The neon sign of the twenty-four-hour diner flickered, casting a sickly green hum over the cracked leather booths. Outside, the rain was relentless, washing over the slick asphalt of empty alleyway. Inside, six people who should have been killing each other sat in a tense, suffocating silence. A cryptic, anonymous message had pulled them all to this exact coordinates, and now that they were face-to-face, the air felt ready to combust.Maeve sat at the far end of a booth, keeping her distance. Her deep mossy brown hair clung damply to the collar of her oversized canvas coat. At nineteen, she knew the dangers of being cornered, and her fingers subtly traced the edge of the wooden table, feeling for the ambient, earth-rooted magic of the building. She kept her eyes locked on the two across from her.Vampires. Axel watched the street through the fogged glass, his Curly blonde hair falling messyly across his pale forehead. He looked no older than nineteen, but his eyes carried the cold, heavy weight of two hundred and nine years of survival. He hadn't touched the glass of water in front of him, his posture completely rigid. Beside him was Lux, her stark velvet-black hair perfectly intact despite the storm. At two hundred and eight, she looked like a stunning eighteen-year-old, her dark eyes tracking Maeve's throat with a slow, deliberate hunger that made the witch's blood run cold. A few feet away, a boy with snowy white hair sat completely isolated. This was Zero. At eighteen, the seer looked entirely too fragile for the heavy supernatural tension in the room. His pupils were completely dilated, making his eyes look pitch black as he stared at a spilled puddle of creamer on the tabletop. He wasn't looking at the others; he was trapped in his own head, watching the invisible threads of time fracture and bleed."Stop staring at the wall," Vane muttered, his voice sharp and full of practiced arrogance. The twenty-year-old sorcerer sat with his legs crossed, his fingers stained with dark ink as he idly tapped a leather journal. Unlike Maeve's quiet, natural magic, Vane's presence felt loud, volatile, and demanding. He looked at the vampires with open disgust, his fingers twitching as if waiting for an excuse to tear the room apart."Tell the bloodsuckers to stop looking at us like dinner first," Mac growled from the corner. Mac was nineteen, their physical form currently resting in a broad shouldered guy
