Page 66 of The Demon Tide

Trystan faces me down, our invisible lightning forking chaotically around us both. “I know what you called me before I got here,” Trystan says. “‘Crow.’ ‘Roach.’ And I know about the petition you organized to keep me out of the Wyvernguard and the East.”

His words are like a knife-strike through my heart. I step toward him, overcome with fierce contrition. “I’m sorry. Trystan, I’msorry—”

“Iforgiveyou,” he says with impassioned sincerity. “But Vothe, you called me those things because you didn’tknowme. Just like you don’t know my sister. She’s with us in the fight against Vogel.”

“This isn’t so simple, Trystan,” I counter, incredulity rising. “Ask me how many people in my family were killed by your grandmother during the Realm War!” My teeth are gritted, elongating. I can feel my horns releasing from my head. “Askme.”

Trystan looks straight at me, holding my gaze even though I can see the pain in his eyes and sense the agony strafing through his magic.

“Many,”I snarl. “And practically every household in the East lost people they loved to your grandmother’s fire. So don’t act like this is a clear, easy choice for me.” My voice fractures, the enormity of what I feel for him breaking through. “Don’t make me choose between you and the entire Eastern Realm.”

“I wouldneverask you to make that choice,” Trystan bites back, his expression hardening with a furious, cornered defiance. “Xishlon’vir or my guard, Vothe. Choose.”

I can feel my heart breaking. “I want you, Trystan,” I say as devastation rips through me. “But it has to be guard.”

Trystan’s invisible power explodes, and I feel that detonation straight through my core as he gives me a look of sheer agony, then turns, throws open his door, and steps into his room. I move to follow him as he falls back to sit on his bed, his face dropping into his hands as he clutches his blue hair.

“Stay out,” he orders, and I freeze in the doorway.

The hallway’s thick webs rustle and a giant spider emerges, gracefully lowering herself to the floor before scuttling toward me, her legs clicking against the stone tilework. Sylla gives me a mournful look as she enters Trystan’s room.

Everything in me yearns to go to Trystan as Sylla climbs onto the bed beside him and morphs partly back into human form, save her extra sets of legs. She throws a human arm and one of her huge spider legs around Trystan.

Trystan grabs hold of the insectile leg as if grasping a lifeline.

“How did the world get to be this way?” he implores, his face hidden in his palm, his voice fractured. “How did this happen? Why are we all bent on killing each other? How does Gardneria happen? How does Vogel happen? How does one religion enthrall a whole land into hating everyone else?”

“The same way it always happens,” Sylla says, a world-weary sorrow in her eight eyes as she embraces him. “By following a flawed story as if the whole of it is true.”

Trystan

“Is Vothe gone?”

Sylla nods, her eyes searching mine as her dark Death Fae mist encircles us.

I face her fully, my internal magic lashing with urgency. “Sylla, I want you to read me. I want you to read every last one of my fears.”

She’s quiet and still for a long moment, her gaze on me unblinking, as if she’s gauging my sincerity. Then she lifts my hand, presses it to her cool, dark cheek, and closes her eyes.

The world shudders to pitch-black, only a silvery mist remaining as my terror for Elloren rises. I start to tremble.

“Your fear,” she says, her otherworldly voice seeming to come from everywhere at once, “there’s an ocean of it.” Her voice has gone throaty, as if with sudden rapture. She slides my hand down and presses her lips to my palm.

“Follow it,” I insist, trembling. “Follow every thread.”

She presses her lips harder against my palm.

Her spider eyes snap into existence as she pulls back, fixated on me with a sudden, dangerous intensity. The side of her mouth lifts into a snarl.

Black Witch power could bring the End of Nature.

Her damning premonition reverberates through my mind, and it’s a shock, having her thoughts sounding deep inside me as her darkness swirls around us both.

“So, you believe in the flawed story as if the whole of it is true?” I challenge.

Sylla is on me in a flash, fully morphed to spider, the room surrounding us snapping back into view, a cage of legs around my form, her jaws twitching so very close to my head.

What is it you want, Mageling?Her voice in my mind is an otherworldly vibration, but I’m beyond Death Fae intimidation at this point.

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