Chapter Three

Death Fae Dream

Tierney Calix

Northern Vo River

Something dangerous is happening to Viger.

Jagged unease kindles along every one of Tierney’s nerves. She glances up, just above their Vo shielding at the purple moon Or’myr conjured, full night descending. Her fingers wrap around the necklace vial containing her dissolved kelpies as her gaze slides back down toward the warded dome-shield she and her fellow Vo Guardians conjured. It envelopes the Vo River and its bracketing Forest, the shield’s translucent surface and its scattered runes shimmering a faint purple from the sheer might of Or’myr’s geomancy.

Tierney draws in a long breath, her unease mounting as she recalls how Viger slashed through the Shadow soldiers earlier, merciless as a viper. And then, after it was all over, how strangely agitated his power seemed to grow when they sensed the Great Tree III’s destruction, the edges of Viger’s Darkness feeling oddly wild and unmoored.

As night began to close in, Viger’s magic surged to frighteningly potent heights, culminating in the full-Dark look he gave her—a look so chillingly violent it froze her in her tracks. Overcome by a terrifying sense of his Death thrall roaring toward her in an unfightable onslaught, she stepped back from him, alarmed, just as he managed to wrest hold of his power and yank it back from her before abruptly disappearing in a slash of dark mist, his thrall vanishing with him, his vaporous form darting into the Forest’s nighttime hollows.

But Tierney can still sense Viger’s Dark bond to her power—a bond linked to Or’myr and Fyordin as well—a thickening, night-deep longing stretching between all four of them, like a Dark tempest brewing.

More unsettling still, Tierney is increasingly aware of Viger’s bond drawing her power down toward the River’s deepest, darkest recesses, mysterious places of cruel endings and fragile beginnings, their Xishlon kiss seeming to have awoken something primal within her.

Tierney’s troubled gaze slides back to the violet Xishlon moon replica Or’myr defiantly hung above the Vo. An edge of her stress softens as she basks in the moon’s purple glow, feeling, for a moment, like she’s being suffused with the calming thrall of the real Xishlon moon, the unbidden urge to go to Or’myr and Fyordin and even dangerous Viger and pull each of them into a kiss abruptly surging.

Holy gods. Tierney stiffens against the scandalous bond-fueled urge, a flush blooming on her cheeks. Get hold of yourself, Asrai!

She glances sidelong at Or’myr, struggling to keep her thoughts from veering toward the first thrilling moments of the Xishlon kiss she shared with him before his purple lightning struck and everything went to all the hells.

He’s standing a few paces away, facing a sizable stone hillock edging the riverbank that they’re using as their Vo-shielding’s central runic anchor point. Or’myr’s arresting expression is tenacious as he casts bright violet runes onto the stone wall.

Tierney mulls over how Or’myr has taken charge of fortifying the Vo River’s runic shielding, methodically setting up this area as a base for it, drawing on not only Tierney’s, Fyordin’s, and Viger’s powers through their binding, but on the veins of purple running through the riverbank’s stone. A line of Tierney’s water power steadily courses toward Or’myr’s runes and into the dome-shield, a shield she and Fyordin spent hours helping Or’myr fortify, and now she feels tapped out, exhaustion weighing her down like a leaden anchor. She considers striding into her Vo, curling up at its bottom and falling asleep in its arms, letting the gentle lap of the Waters restore her.

No, she realizes, her Asrai heart tightening. Tonight, she, Or’myr, and Fyordin were the ones doing the restoring. And Viger, too, before he took his frighteningly unhinged turn.

She glances out over the Vo and takes in Viger’s Deathkin power, rising in dark, snaking tendrils from the contained section of Shadowed water, the water slowly taking on a purple coloration as it sheds the gray poison. Worry digs its claws into Tierney—if it took such a monumental effort to battle such a small section of Shadow, how can they possibly prevail against Vogel’s full might?

As if sensing her tortured churn of emotion, Fyordin meets her gaze from where he’s standing waist-deep in the Vo. His palms are resting on the water’s surface as he feeds healing Asrai energy toward the Shadowed water from his depleted reserves, joining his magic to Viger’s power to hasten the decomposition of the Shadow-killed river life.

Bringing Balance back to their Vo.

A wave of appreciation for her Asrai’kin eddies through her as she notes the way Fyordin’s skin, like hers, is such a mirror of the Vo’s water, both of them currently night dark and suffused with swirls of Or’myr’s dark purple, Fyordin’s hair and hers the same night-plum hue.

Fyordin holds her gaze, a flash of mutual fear for their kindred River roiling through their Vo bond. Fyordin’s water power streams out to encircle hers in a bolstering caress, and Tierney lets herself melt into it, Fyordin’s magical embrace rapidly whirlpooling into a heated longing that Tierney feels she could easily let herself funnel down into . . .

