20. The Tithe
Chapter twenty
The Tithe
Jace went into the forest at midnight because he needed to scream.
Not metaphorically, the need was physical, urgent, a pressure building in his chest that had been accumulating since Canyon called him an asset in front of four people, two of whom were not human and one of whom was taking notes for a creature called the Collector.
The anger had been necessary, the solitude had been healing, but the compression of emotion was reaching a threshold that his body could only release one way, and that way required a space large enough to absorb the sound without sending everyone in the lodge into a panic.
So he broke Rule One. Again. And walked into the trees.
The forest at night was different now. Where the first transgression, the midnight walk that had ended with Canyon's hand around his cock and silver eyes in the moonlight, had been blind and instinctive, this walk was deliberate.
Jace navigated by the territorial markers he'd learned to sense, the faint chemical signatures that Canyon's blood had painted on the bark, each one a waypoint in an invisible map that Jace's enhanced senses, enhanced by the bond, by proximity, by two weeks of sleeping beside a creature whose biology was rewriting his nervous system one night at a time, could now read with increasing fluency.
He found a clearing half a mile from the lodge. Stood in the center of it. Tilted his head back. And screamed.
The sound was not human. Or rather, it was the most human sound possible, the unprocessed, unfiltered expression of everything a human body holds when it has been pushed to the limit of its emotional capacity: the fury of being objectified, the grief of being pushed away, the terror of being caught between forces that could crush him without noticing, and beneath all of it, the love, the stupid, defiant, irrational love that kept choosing the dangerous thing because the dangerous thing was also the true thing, the only thing that had ever looked at Jace Warren and seen not the performance but the man.
The scream echoed through the trees and the mountain absorbed it, and in the absorbing, the pressure eased.
Not disappeared, the anger still lived in him, a necessary tenant in a chest that had been empty too long to evict its residents without cause, but eased, the compression reducing to a level that allowed breath and thought and the clarity that comes after violent expression.
He stood in the clearing, breathing hard, and the forest was quiet.
Too quiet.
The normal sounds of the nighttime mountain, the creak of pines, the distant water, the subsonic hum of the root system, had stopped.
Not faded, not receded. Stopped. The silence was so complete it had texture, the velvet silence of a room that has been sealed shut with something inside it, and Jace felt the hair on his arms rise with the electricity of a prey animal's nervous system detecting a predator that has not yet revealed itself.
He was being watched.
Not by wolves, he knew the wolves' signature now, the amber eyes, the massive bodies, the territorial discipline that kept them at a specific distance from Canyon's markers. These were not wolves.
Shapes in the trees. Seven of them, spaced in a loose circle around the clearing, each one positioned at the exact point where the moonlight failed and the shadow began.
They were humanoid. They were motionless.
And they radiated a cold that Jace felt not on his skin but in his bones—a deep, marrow-level chill that said predator in a language that predated words by a million years.
"You're the one." The voice came from the largest shape, positioned due north, directly between Jace and the path back to the lodge.
The voice was dry, papery, the sound of something that didn't use vocal cords often and had to relearn the mechanics each time.
"The one who sings to the mountain's son. "
"I don't know what you're talking about." Jace's voice was steady. He didn't know how.
"Canyon. The exile. The one who took this mountain and made it his cage.
" The shape moved, not walking but flowing, the darkness itself shifting to reveal a form that was not quite human: too tall, too thin, the proportions wrong, the joints articulating at angles that no human skeleton could achieve.
"You scream and the mountain listens. It hasn't listened to a human in centuries.
You're either very special or very dangerous. "
"What are you?" Jace asked.
"We are the tithe. The Shadow That Walks sent us to deliver a message.
Twenty-three days remain on the ultimatum.
The pack is wavering. Your vampire's position weakens by the hour.
And the one who collects—" The shape moved closer.
The moonlight caught features: pale, angular, androgynous, with eyes that were not silver like Canyon's but black, wholly, entirely, pupillessly black, like holes cut in the face through which a deeper darkness looked out. "—the Collector sends his regards."
Jace's heart was hammering. But the fear, he noticed with a dissociated clarity, was not paralyzing.
It was informative—his body flooding with data, his enhanced senses cataloguing the creatures around him, reading their chemistry, their posture, the frequency of menace they were broadcasting.
They were revenants, he realized. The word surfaced from a conversation Canyon had had with Reed: animated remains, vampire-adjacent, used by the older bloodlines as enforcement tools.
"Tell the Collector he can deliver his own messages," Jace said. "I'm not a mailbox."
The revenant's head tilted. The black eyes studied him with an attention that felt mechanical, automated, the assessment of a tool evaluating a target. "Brave. Or foolish. The distinction doesn't matter to us."
