Chapter 26 Meryn
MERYN
There was never a body. There was never body. There was never a body.
It’s all I can hear. All I can think. I believed he was dead, and now he’s standing before me as a Siphon.
He looks exactly the same. Except, not.
His features are sharpened. He hasn’t aged a day in the years since I last saw him. The same dark hair, the same aquiline nose, the same stubborn chin. It’s Saela’s chin. But his eyes look a little larger. There’s something more handsome about him after all this time.
I can’t take it. I can’t.
My magic reacts to the storm of emotions in me. It starts to rip me apart from the inside, seeping from my pores and circling slowly around my fingers. The garden darkens.
It takes everything left in me—everything his death left behind—to maintain control.
Anassa senses my turmoil. It rages over into her, spilling through our bond, and she immediately releases a deep warning growl meant for the man standing before us. She paces closer, baring her teeth, ears back, as she positions herself protectively beside me.
His eyes—eyes just like mine—widen at the dark tendrils of magic reaching for him, at the shadows eager to strangle the life from him. The man I once knew raises his hand in a placating gesture like he’s telling me he won’t hurt me.
But it doesn’t matter, because the sight of it hurts me more than any blade ever could.
The moment he lifts his hands and holds his palms flat, I see it, and a crystal-clear memory returns to me.
Mother, pregnant with Saela, sitting in our tiny kitchen. She’s weeping over a tiny box. I asked to see inside, and she refused. I was young, and I didn’t get what was so important about the box. Not yet.
It would be months before I finally understood that there was no body to bury. That the only part of him left in the world—the only thing left—was contained in that tiny box.
A single finger, as if that could be enough. As if anything could be enough.
Looking at him now, I see that missing finger on his left hand, and I want to scream.
I grip Anassa’s fur for control. Shadows hiss around me.
“Everyone, leave us,” I command, voice rough.
I can’t do this with all of them watching. With Ruby leering, enjoying the chaos she’s created. With Siegrid frowning, disapproving of my show of emotion.
This needs to happen without witnesses.
Siegrid and Stark make no move to leave until I open our mental connections and explain that the man in front of me is supposedly my dead father. Siegrid tenses. Stark immediately takes a step closer, nostrils flaring.
I can tell he doesn’t want to leave me to my pain. But he also trusts me to protect myself. Even so, he doesn’t leave without boring a hole through the back of my skull with his glare.
“I’ll be just beyond the manor house wall, if you need me,” he promises.
Siegrid inclines her head toward me. “I will head back to the base. Resume duties there.”
“Queen Sturmfrost,” Ruby warns, “please remember that you have until tomorrow evening to decide or the battle resumes full force.”
Then she and her attendants withdraw. Cratos’s and Genicos’s heavy footsteps echo over old stone.
And Anassa and I are alone with him.
The man who resembles my father.
The instant we’re alone, I draw my dagger and step forward, shadows wreathed around me.
“Who are you?” I snap. My voice trembles with barely contained ire. “My father died eleven years ago in battle.”
“Meryn—”
“Don’t say my name!” I shout. “Are you like Killi—” I stop short, smarting. “Are you like Alistair? Are you a Siphon in there who took over my father’s body?”
Lines are blurring. Something broke when I saw Killian’s eyes roll back. When I watched him turn into someone else. The crack deepened when I realized how ghostly Saela had become. It’s difficult for me, now, to believe that the people I love—whom I once loved—are even real.
My dagger is pressed to his chest, tip aimed at his heart. And Anassa looms behind us, growling so deeply that it rumbles through me even though we aren’t touching.
But he speaks calmly. “I’m your father.”
I shake my head. “Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me something only my real father would know,” I demand.
He doesn’t hesitate. Immediately, as if calling up the memory from the very surface of his soul, he says, “On your ninth nameday, I took you hunting in the woods south of Sturmfrost.”
My jaw tightens until my teeth creak.
He keeps going. “You were such a quick learner. Unafraid, even though I was worried that breaking down an elk would scare you. I told you that it would feed us, your mother, the neighbors. And you understood, even though you were only nine. You were so determined to help.”
My eyes are stinging. I don’t want to cry. I don’t want to feel this way.
“Then the very next day you caught a tiny rabbit in your snare. But you couldn’t bring yourself to kill it. You begged me to release the little creature. Said you couldn’t see the point in hurting something so beautiful and young.”
