36 parts Complete MatureThe night was thick with smoke and shadows when Amatista Cruz kicked open her grandmother's door in East Los Angeles.
"¡Abuela!" she cried, her voice slicing through the choking air.
Inside, the room pulsed red-unholy red-from a crack in the floor where fire licked upward like a serpent's tongue. Esmeralda, her abuela, was being pulled down by scorched, skeletal hands. Her silver hair floated like smoke as she fought, crying prayers in broken Nahuatl.
Amatista didn't hesitate.
She dove, arms wrapping around Esmeralda's waist as the hellish pull fought to claim her. A monstrous voice echoed from below: "The pact is sealed. Her soul is ours."
But Amatista was no ordinary girl. She was born under a lunar eclipse, marked by obsidian veins that glowed faintly in her wrists-a sign of protection, her mother once said. With fire licking her legs, she screamed a single word taught to her by Esmeralda in childhood:
"Tlazolteotl!"
A burst of black and violet light exploded from her chest. The hellmouth shrieked. The hands recoiled. Esmeralda slumped into Amatista's arms as the crack sealed with a sound like breaking bones.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, in a quiet Irish village blanketed in mist, seventeen-year-old Fionn Callahan was fighting his own demons.
In his grandmother Rose's parlor, the fireplace had roared to unnatural life, flames turning green, then blue, then pitch black. From the hearth emerged a towering figure, a burning knight with hollow eyes and chains for arms. Rose had tried to run, but the chains had snagged her ankle, dragging her toward the fire.
"Lass of the bloodline," it growled, "your time has come."
Fionn acted on instinct. He grabbed his grandmother's rosary from the wall and held it high. But it wasn't faith alone that saved them-it was what lay dormant in him, a secret passed down from Druid blood. The rosary flared gold. Fionn shouted a word he didn't know he remembered:
"Lúghlamfada!"
saving his grandmother rose