Or’myr’s purple lightning shocks through the Deathbond with crackling, covetous energy, and Tierney stiffens at the sensation. Flustered, she glances at Or’myr and catches the unsettled lightning flashing through his gaze just as Viger’s Darkness rushes in like a storm making landfall and crashes venomously against both Or’myr’s lightning and Fyordin’s whirlpooling caress with shockingly potent strength.

Tierney’s temper flares, hard and hot—the strength of Viger’s attack alarming, like he wants to sink his teeth into their power. Her hackles bristling, Tierney winds up her own storming power, tempest-tight, grits her teeth, and blasts it out against Viger’s invading thrall.

A serpentine hiss shudders through her mind, the scene around her pulsing blacker than night. Viger’s attack consolidates, a barrier of dark, gnashing fangs forming around the bond, keeping Or’myr’s and Fyordin’s powers at bay.

“Do you feel what’s happening?”

Tierney asks Or’myr, both alarmed and incensed.

Or’myr casts a glance at her, his eyes flashing dangerously. “It’s a bit hard to miss.”

Fyordin curses, glaring at them both before blasting out a powerful rush of his invisible water magic to crash against Viger’s hold on their bond, Viger’s biting Darkness outrageously entrenched.

“Your Death Fae is getting territorial,”

Or’myr comments, his tone wry, but the lightning flashing through his eyes spits fire. “He’s lucky he has a skill set we currently need.”

Or’myr’s power surges, crackling through their bond to forcibly shift Viger’s biting Darkness to purple. A tingle courses over Tierney’s skin, but within the span of a breath, Viger’s Darkness bites back down.

“I think he might be stronger than all of us,”

Tierney warns.

Or’myr’s aura gives a hot, purple flare. “You underestimate me.”

A shiver runs through Tierney, and it’s not unpleasant, their locked gazes generating a disarming heat.

Stop falling into this bond! Tierney chastises herself as she wrenches her gaze away from Or’myr’s only to have it snag on his entrancingly violet sorcerer hands. Tierney’s thoughts scatter, both Or’myr’s violet form and the riverbank’s stone lit with a deep-purple runic glow that’s so lush, a tendril of sensual heat curls through her, her River shot through with every dark shade of Or’myr’s glorious purple . . .

A sudden realization floods her.

I’ve gained some of Or’myr’s geo-draw to purple through Viger’s bond.

She meets Or’myr’s heated gaze once more, a tracery of lightning flashing over his lips, as if he can sense both her newfound color thrall and her flare of longing for him. He shakes his head and spits out what sounds like an Uriskal epithet before casting her a tortured look. “Do you know how hard it is to keep my wits about you now that you’re . . . purple?”

Tierney’s heart skips. Swallowing thickly, she glances toward Fyordin to find him farther into the Vo, his back to them, a jealous tension rippling through his water power.

“I . . . I’m not completely clear on what’s happening between all of us,”

Tierney admits sheepishly.

“Oh, I’ve a few guesses,”

Or’myr offers. “I think that bond Viger set down in you during Xishlon is a primordial mating bond, and it’s quickening. And now we’re all caught up in it.”

Tierney’s power rears, a small storm cloud bursting to life above her. “I suspected as much,”

she sputters.

“I need to have a talk with him about the meaning of consent,”

Or’myr grits out with dangerous calm. “And by ‘talk’ I mean ‘inflict great bodily harm.’?”

Tierney cocks a brow at this, as anger forks through Or’myr’s eyes. “The only thing keeping me from going after him right now,”

Or’myr adds, “is the fact that the very large Dryad piece of me knows he helped us save a huge swath of Forest along the entire expanse of the Vo. Not to mention the Vo itself. Which is a lot more important than—”

he swirls his hand agitatedly between the three of them “—this insanity.”

Her brow knotting, Tierney glances at the grayed trees edging the Vo, Viger’s tendrils of Darkness winding around their bases, their leaves slowly speckling with purple.

Viger’s regenerative Death power battling back the gray.

“I need to have a talk with him,”

Tierney firmly states. “Where is he?”

A harder flash of lightning cracks through Or’myr’s eyes. “I don’t know where your Xishlon’vir is,”

he rigidly supplies, and Tierney hears him attempt but fail to keep the hurt from his tone. He draws in a deep breath and shakes his head, giving her a pained look. “I’m sorry, Tierney. Being bound to you like this . . . it’s incredibly difficult.”

Remorse rises inside her, mixed with the trauma of the night, a lump suddenly lodged in her throat over the invisible divide that stands between her and Or’myr. A divide that might not exist if their incompatible magic didn’t make kissing, and possibly other types of touching, a lightning-charged agony.

Her pang of remorse tightens.