They closed in. The circle tightened. And Jace stood his ground, because the only alternative was the forest behind him, and the forest was not safe, and nothing was safe, and the only power he had left was the refusal to run.
Canyon hit the clearing like a missile.
He came from above, from the tree canopy, where he'd been tracking Jace since the moment his boots hit the forest floor, because of course he had, because Canyon had promised not to leave and not leaving meant following at a distance that respected Jace's anger while maintaining the protection that was not a choice but a biological imperative, the programmed response of a bonded vampire to its partner's proximity to danger.
He landed between Jace and the largest revenant, and the impact cratered the earth, and when he straightened, he was not the man Jace knew.
He was the thing. The predator. The apex creature that had held this mountain for three decades by being the most dangerous entity in its ecosystem.
His eyes were silver nuclear, burning with an intensity that cast actual light, illuminating the clearing in a pale, cold radiance that made the revenants flinch.
His canines were fully extended, longer than Jace had ever seen them, and his body had shifted into a posture that was not human, wider, lower, the stance of something designed for explosive violence, every line communicating a single, absolute message:
You are in my territory. You have threatened my bond. You will not leave this clearing intact.
Canyon moved through the revenants the way a scythe moves through wheat, each motion a complete sentence of violence, each impact accompanied by the sound of something breaking that was not wood or stone.
Five of the seven went down in the first four seconds, their bodies crumpling with the limpness of things whose animating force has been severed.
The sixth made it to the tree line before Canyon's hand closed around its neck and ended whatever passed for its existence in a single, sharp twist.
The seventh, the leader, the one that had spoken, stood its ground.
Its black eyes met Canyon's silver ones, and between them passed something that was not a conversation but an exchange of information: a transmission of data from one predator to another, the revenant cataloguing Canyon's speed, his force, his intensity, and beaming the recording to whatever entity had sent it.
"The Collector sees," the revenant said. And then it collapsed, not from damage, but from withdrawal, the animating force pulling out of the corpse like a hand from a glove, leaving an empty shell that crumbled to dust in the moonlight.
Canyon stood in the center of six destroyed revenants, his chest heaving, his eyes blazing, his body still locked in the combat posture, and Jace saw, with a clarity that was almost painful in its precision, what Lucien had meant by the most dangerous thing on this mountain.
Canyon turned to him. The silver eyes found Jace, and the transition that followed was like watching an earthquake run in reverse: the combat posture softening, the canines retracting, the light dimming from nuclear to steady to a flicker that was almost domestic, the predator receding and the man emerging, cell by cell, from the violence.
"You broke your promise about not following me."
A beat.
"We're both terrible at rules."
Jace looked at the dust that had been seven revenants.
Looked at the craters in the earth. Looked at Canyon, blood-spattered, wild-eyed, trembling with post-combat adrenaline that a human body would have taken hours to process and that a vampire body was metabolizing, the shaking subsiding as Jace watched.
"Twenty-three days," Jace said.
"Twenty-three days," Canyon agreed.
"Then we better stop fighting each other and start fighting them."
Canyon crossed the clearing. Cupped Jace's face in hands that were still bloody from the revenants. And kissed him, hard, brief, desperate, the kiss of a man who has just killed to protect and is trying to remember how to be gentle.
"Together," Canyon said.
"Together."
They walked back to the lodge. Behind them, the dust of seven revenants settled into the pine needles, and the mountain absorbed what remained, and somewhere in the network of roots and stone and ancient, watching intelligence, the thing that had stirred during the pack ultimatum stirred again, deeper this time, more awake, more interested.
Because Jace had screamed. And the mountain had listened.
And beneath the root system, far beneath, in layers the mountain had never shown him, something moved.
Not physically. Conceptually. A presence so vast that the mountain itself seemed small beside it, the way a house seems small beside the earth it stands on.
Jace felt it for a fraction of a second: eyes that were not eyes, a voice that spoke in stone-fall and water-flow, an intelligence that made the mountain's patient awareness look like a child's attention span.
Then the sensation was gone, the deep layer settling back into the geological silence it had maintained since before the mountain was a mountain, and Jace was left with nothing but the afterimage of something immense and the certainty that what he'd glimpsed was only the surface of a surface of what lived below.
And what the mountain heard in the scream was not just anger, not just love, not just the compressed anguish of a human caught in the gravitational field of immortal politics.
It heard a frequency. One it recognized. One it had been waiting four million years to hear again.
The mountain didn't have a word for what Jace Warren was becoming.
But it had a feeling. And the feeling was old, and deep, and it ran through the root system like electricity through wire, reaching the wolves and the trees and the water and the stone and delivering, to everything connected to the mountain's nervous system, a single, wordless message:
He's one of ours.