Chapter 4
SERIS
Because you’re going to help me kill my father.
The Shadow’s words were the first my mind returned to as consciousness slowly crept back in. My eyes opened a few moments later.
It had been too long since I’d truly slept. Night after night, I endured torment and torture in that dark, humid prison. My body had grown accustomed to being on alert. At most, I managed a few restless hours each night.
The drug had finally forced my body into real sleep.
It was past noon when my eyes opened again. The fire had long since burned out. I remained still, lids barely lifted as I assessed my surroundings.
The children were gone. Only the mage and the Shadow sat near the dead fire, methodically tending to their weapons. My gaze gravitated toward him.
His words chased me through the darkness like wolves, snapping at my heels with teeth made of silver and shadow.
“If you’re awake, get up. We’ve got a long way to go.”
Heat crept into my cheeks. His eyes never left his daggers as he sharpened them with slow, deliberate strokes.
The bowman squinted at me, studying my reaction as the flush deepened. The cold sharpness from last night was gone from his face. He greeted me with a warm expression.
“G’morning!”
He looked much younger in daylight. Now that I could see him clearly, he was younger than I was.
I sat up slowly, watching their movements. “Where are the children?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“How do I know you didn’t kill them?”
“Once again,” the bowman said lightly, “if we were going to kill children, why bother rescuing them from a king who would’ve done that anyway?”
He was right.
He was also right when he implied they could have killed me while I slept.
He needed me.
He needed a weapon, just like his father had.
“You’re Daemon Thorne.”
He didn’t respond.
“Got tired of hunting down Fae for your father and decided to try something different, have you?” There was enough venom in my voice to drop a horse.
“Something like that.” He lifted one of his sharpened daggers. It gleamed beneath the bright spill of sunlight filtering through the trees.
The bowman chuckled. I shot him a glare. Our eyes met, and he shifted uncomfortably before looking away, whistling as if suddenly fascinated by the trees.
“Water,” I said.
Daemon flicked his chin toward a leather skin resting atop a moss-covered stone.
“Help yourself.”
Big mistake.
Letting me move freely told me they didn’t know enough about me.
I walked to the pouch and twisted off the cap. I took a long swallow. As the last drop slid down my throat, I hurled the skin at the mage and kicked a spray of dirt into the Shadow’s eyes.
I didn’t wait to see the results.
I ran.
My hands were still bound, but that could be handled later. First, I needed distance.
The Nightwood swallowed me whole the moment I crossed the treeline, branches clawing at my shift, roots rising to snare my bare feet. But I didn’t stop running.
I couldn’t.
Kill my father.
The Shadow Prince’s father was King Aeron Thorne, the man who’d murdered my mother, who’d planned to use me as a weapon against innocents, who’d held children hostage to ensure my obedience.
The bastard prince wanted to commit patricide.
And somehow, I was supposed to help him do it.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d spent most of my captivity fantasizing about watching the king burn. But being rescued by his own son? Being dragged into some twisted royal family reckoning?
That was a level of madness I wasn’t prepared to survive.
So I ran.
The forest floor was a minefield of thorns and fallen branches, each step sending fresh pain lancing up my legs. My feet were already bleeding, leaving dark smears across moss and leaves, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the chaos in my mind.
The places where the targeting sigils had been carved into my arms still burned like brands, and my magic felt wrong, disjointed. As if someone had taken it apart and reassembled it incorrectly.
Luckily, the aftereffects of the drugs Thaddeus had administered persisted, numbing the pain and allowing me to keep running.
The trees pressed close on all sides, their branches forming a canopy so thick I couldn't see the stars. Ancient oaks with trunks wide enough to hide entire armies. Willows drooping toward the ground like mourning veils. And everywhere, the sense of being watched. I ignored the sensation and ran until it was fully dark. I didn’t dare stop.
The Nightwood was alive in ways other forests weren't. I could feel its attention on me, curious and calculating. A branch caught my shoulder, tearing fabric and skin. I stumbled, caught myself against a tree trunk, and realized I was crying.
Not from pain. I'd lived with worse wounds for months. I was crying from exhaustion and terror I didn’t want to admit I felt. From the overwhelming sense that I was a piece on a game board I couldn't even see, moved by players whose rules I didn't understand.
It had been so long since I felt like I knew who I was. Since the day I smelled the ash and smoke of my mother’s body, I’d thought of nothing but survival. Before I knew it, I had become a tool. A weapon.
The longing for my parents that I had shoved deep down to survive resurfaced at the worst possible time. I had so many questions to ask, but they were long gone. All I had left was a desperate will to survive.
Soon, only the soft hum of the Nightwood’s magic filled the silence of my unanswered questions. Once again, I was alone. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, the crippling weight of longing and loneliness might have paralyzed me. But years of survival forced my body into motion.
I needed water. The single sip I’d taken had only made me realize how dehydrated I was.
My throat felt like sandpaper, and the drugs they’d given me left a bitter aftertaste coating my tongue.
More importantly, I needed to think. To figure out what the hell I was going to do now that I was free, but not free. Rescued, but not safe.
The sound of running water drew me deeper into the forest. A stream, probably fed by mountain springs, clear enough to see the stones at the bottom even in the moonlight filtering through the canopy. I fell to my knees at the water’s edge and cupped it in my hands, drinking desperately.
It tasted like snow and starlight, cold enough to make my teeth ache. Better than anything I’d had in months. I drank until my stomach cramped, then splashed water on my face, washing away the grime and dried blood from the ritual chamber.
When I looked up, he was there.