What must Or’myr think of her, now that he knows she kissed both him and Viger on Xishlon? And what must Fyordin think of her? A flustered aggravation quickly flares, overtaking her rush of cursed Gardnerian shame, because none of this matters one whit. Not compared to saving the Natural World.

But still, having a primordial Death Fae mating bond set down without her consent—that most certainly does matter.

Her troubled emotions gathering into a fitful tide, Tierney brings one hand to her hip as she turns and peers into the Forest’s darkness. She can feel Viger’s directional pull through his fang-deep hold on the bond, a subtle tether of his Darkness fastened to her power’s core.

Blast this, Tierney curses as she turns and strides toward the purpling woods, a protective flare of Or’myr’s and Fyordin’s powers encircling her. Fighting the urge to let her power return their embraces, she shoves off their magic with an aggravated burst of water power and strides into the Forest toward Viger at a rapid clip, shoving a hand into her tunic’s pocket to retrieve the small purple runic stone that Or’myr magicked for her earlier to light the night.

She’s only a few paces into the woods when her sense of Viger’s pull vanishes, as if wrested from her grasp. She pauses, frustration burgeoning. The night air is cool, insects chirring, as she casts about for a sense of Viger’s aura of Darkness, but . . . nothing.

She curses under her breath. Viger could be anywhere.

A sudden idea lights.

Stilling, Tierney closes her eyes and draws in a deep breath, her hand coming to the vial around her neck as she focuses inward on her fear for the Vo and her iron-injured kelpies, and for her multitude of kindred river creatures and all the Waters of Erthia.

She can feel Viger’s awareness prick up like an antenna’s subtle lift as he connects to her fear, but he makes no move to enthrall her or draw her in. She senses his shiver of resentment, but also, the subtle pull toward his location.

Stalking forward, she fumes, resentment welling over everything Viger didn’t tell her about their bond but should have.

Her sense of his energy strengthening, she finds him in a small clearing, crouching on the ground, his hornless head angled down, eyes closed, claws in, ravens perched all around him.

His palms to the earth.

Her primal attraction to him quickens, and she remembers how he fought off the Shadow forces, all teeth and claws and Dark Deathkin power, warmth rushing to a place she has no wish for it to be.

Why in all the hells would you be drawn in by that, she chastises herself.

Mortified by his effect on her, gnashing her teeth against it, she halts before him.

Viger’s gaze slowly rises to meet hers, the ravens and the surrounding trees washed in the purple glow of her runic stone. Keeping his midnight eyes fixed on her, Viger whispers a stream of words to the ravens in a language she doesn’t comprehend, his hiss like an insidious wind that she can feel winding around her ribs and everything surrounding them.

Viger quiets, and the ravens take off as one, their multitude of wings beating down on the air, while he remains low to the ground, palms to the soil.

Everything empties from Tierney’s head except one, churning thought.

“Is it true you set down a Death Fae mating bond between us?”

she demands, condemnation swelling in a fierce tide. She slashes out a hand at him, like an axe leveled. “Be straight with me, Viger. Because I need to trust you completely if I’m going to fight for my River with you. And I will never trust you again if you’re not honest with me, right now.”

Viger rises, so quickly that Tierney recoils, one second on the Forest floor and the next, standing less than a breath away, the night’s darkness seeming to pull in around them both.

“We kissed,”

he bites out, his pitch-black eyes narrowing. “A Deathbond has been formed.”

Tierney’s flare of ire crackles hotter. “So . . . that means what? That you’ll devour my dreams now? That you’ll devour me?”

His lips curl with obvious disdain. “No.”

Tierney glares at him, incensed. “But you could?”

Viger narrows his coal-dark stare on her as his horns rise and sharpen. “Yes, Asrai.”

He flashes his teeth as his thrall pulses Darker, the whole world blackening, including the whites of his center-of-Erthia eyes, but Tierney is undaunted.

“Careful, Viger,”

she snaps, drawing confrontationally nearer, “I might invade your dreams, as well. And we’ll have a little talk. A violent storm is likely to be involved!”

She’s suddenly swept up in a more intense blur of Dark and she gasps, gravity itself cutting out, Viger’s thrall swirling around them as the ground gives way.

“Then invade them, Asrai,”

he challenges.

A shiver goes through Tierney, but she refuses to cower or give in to the urge to buckle and fall straight into him.

“You should have warned me,”

she throws down, her voice breaking around the tide of her anger. “You should have told me exactly what kissing you meant. Now get your thrall off me and set me down.”

In an instant, she’s back on solid ground, teetering a bit from a rush of vertigo. Viger scowls, his sharpened teeth fully bared, his purple forked tongue flickering out in warning.

Intimidation fires inside Tierney, but she ignores it as an inexplicable hurt rises. “I thought we were friends.”

Her voice seems to split apart at the seams.

Viger gives her a mocking look. “You seek friendship with Death?”

