Chapter 17 Nyssa
Nyssa
Somewhere, during some second or another, everything around us changes, and we are standing back in BlackFen Edge with the drizzle soaking us to the bone.
“Uhm,” I mutter, looking around.
The gods look equally confused.
Rain needles my face. The village smells normal—peat smoke, chip fat, wet grass. Too normal.
“Either we got booted, or we blinked wrong,” I say, wiping drizzle out of my eyes. The glow under my skin stays banked, nasty-small. The hinge hums along my spine like a snake waiting to be offended.
“Not booted,” Dreven says, too still. “Pulled.”
“Pulled by whom?” I ask, looking around and then stop when I see Taye.
“By me,” she says, moving closer.
Dastian hisses and moves closer, holding his hand up. “Stay there.”
“Why did you pull us out?” Dreven asks, his voice more of a growl than I’ve ever heard it. He is pissed.
“Because Nyssa isn’t ready. She is in between.”
Her eyes land on me, sharp, focused, unnatural. “I know who you are,” I say.
“I know you think you know,” she replies. “But you don’t know anything, child.”
“So enlighten me.”
Taye blinks at me and steps to the side as a couple who appear to be on holiday in our sleepy little village amble past in hiking gear and waterproofs.
They walk straight past me, almost walking into me and smile at Taye, who gives me a small, disinterested wave.
“Hey,” I snap. “I’m standing right here.”
The couple keep on walking.
“They can’t hear you, dear. Or see you for that matter. You are… in between.”
That word just pisses me off.
“In between what?” I demand.
“Alive and crowned,” Taye says, looking bored as a tax auditor. “You’re phased. You chose the hinge, so now you get all the joy of existing in the seam until you learn to fix where you stand.”
“Fix how?” I ask. “Knitting? Prayer? Blood sacrifice?”
Her mouth twitches. “You are Shadow’s axis.”
“And that means no one can see me?” I ask, not liking where this is going. “Twice dead and no longer mortal. Is that right?”
“Something like that. You are hovering in the in-between spaces.”
“So how do I un-hover?”
“By doing something The Order will put you on a hit list for.”
Dreven makes a noise like a feral wolf and moves in front of me. “Don’t threaten her, Tabitha.”
“I’m not. I speak merely the truth.”
“And what is this truth?” Voren asks, also blocking me from Taye’s–Tabitha’s–view.
I duck out from around the gods and glare at the witch, who has been pulling the wool over my eyes for twelve years. “Stop speaking in riddles. What do I need to do?”
Her eyes land on me, and my soul nearly withers away.
“There is nothing you can do, dear. I, however, can do a lot.”
“Meaning?” Dastian snaps, getting pissed off.
“The powers of the slayers have diluted in your bloodline over the years. We need to bring it back to the force it once was.”
“Define ‘bring it back’ before I punch you in your orderly face,” I say.
Tabitha smiles that dead-eyed librarian smile. “Convergence. The Firsts forced a single line to carry the weight. Your Order syphoned it.”
Time stands still for a long moment as I stare at this Witch of Order and wish for one fucking second that the grenades would stop landing.
“Syphoned it?” Voren asks for me.
“Since the First Slayers converged their power into one, the rest of the slayers who lost their powers became The Order. They wanted their powers back. But they couldn’t simply remove the powers from the one slayer without causing a catastrophic event.
So, they have been syphoning it off, bit by bit, for centuries. ”
“Are you saying that Cormac and Finnian are the other slayers?”
“Two of some.”
“Some?” I croak. I had no idea they were ancient beings, ex-slayers salivating over my power. I should’ve known, should’ve sensed it.
“Chapters across Europe,” Tabitha says, like she’s reading a shopping list. “Old slayers who took the robe when their light went quiet. They built a syphon under your oath rooms. A net. Every vow skims. Every kill skims. Every death pays interest.”
I swallow acid. “And you let them.”
“I had no choice. This has nothing to do with me, child. I am no ex-slayer.”
“But you still knew about it and let them. You let them bleed me,” I snap. “You let them bleed every person in my line who was chosen. You said you could fix this earlier, and now you’re backtracking?”
Dreven’s shadows flex, a silent snarl I feel in my bones. Voren has gone very still in the way that means something is about to regret existing. Dastian’s hands crackle softly, like a lit fuse pretending to mind itself.
Tabitha tips her head, studying me like I’m a problem set. “Ramming all of that power back into one person required the right person.”
I clench my jaw tight. It’s fair, but still. “How do you fix it?” I grit out.
“Convergence. You go to the engine and take it back. You break the net.”
“Where is it?” I demand.