The memory sears through me like a fire in my chest. Goddess, I forgot this part until now. Blocked out the full truth of this moment when I thought back on him.
I wanted to remember only the good parts, the father who spent special time alone with me and made sure I was fed.
“You told me I needed to toughen up,” I grind out. “To become realistic about the world. You snapped its neck.”
He smiles lightly at that. “We had rabbit stew, and your mother turned its pelt into a warm hat for you.”
A shudder passes through me. My memories of him had become glossy, sanitized. With a mother as sick as mine, the good moments with Father grew and blossomed until they blocked out the bad. He became a hero in my mind.
I tighten my grip on my blade and refuse to drop it. But I speak coldly and calmly now, no longer desperate to tear him apart. More intent on getting answers.
“The story’s true, but the merciful, innocent girl you remember died when her father did.”
He sighs, running a hand through his hair.
“That child was replaced by someone who had to grow hard to survive. So I guess in a way, you got what you wanted.” I look at my dagger pointedly, as if to say, I’d kill the rabbit now. I’ll kill you now. “You might not like whom I’ve become.”
Then I step back and let my anger run free. My shadows surge forward. They take hold of his limbs and force him back, seeming to read my intention. He doesn’t fight it as the dark tendrils shove him into the stone chair behind him and restrain him with tendrils of darkness.
Good. He’ll be under my control if he wants to talk. Anassa rumbles approvingly, moving forward to stand at my side.
“If you’ve been alive this entire time, where have you been for the past eleven years? Why did you never return to us?” My dagger is still in my hand. I can’t let go of it. But I let my other hand come up to wind through strands of Anassa’s fur.
“My battalion was ambushed, and I was critically wounded. They left me to die on the battlefield. But—” he glances down at my magic, swallows, then meets my eyes “—Ruby found me. She offered me transformation instead of death. And I was in so much pain and so afraid. I know fathers aren’t supposed to admit it, but I was afraid. And I accepted.”
A missing father. A terrified man. An unwanted Siphon. Nothing feels real.
“I believed I was protecting you by staying away, that returning to Nocturna as a Siphon would have put a target on your backs. And truth be told, I found the idea of leaving my sire to be… unwelcome.”
I scoff. He abandoned us because he didn’t want to leave behind the beautiful Siphon general who turned him?
“I knew you and your mother were strong enough to manage without me,” he says with unearned confidence. “That you would be fine.”
“Fine?!” I shout.
The anger is back, and I watch the shadows tighten on him. Relish his look of fear. I have so much hurt in me. So much hurt. And he’s here, and it’s like I finally have somewhere for it all to go. I want him to hurt.
“Mother was pregnant when you ‘died’!”
His eyes widen. “What?” I get the sense that for the first time in this conversation, I’ve surprised him. Which means he didn’t even bother to find a way to check up on us, not once in the past eleven years.
“Your disappearance shattered her mental stability. I had to become both a sister and a parent. I had to think about things, to do things no child should have to think about or do. My sister’s life was on my shoulders. Do you even care? Do you even care that your wife is dead now?”
His lips purse, and he glances away. When he looks back at me, something like regret is in his eyes.
“Meryn, the way I’ve been dead to you all this time, it felt the same way for me. You and your mother were part of a life I couldn’t return to, no matter how much I would’ve rather been with you. I had to make peace with that. I had to move on.”
The rage bubbles up in me again. “Move on? Like, to another woman?”
His gaze trails over toward the building, to where Ruby left with the attendants. “Ruby and I, we’re—”
“Stop,” I say, holding up a hand, nausea rising.
“It’s how we figured out who you were. Ruby received intel about the new queen of Nocturna, that she had been living as a commoner named Meryn Cooper. There couldn’t be more than one Meryn Cooper in Sturmfrost. I told her right away that you were my daughter.”
“Isn’t she a little young for you?” I snap, petty. “That woman can’t be more than three years older than me.”
His hands tighten around the armrests of the chair. “She’s four hundred years old. Kind of the other way around, actually.”
Gross. I turn from him and start to pace, my mind a whirling frenzy of anger and confusion. Anassa nudges me with her snout, then turns back to glare at my father.