The hurt digs in deeper. “No, with you,”

she exclaims, voice breaking.

“You understand nothing,”

he snarls, low and menacing, his elongated teeth snapping. “You do not understand what we Deathkin will be forced to do if Nature’s Balance gives way. What I’m already being drawn toward. Nature is upending. And we will bring the Reckoning. The death of crops. Pestilence. Sickness. A tide of Death the world has never before seen.”

“Then work to keep it at bay,”

she cries, “like you’re helping us keep the Shadow at bay!”

“If the Balance unravels, it cannot be kept at bay!”

he hisses, eyes wild. “Death Fae are beings of primordial power. We do not fight for any alliance, no matter what this bond-linkage has wrought. We fight for Natural Death. And if the people of Erthia upend the Matrix, Natural Death will come. Our Reckoning will rise to fight both the Shadow Death and Nature’s Unbalancing, and you will be torn apart by our sickle!”

Tierney takes a stumbling step back, a shiver of intense fear coursing through her hurt and confusion. “But . . . we’re allied.”

Viger leans in, lip lifting in a snarl as multiple snakes appear and slither around his shoulders, all of them hissing at Tierney, fangs bared. “I am Deathkin,”

he snarls, his voice vibrating straight through her. “I am cruel. I am every reality you are afraid to face. I am every cherished belief destroyed. Do not come to me if you seek comfort or consolation. Do not come to me for kindness or friendship or alliance. You will find no solace here.”

And with that, he turns into mist and flows into the night, a tendril of his Darkness trailing behind him.

Distraught, Tierney stumbles back to her Vo a distance away from everyone. She dives into it, blasting away Fyordin’s then Or’myr’s incoming flashes of protective, questioning power, making it clear that she wants them to stay away.

The Vo enfolds her as she glides toward its bed, her emotions a tempestuous mess, her full fury whirling around Viger Maul’s unexpected cruelty.

Have I misjudged him all this time?

Fear rises that Viger is not truly aligned with her beautiful River but with Death above all, ready to send a wave of killing might over everything. Not in the way Vogel would, with demonic power and multi-eyed beasts, but by raining down sickness and famine and cruel natural Death, he and his fellow Deathkin scything through everything she and her allies are trying to salvage and protect.

Everything on Erthia worth fighting for.

Tierney stares up through the water for a long time, her eyes focused on Or’myr’s wavering purple moon orb until weariness begins to pull her under. Does Viger even sleep? she wonders as she sinks closer to a troubled slumber, her thoughts churning around Viger’s cold words. She has no idea where he sleeps, if he does. He’s the most solitary being she’s ever met.

Solitary as Death.

She closes her eyes and recklessly searches for the bond Viger laid down with his kiss, bristling with offense that even her dreams are no longer her own. But still, she can’t get the image of him fighting off Shadow soldiers out of her mind, a terror and a wonder to behold as he drove off Mage and Marfoir power.

Helping her to save her River.

Despite Viger’s chilling words, she can’t help but remember that glimpse, through his kiss on Xishlon, of how his terrifying magic supports the entirety of the Natural Matrix, the decay and Death giving rise to all new Life, their kiss a mind-bending revelation, leaving her clear about his complexities. But his frightening words . . . she sensed truth there too.

Are you really so cruel, Viger? Tierney frets, remembering the edges of besotted tenderness in his Xishlon kiss. And suddenly, despite her ire, the desire to find him rises once more. Searching for their link to no avail, she starts a slow slide toward sleep . . . then abruptly finds it.

Jolted into wakefulness, she tenses, hyperaware of a thin Dark thread in the Deathbond’s center, bound to the deepest recess of her mind.

The dream tether.

It’s subtle as the pull of a single strand of spider silk, taut and firmly affixed.

Tierney runs her mind along it as it loosens . . . then slackens.

He’s going to sleep, Tierney realizes, astonished to be able to sense this so clearly through the tether. Pulse quickening, she slows her breathing and focuses on the slackening binding, then lets herself fall right into that slender strand, the surrounding world dissolving, Viger’s Darkness collapsing in . . .

Abruptly she’s on her feet and in another nighttime location, surrounded by green-leafed trees instead of purple.

The Western Realm.

Disoriented, she peers through foliage toward a clearing just beyond. There’s a cottage in its center, its windows glowing with amber light.

A tall youth garbed in black disembarks from a carriage and stalks purposefully toward the cottage, his cloak billowing dramatically behind him.

Tierney gives a hard start.

Because it’s Viger. But . . . a much younger Viger. Perhaps around fourteen. Pale and skinny. But hints of the emerging man are there in the square lines of his jaw, his imposing height. The intensity in his Dark eyes.

A chill pricks at Tierney’s skin. I’m in his dream.

A fuller realization hits. The tether he set down in his kiss . . . it goes both ways.

