We could kill her, whispers the Darkness. Look at her. It would be so easy.
I lift my gaze to Adaia as I sip my wine, and the clearing vanishes around me as the world becomes black and white.
Death peeks over many a shoulder here. It would be disconcerting to see if I wasn’t in the grip of the daemon within me. I am empty and hollow and my heart stills like a stone sinking to the bottom of a rushing river.
It doesn’t have to beat, for a heart is what stirs life through a fae’s veins, and I am nothing more than Death right now.
It’s quiet here, in the Shadow World.
Hungry faces leer at me, superimposed over the fae beneath them. Shadows writhe as they thicken and solidify. Shadowy arms slide up a young woman’s body. Dozens of them. Threatening to drag her back into her own silhouette.
She’ll die soon.
Days at best. Maybe a week.
But it’s Adaia who I focus on.
Adaia Thornborn.
Even in the Between, the light of her magic and power burns bright. Shadows writhe as her light pours over them, desperate to touch her and drag her down. She doesn’t even know they’re there.
It’s a simple flex of power. I twitch my fingers and they crawl up her skirts, dragging themselves claw by claw. The light shreds, dissipating around her like smoke. The shadows are hungry. So fucking hungry.
A rushing sound fills my ears.
Hunt, whispers a voice in my head and this time it’s not my daemon. It’s the Darkyn soul trapped within me that I’ve named Fury.
Torment is not far behind it. Gods, she tastes so divine. I want to eat her all up.
Make her scream. Make her bleed. Crush her bones. Crunch, crunch. Rage pushes against the wards tattooed into my skin.
It feels like a knife dragging over the inside of my chest. They want out. They always want out. They’re mere remnants of a whole and combined they’ll form a single entity, but over the centuries, the separation has fused them into individual beings.
Adaia looks down as if she senses something. Her light dims. Her face pales and stands sallow against the flickering torches behind her.
Behind her, a shadow drags the claw of its thumb across her throat and Adaia gasps as if she feels it, clapping a hand to the mark.
“Thi?” A hand grips my arm, wrenching me back out of the gloom.
Light and heat and sound burst in upon me. For a second, it’s more than I can handle and my grip tightens around the golden goblet I bear, crushing the imprint of my fingertips into it. I can barely see for the sudden brightness. Pain almost brings me to my knees; my heart, starting to beat again.
“Ignore her.” There’s a certain urgency in Thalia’s voice.
“Weren’t you the one arguing for murder?” The words sound so distant it’s a wonder they came from my mouth. I blink again.
Light. Fuck, I need the light.
Claws screech down the inside of my skin like nails on a chalkboard as the daemons retreat.
“Your skin is freezing.” Thalia searches my face. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Adaia smirks at me as she lifts her hands, her rings gleaming in the light of the torches that line the clearing. She will never know how close she came to dying this night.
Sweat breaks out upon my brow. It’s never been this hard to control.
What is wrong with me?
Almost as if thinking of him summons his attention, I feel my father turn to look at me from the north. I won’t give him the satisfaction of responding, but I can sense his focus sliding over my skin like the pad of a finger trailing down a long-bleached spine.
Searching for me. Yearning to destroy me. To consume me.
Wondering perhaps, who it is that catches his attention every now and then.
He’s never seen me. He doesn’t even know I exist.
But he can sense me—or the daemon inside him can.
It’s inside me too, and it yearns to be whole.
Thousands of years ago it stalked these lands. Death, they called it. The Everlasting Night. The Primordial Darkness. A creature so malevolent and powerful that even the Old Ones feared it.
A band of fae warriors spent their entire lives hunting it, and when they finally captured it, they had to consume fragments of its body and soul in order to defeat it. It cannot die. It cannot be contained. They were forced to venture to the ends of the world in order to separate its desperate soul, and I wonder if those long ago fae felt the crush of this hunger, this need, this yearning to reunite.
Somewhere along the way, some of them fell prey to its lure.
They hunted their own, consuming the fragments of that Darkness.
Now only a few of us remain.
My father, who birthed this evil within me, and myself, veiled and cloaked from his eyes with the best illusions any fae can wield. There are two others, I think, somewhere far to the west and east, but I suspect a sea stands between us for I can rarely feel them.
Of the five Darkyn souls trapped within me, only two of them ever give me any peace.
Thalia slides her fingers through mine, and I relish every inch of heat within her.
“As the days turn, we celebrate the end of harvest and the beginning of the long chill,” Lucidia of Ravenal calls as she slowly pushes to her feet and moves toward the torch that awaits her.
Tonight the Veil begins to thin between worlds, and will not strengthen until the third night. Pocket realms may open. Strange creatures sometimes slip between worlds. In the ancient days, before the fae locked the Old Ones in their prison worlds, they hunted nights like this.
“As the Veil thins,” calls Maren of Aska, lifting her
