The dragon-thing's breath smelled like sulfur and rotting meat.
Adrian threw himself sideways as flames erupted from its maw, scorching the air where he'd stood a moment before. The heat seared his exposed skin even from six feet away, and he felt the new power in his veins responding—accelerating his healing, repairing minor burns before they could blister.
Fast. I'm faster than I should be.
The creature was massive, its scaled body filling the corridor, wings folded against its back to fit through the impossible space. Its eyes—too intelligent, too aware—tracked Adrian's movement with predatory focus. This wasn't some mindless beast. It was hunting.
Adrian's hand closed around a piece of rebar from the collapsed ceiling. The metal felt light in his grip, and when he swung it at the dragon's snout, the impact actually made the creature recoil. Blood—dark crimson, almost purple—welled from the gash Adrian had opened.
The power surged.
It hit harder this time, more violent, as if the dragon's essence was too large to integrate smoothly. Adrian's vision went white with pain as something massive tried to force its way into his cells. He felt his body rejecting it, his newly awakened abilities straining against the incompatible energy.
Too much. Too different. I can't—
The dragon lunged while Adrian was paralyzed by the failed absorption. Claws raked across his chest, shredding his scrubs and the skin beneath. Blood sprayed. Adrian heard himself scream, a sound of pure agony that echoed through the fractured corridor.
But even as he fell, the regeneration activated. The wounds were closing, flesh knitting together with unnatural speed. It hurt—god, it hurt—but within seconds the bleeding had stopped.
The dragon reared back, confused. It had landed a killing blow. Its prey should be dead.
Adrian rolled to his feet, one hand pressed to his healing chest, the other still gripping the bloody rebar. His mind was racing through the implications. He could heal from terrible wounds, but not instantly. There was still pain, still a recovery period, however brief. And whatever he'd tried to absorb from the dragon hadn't worked. The creature was too powerful, too alien, or perhaps his ability had limits he didn't understand yet.
Fine. Can't absorb it. Can still kill it.
The thought was cold, clinical, and entirely unlike the man Adrian had been forty-eight hours ago. But that man had lived in a world with rules, with physics that made sense, with the comforting illusion that knowledge and skill mattered.
This world had different rules.
Adrian feinted left, then drove the rebar into the dragon's eye when it tracked the movement. The creature's shriek was deafening, a sound that shattered the remaining windows and sent cracks spiderwebbing through the walls. It thrashed, its tail smashing through the corridor wall and revealing—
What the hell?
Through the hole, Adrian could see outside. Or what passed for outside now.
Seattle was gone.
The city still existed in fragments—he could see the Space Needle jutting from a landscape that shouldn't contain it, skyscrapers merged with gothic towers, the waterfront overlapping with what looked like an alien ocean under a green sky. But the familiar geography had been torn apart and reassembled into something nightmarish.
And everywhere, everywhere, there were rifts. Tears in reality itself, doorways between worlds, and through them poured an endless stream of the impossible.
Creatures with too many legs skittered across the sides of buildings. Humanoid figures with wings—angels? demons?—fought in midair, their battles trailing fire and lightning. Something that looked like a walking tree was striding through Pioneer Square. The streets were chaos, humans fleeing from or fighting against or simply standing paralyzed by the sudden invasion of myth and nightmare into their mundane world.
The dragon's tail caught Adrian in the ribs, slamming him through the already-damaged wall and out into open air.
He fell.
Three stories became two became one, the ground rushing up with terminal velocity. Adrian's new senses screamed warnings his body couldn't possibly act on. He was going to hit. He was going to die. Enhanced healing or not, physics still—
He landed in something soft.
Not soft. Yielding. A pile of debris and bodies—oh god, bodies—that broke his fall enough that when he hit the pavement beneath, his legs shattered instead of his skull.
The pain was indescribable.
Adrian lay gasping, feeling his bones grinding, the regeneration already working but slowly, so slowly. Above him, the dragon perched on the edge of the hole it had made, preparing to dive down and finish what it started.
"Hey! Over here, you flying bastard!"
The shout came from Adrian's left. He managed to turn his head—small mercies that his spine was intact—and saw a woman standing atop an overturned ambulance. She was holding what looked like a rifle, but the barrel glowed with symbols that definitely hadn't been part of the original manufacturing.
She fired.
The projectile wasn't a bullet. It was light, pure and blinding, and when it struck the dragon, the creature's roar became a scream of genuine agony. Scales blackened and fell away. The thing launched itself into the air, wings beating frantically as it fled toward one of the larger rifts and disappeared into whatever hellscape it had emerged from.
The woman jumped down from the ambulance with practiced ease and approached Adrian. She was young—mid-twenties maybe—with short dark hair and eyes that had seen too much too quickly. A police uniform, though the badge had been torn away and the tactical vest underneath was strapped with items that hadn't come from any evidence locker: vials of glowing liquid, carved stones, what looked like a pouch of salt.
"You stupid or suicidal?" she asked, kneeling beside him. "Because fighting a drake bare-handed is usually both."
"Doctor," Adrian managed through gritted teeth. His legs were almost healed, the bones setting themselves with audible clicks that made even the cop wince. "Was saving someone."
"Yeah, well, you're gonna need saving yourself if you keep that up." She looked at his healing legs, then at his face, her expression sharpening with recognition of something significant. "You're like them. Supernatural."
"Just happened." Adrian pushed himself into a sitting position, testing his newly-repaired legs. They held. "During the... whatever this is."