The eerie Dark of Viger’s thrall ripples over her, but it’s not controlled and contained. It pulses fitfully, triggering a jolt of fear and despair that tightens her chest. Stunned by the out-of-control potency of teenage Viger’s aura, she stands her ground and ignores the instinct to turn and run from him.

His dark form is trailed by a middle-aged Keltish couple—an emaciated brown-haired woman clinging to the arm of a broad bearded man. The bearded man’s face is set in a stern-approaching-furious expression, his gaze pinned on Viger’s back.

Tendrils of black smoke appear below the hem of Viger’s cloak, curling and undulating toward the couple, as if he’s trying to scare them into fleeing from him.

Tierney’s entire body breaks into gooseflesh as she’s hit by side-tendrils of Viger’s mist. The scene shudders, the edges of the sky momentarily contracting. Everything stills, no birds, no insects, no trace of a breeze, Viger’s ominous wall of quiet pressing down.

The cottage door opens, and a white-haired older Keltish woman appears in the lantern-lit entryway. Her calm, kind voice rings out. “This must be Viger. Come in, come in.”

Her unflappable composure surprises Tierney. It’s as if the woman doesn’t notice Viger’s eerie black mist or his aura’s thrall of frightening doom.

Viger and the couple enter the cottage, Viger’s dark fog sucked in behind them as the door snaps shut.

Tierney lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding as slowly, tentatively, the normal night sounds resume—an owl hoots, followed by a chorus of peepers then the thrum of insects, the chill prickling Tierney’s skin receding as the night smooths out.

Tierney creeps toward the cottage and enters it through the back door, walking silently through a dim jarred-goods storeroom, fragrant herbs drying overhead. She nears the amber light spilling from the edges of a slightly open door and peers into a rustic kitchen. She immediately spots young Viger, now seated at the central wooden table, his hands clasped before him, pale face hood-shrouded as he stares fixedly at the oak table before him, his swirling black mist orbiting his straight-backed frame.

The older woman is leaning back against a wooden counter, her hands planted on it. A slender gray-haired Keltish man of about her same age stands beside her, his bespectacled visage intelligent and kindly, the couple’s gazes on the angry bearded man as he holds forth.

“You’ve got to take him back,”

the bearded man insists with a swipe of his arm toward young Viger. “He’s no good. He’s got the demonic in him.”

“He wasn’t always like this,”

the emaciated woman nervously counters. She’s sobbing a little as she speaks, her arms wrapped around her scarily thin frame as if she’s desperate for self-comfort. She looks to the white-haired woman, a pleading expression on her sickly face. “He’s got good in him. I know he does. When we first took him in, he was such a sweet little boy.”

“He was never a sweet boy,”

the man refutes with a vicious sneer. “He was off right from the start.”

He jabs a thick finger at Viger. “Up all night. Asleep all day. Peering out from corners. Like a demon from a nightmare. Eating spoiled food.”

He crosses his muscular arms in front of himself, eyes set on the bespectacled man, as if only a man will see sense here. “We caught him taking things from the garbage.”

He glances at Viger, his gaze narrowed. “Frightening, is what he is and always was.”

“He’s quiet and artistic,”

the woman insists, her voice choked with tears.

The man gapes at her. “He drew multiple pictures of giant gray clouds with horrible eyes devouring villages like a demonic tide, a black tide rising up from the ground to batter against it! Those aren’t normal things for a child to be drawing!”

The emaciated woman shakes her head, her mouth a trembling grimace. “He’s good. I know he’s good. You don’t see him for what he is. You never did.”

She looks at Viger, desperation washing over her face. “Viger, why won’t you talk to me? I want you home.”

The man jabs his finger at the youth once more, his expression venomous. “That . . . thing can never step foot inside my house again.”

He rounds on the woman. “Or I will call the Mage Council, Rosalie. I swear I will.”

The dark thrall winding around motionless Viger ripples out over the floor, thickening. The bearded man lets out a low oath and steps back, but the black mist slithers over his foot.

“You see what he does?”

the bearded man cries to the older couple, a slight tremor to his voice. “He’s evil, I tell you!”

“Please,”

Rosalie begs the couple, “you need to believe me—he’s not what Goryl thinks he is.”

“He’s exactly what I think he is,”

Goryl hisses at her.

“The Fae have ways that differ from ours,”

the bespectacled man pipes up diplomatically. But I notice he’s regarding Viger warily. The white-haired woman, on the other hand, is fixedly eyeing Goryl, pointedly ignoring the dark mist snaking around her ankles and undulating over the entire kitchen floor.

Rosalie is sobbing harder now, her head falling into her hands. “He’s good with animals—kind to them,”

she murmurs brokenly.

Goryl makes a sound of disgusted incredulity. “Are you going to tell them what type of animals, Rosa?”

