43. Syneca #2
Silas pressed. “There’s a way in. There’s always a way in.”
Morgana, the fight nearly gone out of her, the bargain having its way answered. “I’ve yet to find one.”
I swallowed my gasp. After all these years?
Silas looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and absolutely lethal.
“You bought a throne with the blood of infants. Children who had done nothing but exist in a way that frightened people who should have known better.” He stepped toward her, and I watched her shrink back, this woman who had ruled a militant matriarchy for so long, shrinking from a demon who hadn’t raised his voice once.
“You called them an abomination. You, who have spent over a century draining the life from people to keep yourself beautiful, powerful and untouchable.” He took her own hand mirror from her desk and held it out for her.
“Look at yourself. This is what you actually are. This is what you’ve always been underneath. ”
I watched him from the door and thought that I had never in my life seen anything more terrifying or more just. I had never wanted to stand beside someone more than I wanted to stand beside him in this moment.
He turned to me. “My witch will never be brought to heel.” His eyes held mine across the room with an attention that had nothing performative in it. “Not by anyone.”
Then he spun back to Morgana and took what was left.
She didn’t scream. There wasn’t enough of her remaining for that. She simply diminished, folding in on herself until what sat in the chair where the nymph Matriarch had been was a husk wearing a very old woman’s face, her violet eyes gone pale and empty, her hands still in her lap.
The room was very quiet.
“Syn,” Silas said.
“I’m ready.”
We walked out.
Not a single Nymph moved, staring at the ball of fire burning in my palm.
I stepped slow and steady, and looked at every face that turned toward us in the village.
No one came forward. No one reached for a weapon.
They watched us with those violet eyes and held their positions and I held mine, and the fire in my hand said everything that needed saying.
Silas shifted.
I climbed up, cast the adhesion spell, and pressed low against his back as he launched into the dark canopy above.
The village disappeared beneath us, swallowed by green, and then we were above the trees and the night air hit my face cold and clean and I exhaled for what felt like the first time in hours.
Below us, the Nightfall Forest shrank to a dark mass against the landscape.
I didn’t look back.
Silas landed outside Drennith without a word.
He shifted and we walked. I let the silence sit for a while before I started paying attention to it. He’d closed some kind of door in his mind, and I knew it was because now I finally knew what he was, truly. What the demon was capable of.
I watched him from the corner of my eye as we moved through the outer streets toward the Black Marrow.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were forward.
Whatever he was carrying out of that room, he was carrying it alone.
I couldn’t tell if I was annoyed with the mood, or comforted by the familiarity of his fucking brooding.
I left it alone.
Silas heard it first. Or maybe I did, because I knew Calder’s deep and genuine laugh, currently spilling out through the Black Marrow’s open door.
We looked at each other carefully before stepping inside.
The back corner had become its own event.
Calder and Dez were at the center of it, surrounded by a loose circle of lycan who were in various states of delighted intoxication.
Dez had a black eye with varying shades of purple.
Calder had a split lip and the expression of a man who hadn’t had this much fun in months.
Pip was perched on someone’s shoulder, wings slightly unsteady, holding a shot glass with both hands.
“What the fuck happened here?” Silas said, with absolutely no decorum whatsoever.
“Oh hey. Hey guys, welcome in.”
Silas’s low growl sank over me. “Enjoying yourselves?”
Dez nodded with a sloppy grin. “We were just minding our own business.” He then winked for every single person to see. Idiot. “And out of nowhere, a shifter saw Pip and tried to grab her. We had no choice but to defend her honor.”
That sounded more like Pip was bait to me, but she was safe and half drunk so whatever had happened, that was her choice, I supposed.
“Our friends here jumped in,” Calder added, raising his tankard toward the lycan surrounding them. Several tankards rose in response before a cheer.
They’d started a fucking bar fight for a distraction and somehow made friends. Furies help us all.
“Such nice men,” Pip confirmed, listing slightly to the left.
Dez’s eye contact with me held steady for just a moment, long enough for me to question his sobriety.
He might have said more, but something shifted in the room.
A man came through the side door and bent to speak into another lycan’s ear.
That lycan turned to his neighbor. The neighbor turned to the next.
The whispers spread outward through the parlor, growing louder with every pass until the words were clear enough to hear from where I stood.
“The Phoenix has been spotted in Drennith.”
Heart dropping, I turned toward the door, and my entire world completely stopped.
Wickett fucking Veyne walked in.