Daemon Thorne stood on the opposite bank as if he’d materialized from the shadows themselves, still dressed in black leather that seemed to absorb the moonlight, silver eyes reflecting the water’s surface.
I felt him before I saw him, a sudden coldness in the forest’s warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. A familiar darkness. He stood there, and I knew he had not just arrived.
He had been watching me.
“Running won’t change what you are,” he said, his voice carrying easily across the narrow stream.
I scrambled backward, water dripping from my hands, but didn’t take my eyes off him. “Stay away from me.”
“You can’t escape your nature forever.” He stepped onto the water itself, shadows solidifying beneath his feet to support his weight.
Magic like that should have been impossible. But the Thorne bloodline was different. Evil coursed through their veins. Generation after generation, they committed heinous acts in the name of conquest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” He reached the center of the stream and paused, head tilted as though he were listening to something I couldn’t hear.
“The trees are singing your name, Seris. They remember your bloodline. They remember what your ancestors could do when the world was younger and the barriers between realms were only suggestions.”
I tried to back away further and hit a tree trunk.
Trapped.
“I’m not my ancestors.”
“No,” he agreed, taking another step forward. “You’re stronger.”
The magic beneath my skin stirred at his words, responding to something in his voice. Or maybe to the shadows that moved around him like living things, reaching toward me with tendrils that felt familiar.
Wrong.
Right.
I couldn’t tell anymore.
“The prophecy calls you the Last Daughter,” he continued, still gliding across the water with impossible grace. “Last of the Veil-touched bloodline. Last hope for salvation or damnation, depending on the choices you make.”
“I didn’t choose any of this!”
“No one chooses their fate. But you will choose what comes next.” He reached the bank where I cowered, shadows pooling around his feet like spilled ink. “The question is whether you’ll do it willingly, or whether I’ll have to force your hand.”
I tried to run again. Stupid, maybe, but trapped animals don’t think clearly.
I made it three steps before tendrils of living darkness wrapped around my ankles, gentle but implacable.
They didn’t hurt. They felt almost warm against my skin, but they might as well have been iron chains for all the good struggling did.
“Let me go,” I snarled, wrenching against the shadow-bonds.
“So you can stumble through the forest until something worse than me finds you?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Nothing could be worse than you.”
His smile was sharp enough to cut. “You really don’t know anything about the Nightwood, do you?”
That’s when I heard it.
A howl in the distance, long, mournful, and definitely not made by any wolf I’d ever encountered. It echoed through the trees, seeming to come from everywhere at once, and the shadows around Daemon’s feet recoiled at the sound.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“Wraith-hound,” he said matter-of-factly. “They hunt by scent, and you’ve been bleeding for the past hour. It’ll be here soon.”
Another howl answered the first, closer this time. Then a third, from a different direction entirely. My blood turned to ice as realization sank in.
“They’re circling,” I breathed.
“Do I still seem like the worst thing you’ll find in these woods?
” The shadow-tendrils around my ankles shifted, becoming more like hands than chains.
“Wraith-hounds are what happen when wolves get caught between realms during a Veil-storm. They’re neither fully alive nor properly dead, and they have a particular taste for Fae blood. ”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He tilted his head toward the sounds drawing nearer through the darkness. “Feel free to test that theory. I’m sure they’ll be happy to prove me right.”
The howls were closer now. Beneath them, I heard something else, the heavy movement of large bodies through undergrowth, claws clicking against stone. Whatever was coming, there was more than one.
“Why aren’t you running?” I asked.
“Because I’m not prey.” His shadows rippled outward, forming a perimeter around us. “They can smell the death magic on me. It confuses them, makes them uncertain whether I’m predator or carrion.”
“And me?”
“You smell like terror and Fae blood. Their favorite combination.”
A shape moved between the trees, too large to be a normal wolf, too fluid to be entirely solid. Red eyes gleamed in the dark, and I caught a glimpse of teeth that were definitely not meant for rabbits.
“There are worse things than me hunting you in these woods,” Daemon said quietly. “Much worse. So I’m going to ask you one more time: will you come with me willingly, or shall I leave you to make friends with the local wildlife?”
The wraith-hound stepped into the moonlight.
I stopped breathing.
It had been a wolf once. The basic shape remained, four legs, pointed ears, a long snout filled with far too many teeth.
But its body flickered between solid and translucent, like smoke given form.
Its eyes burned with cold fire, and when it opened its mouth, the sound that came out was nothing any living creature should have been able to make.
More shapes emerged from the forest.
Five.
Seven.
Ten.
All of them focused on me with the single-minded intensity of predators who had found their next meal.
“Decide quickly,” Daemon said. “They’re working up the courage to attack.”
I looked at him and saw something in those pitch-black eyes that might have been genuine concern. Not for my well-being, necessarily, but for the value I represented. He needed me alive for whatever scheme he was planning.
The lead wraith-hound took a step forward, and the shadows around Daemon’s feet hissed in response.
“Fine,” I said. “Fine. I’ll come with you.”
“Smart choice.”
He gestured, and the shadow-tendrils around my ankles dissolved. But before I could even consider running again, his hand closed around my wrist. His skin was cold, almost corpse-cold, but his grip was steady. Controlled.
“Don’t move,” he murmured. “Don’t speak. Don’t even breathe loudly. And whatever happens, don’t let go of me.”
The shadows around us rose, forming a cocoon of living darkness that swallowed the moonlight, the trees, everything. The world tilted, and suddenly it felt like falling through endless space.
When reality solidified again, we were somewhere else entirely.
But the howling followed us.