even realise she caused it.” He said flatly, but his eyes told another story. Something darker. Something that reminded me of the last time a child’s magic cracked the world open.

„Or?” Elowen said, voice lowering to a whisper threaded in iron.

„She wakes something worse.” Her gaze met his. There was no fear in it. Only memory. Recognition. The kind that lived in scars and buried records. They had seen this before. Not in training simulations or Council theory, but in the aftermath of the Wells. In the silent pits sealed beneath the capital. In the war where ancestral bloodlines collided and magic rewrote terrain. Phoenix wasn’t just power. She was a pattern. A recurrence. A return.

„She could be our annihilation.” Klaus said. Not loudly. Just truthfully. Elowen moved toward the window, fingers trailing the runes on the edge of the enchanted glass as his words sank in.

„And what of the father?” Klaus’s jaw tightened.

„Corbin Blackwood cannot find her.” His voice was measured, but underneath it coiled something volatile. Not fear. Strategy sharpened by urgency.

„Agreed…”

„The bond has been buried.” Klaus hissed.

„Severed when Himari died. Cloaked under spells older than his blood. He doesn’t know. He must never know.”

„You think it would change him?” Klaus turned.

„I think it would ignite him.” They both knew what that meant. An Alpha. Unleashed. Vengeful. Already dangerous in silence. Hearing the truth would be like handing a loaded rifle to grief itself.

„She endured the Langstons.” Elowen murmured. Her voice had lost its sharpness, replaced by something quieter. Heavier.

„Seven years with monsters. Powerless. Unprotected. Humiliated, isolated, beaten, and worse.”

She drew a breath that trembled at the edge.

„Her stepfather s.exually assaulted her. Repeatedly. Her foster mother turned to sedatives and silence. And no one came.” She looked down at the scroll still open in her hands, as if the ink itself might bleed from shame.

„She survived all of it. Without awakening. Without help. Just… endured.” Klaus didn’t move. Didn’t blink. But something behind his eyes shifted, like stone cracking under pressure.

„Which means she’s stronger than we calculated.” He said it plainly. As judgment. As a warning. As truth is carved in ice.

„And more dangerous than we feared.” Klaus’s voice was quieter now, but no less sharp.

„Then what do we do?” Elowen asked, eyes never leaving the runes beneath the scrying pool. Klaus inhaled slowly, the kind of breath that tastes like war. His fingers curled into a fist at his side.

„We find where she’s been moved. Now. Discreetly. Quiet eyes. No interference unless necessary. She must not know we’re watching.” His tone left no space for argument.

„And the Council?” He asked, voice quiet but tense beneath the weight of what they both knew was coming.

Elowen’s gaze flicked to him, already knowing the answer. Her fingers twitched once at her side.

„I’ll summon the Twelve.” She said coldly, every syllable wrapped in finality. He ran a hand through his hair, jaw like granite.

„They’ll try to delay. Debate. Pretend this can be handled with parchment and rituals.” He didn’t scoff, but it hung in the pause.

„But it can’t.” Elowen whispered. Her fingers tightened around her rings.

„No.” Klaus said.

„It can’t.” His eyes were fixed on the sealed door ahead. He turned, already half gone in his mind. A step toward something no longer avoidable.

„This isn’t a correction anymore. It’s a reckoning.” His voice left an echo like ash. And then he was gone. The door sealed with a sound like breath being held. Elowen remained by the window, her reflection swallowed in enchantment and dusk. Her silence was heavier than shadow. Then, barely above a breath, she whispered a single word in High Fae. One that carried legacy and ruin in equal measure. A word that meant daughter, weapon, warning, and fire. All at once.

„Phoenix…”