"The Rupture." She offered her hand, pulled him to his feet. "That's what the radio's calling it before the broadcasts cut out. Reality broke. Seven dimensions merged into one clusterfuck. Welcome to the apocalypse, doc. I'm Officer Sarah Chen, though I guess titles don't mean much anymore."
Adrian looked around properly for the first time. The street—he thought it might be James Street, but the landmarks were wrong—was devastated. Cars crushed beneath debris that had fallen from buildings that shouldn't exist. Fires burning with flames that were the wrong color. And bodies. So many bodies.
Some were human. Others definitely weren't.
"Forty-eight hours," Sarah said, following his gaze. "Two days since the Rupture. Most people are either dead, hiding, or joined up with whatever faction offered protection. The smart ones, anyway."
"Factions?" Adrian's doctor brain was cataloging injuries, calculating which of the fallen might still be alive, might still be saved. But the power in his veins was nearly depleted—he could feel it, like a well running dry.
"Vampires control the International District. Demons took downtown. Angels claimed the University District, though 'angels' is generous considering what they've been doing to anyone they consider tainted." Sarah gestured broadly at the transformed cityscape. "Then there's a dozen smaller groups. Werewolves, fae, things that don't have names in any language I speak. Everyone's carving out territory, making rules, and killing anyone who gets in the way."
Adrian stared at her. "Two days. All this in two days."
"Apocalypse moves fast when reality stops making sense." She checked her rifle—the symbols were fading, the glow diminishing. "I'm low on blessed rounds and you look like you're running on empty. We need to move before something else decides we look tasty."
"I have to get back to the hospital. There were patients—"
"Seattle General collapsed six hours after the Rupture started. Anyone who could evacuate did. The rest..." She shook her head. "I'm sorry. But you can't save people who are already dead."
The words hit harder than the dragon's claws. Adrian thought of his patient, the construction worker he'd saved. The surgical resident. All the others he'd left behind when the dragon had thrown him through the wall.
You can't save everyone.
His old cynicism, proved right once again.
"Come on," Sarah said, her tone gentler. "There's a shelter six blocks from here. Former police station, got good walls and better wards. They'll take you in, especially if you can heal. Healers are more valuable than gold right now."
Adrian nodded numbly and followed her through streets that looked like they'd been designed by a madman's fever dream.
They passed a coffee shop that had merged with what appeared to be a medieval alchemist's laboratory. A bank whose vault had fused with a dragon's hoard—actual gold and jewels spilling onto the sidewalk, ignored by the desperate and dying because currency meant nothing when survival was hourly.
They passed groups of humans huddled in doorways, eyes hollow with shock. They passed creatures that looked almost human except for details that were fundamentally wrong—too many fingers, eyes that reflected light like an animal's, skin that shifted colors.
And they passed the dead.
Adrian stopped counting after twenty. Most were human. Some had died from trauma—crushed by debris, burned, torn apart by claws or teeth. Others showed no visible injuries but their faces were frozen in expressions of such complete terror that Adrian knew they'd died from fear alone, their hearts simply stopping when confronted with the impossible.
"Here." Sarah led him down an alley that ended in a reinforced door. She knocked—three quick, two slow, three quick again. A pattern.
The door opened to reveal a man who might have been a bouncer in his previous life. Now he was armed with a sword that crackled with electricity and wearing armor that looked like it had been looted from a fantasy convention or possibly forged in actual hellfire.
"Sarah. You're late." His eyes fixed on Adrian. "And you brought company."
"He's a healer. Saw him regenerate from broken legs."
The man's expression changed immediately. "Get inside. Both of you."
The shelter was a converted police station, just as Sarah had said. The main room had been turned into a makeshift refugee camp—maybe forty people, human and otherwise, huddled in small groups. Medical supplies were stacked against one wall, food against another, and weapons—an eclectic mix of guns, swords, and items that glowed with various colors of supernatural light—hung ready for use.
A woman approached, elderly but with eyes sharp as scalpels. She looked Adrian up and down, taking in his bloody scrubs, his healing chest wound visible through the shredded fabric, the way he held himself with a doctor's posture despite everything.
"You're medical," she stated. Not a question.
"Trauma surgeon. Was." Adrian gestured at the transformed world outside. "Not sure what I am now."
"You're what we need." She pointed to a corner where several people lay on makeshift cots. "We've got wounded. Some will die without help. Can you save them?"
Adrian looked at the injured. He could see their conditions even from across the room, his enhanced senses picking up the fever heat, the labored breathing, the smell of infection setting in. His power was low, nearly exhausted from healing himself, but there was enough. Maybe.
"I'll try."
"That's all anyone can do anymore." The woman smiled, sad and knowing. "Welcome to the end of the world, doctor. Try to keep us alive through it."
Adrian walked to the first patient—a young man with a gut wound that was going septic—and placed his hands on burning skin. The power flowed, thin and sluggish now, but still present. Still enough to push back death one more time.
Outside, through the reinforced windows, Adrian could see the fractured sky beginning to darken. Not night falling naturally, but dimensions shifting again, different realities taking their turn in ascendance. He caught glimpses of stars that weren't stars, moons that had never orbited Earth, auroras in colors that shouldn't exist.
The world had shattered.
And somewhere in the ruins, Adrian Thorne—who'd spent twelve years learning that he couldn't save everyone—was learning to try anyway.