“The Chamber of Hidden Power,” she says. “Under the Oath Chamber. They hid it under a layer of respectable stone and incense.”
Of course they did. “And what happens when I break it?”
“You stop phasing,” she says. “You’ll anchor. The syphoned power will rebound to the line, to you.”
“How do I do this?”
“You will need my help.”
“Of course,” I grit out.
“They will notice,” Dreven points out, rather unnecessarily. “They will come for you.”
“Will they?” I ask seriously. “Because I’ve always been able to beat them, even with diluted slayer power.”
“Have you?” Dastian asks in the same tone I used. “Or did they just let you think that?”
His words give me pause. Great, big, annoying pause.
Fucker.
I swallow the urge to smack Dastian and look back at Tabitha. “Fine. We do it now.”
“Good girl,” she says, like she’s praising a dog that didn’t bite the postman. “The Chamber is warded six ways to Sunday. I can get you through. Then you will need order, not chaos.” She shoots Dastian a fierce stare. “Let’s move.”
We cut across the green, the rain turning sideways.
I don’t bother hooding up. If I’m in between and the village can’t see me, the weather can get stuffed.
Tabitha walks like a woman who owns every step.
Dastian keeps pace with me, crackling quietly, and Voren ghosts behind us, the temperature dropping to church-not-warmed-since-1962.
My skin crawls as we push through the doors of the shop. The Oath Chamber sits under the public room, under the sanctified circle where they pressed oil to my forehead and told me I was chosen.
Yeah, chosen to be syphoned. Arseholes.
We descend the stairs, and I suddenly wonder why we are trusting her. What if she is walking us straight into a trap?
Tabitha stops at an antechamber door that I’ve never seen before, and plucks a bobby pin out of her hair. She flicks it once. It becomes a thin, precise key. She slots it into the lock. The wards on the wood hiccup. The door opens with a sigh that sounds personally offended.
“Neat trick,” Dastian says.
“Basic order magic,” she says, already moving. “You take a thing and tell it what it’s for.”
“Why did I never see that door before?” I ask.
“Creatures on the mortal realm cannot.”
Makes sense. As much as any of this does.
We descend. The air thickens. The walls sweat old vows. The circular room at the bottom is empty.
Tabitha skirts the edge of the visible circle and toes a specific tile. “Here.” The slab looks like all the others. It isn’t. The grout around it is too perfect.
“Step back,” I say.
She does. I draw my blade and slide the point into the seam. The stone resists, then yields with a little cough. Dreven’s shadows slip under and lift. The floor comes away in one clean plate.
Below, the engine purrs.
It isn’t cogs and levers. It’s a net. A lattice of fine, silver lines strung over a dark well, anchored to iron pegs hammered into the bones of the room.
Jars sit in niches—smoke trapped under wax, old breaths, old names.
Every line hums in a frequency I recognise because it is inside me.
My light answers like a dog that hears its name called by the wrong mouth.
Voren’s voice goes very quiet. “They built a syphoning net on a grave.”
“Of course they did,” I say, rage narrowing my world until the edges go clean. “How do I break it?”
“Not with chaos,” Tabitha says, eyeing Dastian, who lifts his hands in innocent outrage. “It’ll backlash into the village.”
“Not with brute shadow,” Dreven adds, crouching down and reading the pattern. “It will chew and reweave. You need to pull the master line.”
I kneel next to him and stare into the web. “How do we know which it is? They all look the same?”
“They don’t,” Tabitha corrects, crouching beside me with a knee crack that sounds far too mortal for an immortal witch. “Look with your power, not your eyes. Order hides in plain sight, but it always has an anchor.”
I narrow my gaze. I stop trying to see the silver threads and start trying to feel them.
Most of them buzz like angry wasps—stolen power, agitated and trapped.
But one doesn’t buzz. It sings. A low, miserable note that vibrates right down to my boots.
It’s the only line that isn’t shaking, holding the entire lattice taut with a grim sort of determination.
“That one,” I say, pointing to a thread that looks duller than the rest, anchored to a jar filled with something that looks suspiciously like teeth. “It’s too quiet.”
“The anchor of silence,” Dastian murmurs, actually looking impressed. “Sneaky bastards.”
“Grab it,” Dreven orders, his shadows pooling around my wrists like protective gloves.
I reach down. The air gets heavy, static building until the hair on my arms stands up. My fingers brush the dull silver line, and a shock of cold fire zips straight up my arm. It tastes like copper and betrayal. It feels like every lie Cormac ever told me, distilled into a physical current.
The shock as it touches my fingers is nothing compared to the earthquake that smashes through the room, that has nothing to do with the syphon, and everything to do with the ex-slayers who call themselves The Order of Veil.