I am 15 chapters ahead on my patreón, check it out if you are interested.

Patréon.com/emperordragon

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The body that had once belonged to a man named Darren shuddered violently, as if gasping in the cold breath of a second birth. A rasping inhalation filled the stale air of the apartment as the parasite completed its grotesque work, threading itself into his spinal cord, fusing nerve to nerve, root to root, until there was no longer a boundary between host and invader — just one breathing, twitching whole.

For a brief, suspended moment, the room was silent. The only sounds were the hum of an old refrigerator vibrating faintly in the kitchen, the dull electrical buzz of a street lamp outside the half-cracked window, and the slow, uncertain beat of a heart that did not yet know to be afraid.

Then his eyes opened.

They were Darren's eyes — same irises, same blood vessels mapped like rivers in the whites — but they no longer saw the world the way he had. The pupils expanded unnaturally, blooming like ink in water. What peered through them was no longer the soul of a man.

The thing inside smiled.

Its first movements were unsteady. Muscles trembled under the unfamiliar weight of flesh. Ligaments strained. The lungs drew in air again — tentative, experimental. The tongue flexed against the roof of the mouth, tasting the dust in the air. Hands — Darren's hands — rubbed slowly against each other, fingertips brushing against skin that still felt strange, as though the body belonged to someone else.

It did.

"Better," the creature whispered. The voice that emerged was Darren's, but weathered now by something older — coarser, darker, touched by an echo of rot and ruin. Serviceable, at least.

He staggered at first, but quickly taking even steps across the apartment, moving through a life not his own. The framed photographs on the wall showed Darren smiling beside friends on fishing trips, laughing with people the parasite didn't know. There were stacks of unopened mail on the counter, a familiar scent lingering in the air — laundry detergent mixed with the sting of cheap whiskey and the faintest trace of loneliness.

And then — the flood.

Memories surfaced like bodies in a thawing lake. They weren't sought; they were taken. The parasite dipped into the nervous system, threading through synapses and bioelectric whispers, devouring the fragments left behind. It drank deeply: flashes of forgotten birthdays and bitter arguments, drunken nights and unpaid debts, kisses in parking lots and breakups on doorsteps. Laughter. Rage. Regret. The full, unremarkable weight of Darren's small life was laid bare — and absorbed.

He had been ordinary.

And that made him perfect.

Tony — the name the parasite had earned — eased onto the sagging couch, letting the body sink into the cushions. He closed Darren's eyes, but he wasn't resting. Deep within, he navigated the web of foreign neurons, adjusting, recalibrating, until the form no longer felt foreign. Until it was his.

Then he went deeper still — beneath Darren's life, past the layer of stolen memories — and pulled open the vault of his own.

It was not a place, but a sensation — hot, jagged, half-buried. He remembered the darkness, the scent of blood, the chorus of flash lights slicing through fog and trees like beams through smoke. Six years ago. The iron stink of blood mixed with the sharp bitterness of wolfsbane. The howls. The fire.

Talia Hale and her pack — fierce, righteous, united in purpose. And Gerard Argent's hunters — disciplined, ruthless, their conviction as sharp as their silver. Two factions joined by necessity, fighting side by side for the first and only time. They had come together to end him.

He remembered it all.

He remembered the chaos he'd sown, how wolves and hunters had turned on each other with claws and blades, fury and fear feeding into a cyclone of violence he had orchestrated like a symphony. He remembered the taste of their rage — metallic, intoxicating, beautiful.

And then... her.

Talia.

Even in death, she had been something glorious. Fire in her blood, resolve etched into every movement. Her claws glowing blue with mountain ash, searing his flesh, reducing half his body to rot and smoke. She had screamed something at him — a warning, a curse, he couldn't remember — as she tore through him.

He had unraveled that night. Pieces of him had burned, pieces had withered. But even as his body dissolved under her final strike, something deeper — older — had responded. Some primal instinct. Something that would not allow him to end.

As the edges of consciousness darkened, he had torn a sliver from himself — not a memory, but a seed. A piece small enough to escape, to bury itself in the soil, hidden within marrow and mold. A promise sealed in decay.

Six years.

For six long years, he waited — plotting in the dark, seeking a vessel that could hold him. Only once he had found one did he return to Beacon Hills, hungry for revenge.

But he was stopped once again — this time by a werewolf named Lucas, not Talia.

And when Darren, lonely and unremarkable Darren, had wandered too close — it had acted.

The parasite smiled wider, the grin cutting a little too deep into Darren's cheeks. He opened his eyes again and surveyed the apartment — his now, fully. He rose and walked to the mirror mounted above the small dresser.

The reflection that stared back was unassuming — a man in his thirties, tired, worn by life but not broken. Perfect camouflage. No one would look at Darren and see the monster inside.

Tony touched the glass. "I told you, Talia," he whispered to the silence, "you can't kill what refuses to die."

He stepped back from the mirror and turned toward the door. But as his hand reached for the knob, his thoughts shifted — not to Talia, not to Gerard, but to another.

Lucas.

The boy with the eyes like hers. The power like hers.

Tony had come back to Beacon Hills to finish what had begun. To collect the debts owed to him in blood. But Lucas — the unexpected variable — had stopped him. Somehow. Where Talia had used fire, Lucas had used instinct, speed, cunning. He had been something new.

Tony had almost underestimated him.

Almost.

But even then, something inside — some gut-deep alarm — had screamed danger every time Lucas stepped into view. So Tony had prepared. He had left a seed behind, tucked away in soil and dirt before going after the boy. Insurance.

If he hadn't… he might not be standing here now.

And now, thanks to that foresight, thanks to the plan buried within the instinct to survive, he had returned again — through Darren.

He was back.

He stood at the threshold of the apartment, flexing fingers that were no longer wholly human, the bones beneath shaped by something far older, far hungrier. His smile returned, sharper now, predatory.

"There are debts to collect," he muttered, voice laced with venom and anticipation. "The Hales. The Argents. And the boy."

Lucas.

Tony licked his lips, savoring the name like it was a flavor.

"This time," he whispered to the night, "I'll make sure you beg before the end."

And with that, he stepped out into the cool darkness of Beacon Hills — reborn in flesh, carrying memories like weapons, and bringing with him a storm six years in the making.