“No, but—”

“Tell them what type, Rosalie.”

She looks up and meets his eyes, her face a mask of misery.

“I’ll tell you what type,”

Goryl snarls, turning back to the shocked-looking couple. “Bats. Ravens. Scavengers. Every vile animal you can think of. Wolves.”

He swirls the air with his finger. “Sniffing round the house. We caught him with a whole pack of them. More than once. Circled round him, they did. Like he was some dark lord. It was twisted.”

He glares at Rosalie. “Should I tell them about the spiders?”

She shoots him a pained, pleading look before glancing imploringly toward the older couple, her cowed voice fading to a whisper. “He’s quiet and thoughtful. He’s smarter than most—reads everything he can get his hands on—”

“And what does he pick out from it? Hmmm?”

Goryl demands. “Marks every page that has to do with death. Or disease. That’s what he reads.”

He taps the side of his temple with a finger. “He’s sick in the head. Maybe more than sick.”

Viger endures it all calmly, black eyes alarmingly feral, his form still and silent.

Like Death.

Goryl makes the Ancient One’s star sign of holy protection on his chest, murmuring a prayer.

Seeming overcome, Rosalie suddenly rushes through the mist toward Viger. She grasps his arm, but he doesn’t look at her. “I know you’ve good in you,”

she cries. She looks to Goryl, pleading. “Remember when he nursed the bats?”

“No normal boy has a small sanitarium for ravens and bats!”

he booms back. “No normal family has bats flying ’bout the house!”

“He’s not normal! But he’s not bad!”

“A mother’s love is an all too forgiving thing!”

“As a father’s should be!”

Viger rises in one blindingly fast motion. The entire room seems to shudder and contract as his eyes turn solid black and he sets them on Goryl, horns rising from his head.

“YOU. ARE. NOT. MY. FATHER.”

Viger’s deep voice echoes from every corner of the room, the Dark force of it sending a vicious chill straight through Tierney, and she takes a step back, her heart quickening.

Seeming frightened now, Goryl makes the Ancient One’s protection sign on his chest once more before he sets his rattled gaze back on the older couple. “I rue the day I ever let this thing in my house.”

“Don’t speak of him like that!”

Rosalie cries, grabbing Viger’s arm again as his Dark power whips around the room, sucking Tierney into its thrall, filling her thoughts with death and despair.

Rosalie throws her arms around Viger. “I’m so sorry, my beautiful boy. I’m so sorry. I love you, my sweet one.”

“Do you see?”

Goryl cries out to the couple. “He has her under his thrall.”

Viger suddenly grips Rosalie’s arms and pushes her back with obvious, otherworldly strength. “Mother, you’ve got to let me go.”

His face is devoid of feeling, his eyes a piercing abyss.

“She’s not your mother!”

Goryl snarls. “She never was, and she never will be! Your mother is dead, and it’s probably a good thing, too, if she could bring forth the likes of you!”

“Please stop,”

the older white-haired women shakily states, holding up her palm.

Viger slowly turns back to Goryl. A chilling grin forms on his face, his eyes filling with Dark power, his thrall expanding to fill the cottage’s expanse with a suffocating force that Tierney can feel pressing against her lungs.

Viger lunges toward his mother, and Tierney flinches in shock as he grabs Rosalie by the back of her neck and sinks his teeth into the base of her throat, dark mist flowing from the edges of his mouth.

Chaos breaks out.

Goryl and the older couple spring forward to grab Viger, struggling to pull him off Rosalie. She shudders and convulses, her eyes lolling backward, before Viger releases her, all the Dark mist in the room snuffing out.

Goryl punches Viger in the face. Hard. Sending Viger to the floor, blood streaming from his nose.

“Only for her did I not slay you,”

Goryl growls at a crumpled Viger. “Stay away from my family, freak! You hear me? The Mage Council is right about you lot!”

Rosalie is staring at Viger, dazed, her hand cradling the base of her throat. “The pain in my hip is gone,”

she marvels to Viger in a rasp. “What did you do?”

Viger pushes himself up from the ground, his grim gaze fixed on his mother. “When I come into my fullness, I will return for you.”

Rosalie seems to barely register his words as she clutches her hip, then her abdomen. “The lumps . . . they’re gone. What did you do to me, my son?”

“No,”

Goryl snarls, grabbing her arm. “No more falling into his thrall. This ends now.”

With that, he drags Rosalie out of the cottage and into the night, slamming the door behind them.

Stunned, Tierney looks at young Viger, two snakes now twining around his shoulders as he stares the older couple down with unnerving, emotionless focus even as blood streams over his lips and chin.

“Here,”

the woman says, retrieving a cloth and dampening it before offering it to Viger. “For . . . for your face.”

But she seems scared now, and Viger makes no move to take the cloth.