“I’m sorry to hear about Nathalia—both her death and her mental health. I’m sorry for the burden my absence placed on you. And I’m—”
His voice cracks, and I turn back toward him. I get the sense he might be fighting back tears, but he swallows them down.
I wish I felt satisfaction, watching him almost cry. That my outburst did what I thought it would. That I was done hurting. But all I feel is echoing numbness laced with simmering anger.
“I’d like to know more about your sister,” he finishes quietly. “What’s her name?”
I stop pacing, moving back to Anassa’s side. We watch him in silence. I tell him nothing.
“You hate me?”
Still, I say nothing. Anassa and I are motionless statues, staring him down.
He shuts his eyes and clenches his jaw. If this hurts him, too, good. Then he takes a shaky breath and says, “Please don’t let how you feel about me turn you away from Ruby’s offer.”
I click my tongue and pace away from him again, frustrated. I start to flip my dagger in my hand to expel some of the excess energy.
“Astreona is nothing like what Nocturnans have been taught,” he implores, begging me to believe him.
“Humans live there peacefully along Siphons, not as prey but as citizens. If you would only come to see it for yourself, you would understand how different reality is from the propaganda you’ve been raised on. ”
Reality. Propaganda. Who is this man? His existence is a lie. How can he speak truth?
“You can trust them. Astreona and King Lucien will be good allies,” he tells me.
I catch my dagger’s hilt and grip it hard, glaring at him. “How can I trust you when I don’t even know you? You’ve been absent for half my life. What right do you have to give me advice about alliances and rulership after abandoning your own family?”
My anger seems to be getting to him—his hands tighten on the armrests again, and the glassy look has come back to his eyes. “I know… I have no right to your trust, but I ask you—beg you—for a chance to earn it. To get to know you again. And to meet the daughter I never knew existed.”
Anassa’s voice cuts through the chaos roiling inside me. “Taking Saela into Astreona might actually benefit us. If any kingdom would know how to help a newly turned Siphon control her hunger or possibly even reverse the transformation, it’s Astreona.”
I pause at that. The possibility of helping Saela weighs heavily on me. My mind pivots away from my father and toward my sister.
He watches me as I think, but I just let him stare. Let him linger in the pain. Let him wait and fruitlessly hope the way I once did, before the tiny box arrived.
It becomes clear to me quickly that I’m not going to find any meaningful answers in this state. I need to consider it all in depth.
I breathe deeply, calming my heart rate. My shadows are still writhing around my father, trapping him in place.
With each deep breath I take, they loosen their grip, until finally they dissolve and fall away.
“Well done,” Anassa says, noting my increased control over my powers.
I’m in no place to appreciate the achievement. “Get out of my sight before I end you for real this time,” I say. My voice is too level because of everything I’m forcing down.
His brows twist up. I can see that he believes me. That he feels like a struggling rabbit in a snare. I might have spared him today, but my mercy has limits.
He rises slowly from the chair, his expression heavy with regret. I can’t care. Can’t pity him. He left the weight of an entire family on a kid’s shoulders.
Did he think this was going to be some touching, grateful reunion when he came here?
After everything I’ve been through because of him?
I wish he’d actually died on that battlefield.
He takes one last lingering look at me. He’s memorizing my face. I let him look. Let him see how dead the love I once had for him is now. Then he turns and strides toward the manor house, where his monstrous lover, Ruby, and her bloodsucking attendants wait for him.
Only when he’s gone do I let my pain show on my face, when there’s no threat that he’ll confuse my agony for girlish longing. My composure cracks, and my magic breaks free again. The shadows around me surge and writhe.
They’re searching for him. For the source of my pain. They want to snuff him out.
Rage, grief, and a lifetime of loneliness threaten to overwhelm me.
I want to cry now. Scream.
But the tears won’t come. My voice won’t work. My nails dig into my palms, and none of the emotion will move. It’s all just lodged in my throat, choking me to death.
It’ll explode and ruin me if I don’t find an outlet.
I stalk back to where Stark awaits my return, Anassa padding behind. Stark pushes off the rubble when he sees me coming, his expression serious. My entire body is taut with painful, barely contained emotion.
“I need to hurt something,” I tell him.
“I can help with that,” Stark says immediately, already turning to lead me away from the manor and prying eyes, Cratos close behind.
And I follow him, shadows and ghosts trailing in my wake.