“Well, Viger,”

the bespectacled man says stiltedly. He clears his throat, his wariness of the horned teen before him evident on his face. He motions to a room at the end of a narrow hallway. “We’ve prepared a room for you. You . . . you must be tired.”

In a blur, Viger is on his feet and striding down the hall, his dark cloak billowing behind him. He reaches the room, enters, and firmly shuts the door behind him.

The couple stares in his direction for a good, long moment before the man turns to the white-haired woman. “What is he, Emilin?”

he asks in a tremulous whisper.

She swallows. “Primordial Death Fae.”

The man sucks in a long breath, fear in his gaze. “We can’t have a Death Fae living here with us . . .”

“He has nowhere else to go.”

The man shakes his head. “Emilin . . . I’m sorry, no. The Asrai and Lasair Fae . . . that was one thing. This is entirely different. You can tell him in the morning. He has to go.”

With that, the man walks out, leaving the woman alone. She stands there for a long moment before she, too, casts one last anguished look toward Viger’s room, then turns and follows the man out.

Tierney is frozen, her heart in her throat.

Forcibly getting hold of herself, she creeps through the kitchen and down the dimly lit hall, dark mist seeping out from under the door before her. The closer she gets to it, the more she can feel the troubling vibration of fear and sorrow in Viger’s thrall.

Tentatively she takes hold of the cool, metal doorknob and turns it, pulling the door open.

Tierney draws in a quick breath as she finds Viger sprawled out on a bed, facedown, cradling his horned head tightly in his arms as he sobs, chest heaving. A multitude of serpents are slithering over his prone form, more slinking in from the slightly ajar window, as if seeking to offer him solace, but he doesn’t acknowledge them, so great is his misery. Tierney’s chest tightens with kindred sorrow, a fierce compassion for him cinching her gut. Sympathetic tears fill her eyes as she remembers being ripped away from her Fae parents when she was so small. Remembers how her mother screamed her name as Tierney’s painfully glamoured three-year-old self was dragged away.

Forcing back the nightmarish memory, Tierney snaps herself away from the dream tether, the world blurring as she’s thrust back under the Vo, breathing in gulp after gulp of water as she opens her eyes, her river-slicked gaze burning with emotion. She sits up, the Vo’s cool water streaming around her body as she’s filled with the desperate urge to find Viger.

She closes her eyes and concentrates, more easily locating their tether this time and latching hold of it. She burrows deep until she can sense a small, subtle pull toward Viger through the woods. Decided, she swims toward the bank, emerges, and releases her restless kelpies from her necklace’s vial into a small, sheltered pool beside the Vo, then whisks the water from her form and follows his dream’s pull.

Tierney finds Viger deep in the woods, facedown on the ground, covered in serpents and sobbing in his sleep. Her hand flies to her mouth in anguished surprise. Falling to her knees beside him, she touches his shoulder, his snakes slithering agitatedly over her hand. “Viger . . .”

He swings around and grabs her wrist, instantly awake and hissing along with his serpents, his horns arcing up, his claws digging painfully into her skin, his eyes full Dark and teeth snapping, his face slick with black tears.

A shocked recognition flashes through his eyes and he instantly loosens his grip and retracts his claws and horns, his eyes regaining their whites, his breathing labored.

Tierney gapes at him. She’s never seen him look so young and vulnerable. “You healed her, didn’t you?”

she manages, sliding her wrist out of his grip to take hold of his hand.

He moves to pull away but she tightens her grip, and he allows it, pain slashing through his eyes. “I did,”

he admits, voice rough and resonant.

“How did you do it, Viger?”

she prods, her heart going out to him.

He grimaces and gives her a harsh look before his mouth lifts in a horrible rictus grin. For a moment, Tierney’s mind is filled with visions of maggots. Of decaying flesh. A spider piercing its prey with venom. Her own body decaying in the center of Erthia . . .

“Stop it,”

she firmly grits out, keeping tight hold of him. “Stop trying to push me away. How did you save her, Viger? Tell me.”

A subtle flinch before his gaze takes on a morbid tension. “Life was killing her,”

he finally says, his lips quivering into a fierce scowl. “Life unchecked . . . growing and eating and consuming and blossoming into its hideous fullness.”

A furious glint fills his eyes as his gaze knifes into her. “I killed it.”

Tierney pulls in a long, harsh breath. “And saved her.”

Viger gives a subtle nod. “Yes, Asrai.”

“What . . . happened?”

Tierney asks. “Did you ever see her again?”

Viger’s face twists. “I tried to go back. But her wretched husband convinced her that it was my leaving that cured her. The removal of the demonic so the Ancient One could restore her. And then . . . they reported me to the Mages.”

“Oh, gods, Viger.”

They’re quiet as she regards him. No horns, claws, or fangs. No thrall.

Just Viger.

Inky tears glistening on his cheeks. Dark circles weighing down his eyes.

Another black tear courses down his pale face. “I don’t want to bring the Reckoning,”

he rasps, an abyss of misery in his gaze. “I don’t want to kill you or your Waters.”

Tierney nods, her own tears brimming. “I believe you.”

An idea lights, deep in Tierney’s core. “Come with me,”

she offers as she cradles his hand.

He nods, seeming too choked up to say more, which both stuns and pains Tierney anew. Decided, she releases his hand, gets up, then holds her hand out to him once more.

Viger hesitates, then takes her outstretched hand and rises, his midnight eyes meeting hers, the bottomless sorrow glistening in them strengthening Tierney’s resolve. Silently, she leads him to an isolated bank of the Vo and then into it, heading toward its center.

The Vo’s night-dark waters close in around their legs, waists, and abdomens before flowing over their heads. Tierney keeps firm hold of Viger’s hand as she leads him down, down, down to the bottom of her River, all the way to the deepest point of the Vo’s silty bed.

And then Tierney pulls Viger onto the River’s floor and into a close embrace, his arms wrapping tightly around her.

He clings to her in the darkness, and Tierney can feel his powerful, pent-up emotion, leagues deep, pulsing through her and around her as she holds on, a shiver running through his long form.

A sudden vertigo sweeps through her.

The River’s bed gives way as Viger pulls her down into it, tunnelling deep into the earth before they both still, their small, cavernous space lit up a dim silver as Tierney draws back a fraction and meets Viger’s impassioned gaze, stunned to find she can still breathe so deep inside Erthia’s depths.

She draws him into a close embrace once more and can feel the loosening of his breath against her neck as she’s filled with the sense of natural Death thrumming through the earth, through her River above, the Magedom’s Void Death driven off by it. The River’s Balance tenuously restored.

But she can also feel Viger’s pain and unguarded fear over being nature’s Great Balancer and what that might mean for his immediate future.

“Those pictures you drew as a teen,”

Tierney whispers. “You were drawing your fear of a Reckoning, weren’t you?”

Viger nods against the side of her face.

“The Shadow is throwing off the Balance,”

she continues, losing herself to their joint upsweep of emotion. And their joint upsweep of fear. “It’s not you throwing it off. I know you fear for my River as much as I do.”

He nods again and draws back a fraction, a grim Darkness passing through his gaze. “There’s only one way to stave off a full Reckoning,”

he says in a rough whisper, “if Nature’s Balance is destroyed.”

Tierney waits, heart in her throat.

“To dissolve myself completely into the Natural Matrix.”

Tierney’s pulse stutters. “Would it kill you?”

“Only if the Shadow Death wins.”

A terrible silence descends.

“And if it doesn’t win?”

Tierney asks, voice tight as she takes in the stark glint in Viger’s eyes.

“I’d reemerge,”

he says, his voice weighted with a chilling finality. “In a hundred years or more.”

Her breath catches. “Are you immortal?”

His gaze on her intensifies. “Yes, Asrai. As are you.”

Tierney startles at this, shaking her head in solid refute. “Viger, I’m Asrai.”

“You have a much stronger Deathkin line than I realized. I knew there was a sliver of primordial lineage in you, or you would not have bonded to Deathkin kelpies. But it’s much more than a sliver. When we kissed on Xishlon, I thought I would be able to stave off a permanent binding between us. But your Deathkin line . . . it overtook the Balance between us when you pulled on your full power battling the V’yexwraith, and I wasn’t able to hold back from a full Deathkin mating bond.”

Tierney’s heart thuds against her chest as she senses, through his line of fear, the truth of his words. That he never meant to create such an intense bond between them.

“You told me that Deathkin don’t pair with other Deathkin,”

she counters, confused.

His eyes ink over, a spark igniting in them. “Not when the Balance is veering toward chaos. The draw becomes too . . . wild. If we were to give in to this bond, it could pull us both into Nature’s Reckoning.”

Longing ripples through their bond, and Tierney senses Viger swiping it back, emotional pain rushing in behind it. And fear. Incredible fear. Tierney follows his line of fear, stunned by what she finds at its base. Three words, buried deep. All his fears swirling around them.

A tear streaks down her cheek, and she can sense it’s as inky black as his own. “I think I understand,”

she says, lifting her palm to his tear-slicked cheek.

Viger lets out a shuddering exhale, his mouth trembling before he nods and draws her close, pressing his tear-damp lips to her neck in an impassioned, tongue-flickering kiss that sets Tierney’s heart racing.

And then he stills against her and tugs gently on their dream tether.

The faint, silvery light cuts out, the two of them dissolving into entwined mist before they fall into a deep, Deathkin sleep, both of them soon caught up in nightmares filled with clouds of gray with multiple eyes ready to consume Erthia whole.