Page 129 of The Dryad Storm

Seeming frightened now, Goryl makes the Ancient One’s protection sign on his chest once more before he sets his rattled gaze back on the older couple. “I rue the day I ever let thisthingin my house.”

“Don’t speak of him like that!” Rosalie cries, grabbing Viger’s arm again as his Dark power whips around the room, sucking Tierney into its thrall, filling her thoughts with death and despair.

Rosalie throws her arms around Viger. “I’m so sorry, my beautiful boy. I’m so sorry. I love you, my sweet one.”

“Do you see?” Goryl cries out to the couple. “He has her under histhrall.”

Viger suddenly grips Rosalie’s arms and pushes her back with obvious, otherworldly strength. “Mother, you’ve got to let me go.” His face is devoid of feeling, his eyes a piercing abyss.

“She’s not your mother!” Goryl snarls. “She never was, and she never will be! Your mother isdead, and it’s probably a good thing, too, if she could bring forth the likes of you!”

“Please stop,” the older white-haired women shakily states, holding up her palm.

Viger slowly turns back to Goryl. A chilling grin forms on his face, his eyes filling with Dark power, his thrall expanding to fill the cottage’s expanse with a suffocating force that Tierney can feel pressing against her lungs.

Viger lunges toward his mother, and Tierney flinches in shock as he grabs Rosalie by the back of her neck and sinks his teeth into the base of her throat, dark mist flowing from the edges of his mouth.

Chaos breaks out.

Goryl and the older couple spring forward to grab Viger, struggling to pull him off Rosalie. She shudders and convulses, her eyes lolling backward, before Viger releases her, all the Dark mist in the room snuffing out.

Goryl punches Viger in the face. Hard. Sending Viger to the floor, blood streaming from his nose.

“Only forherdid I not slay you,” Goryl growls at a crumpled Viger. “Stay away from my family, freak! Youhear me? The Mage Council is right about you lot!”

Rosalie is staring at Viger, dazed, her hand cradling the base of her throat. “The pain in my hip is gone,” she marvels to Viger in a rasp. “What did you do?”

Viger pushes himself up from the ground, his grim gaze fixed on his mother. “When I come into my fullness, I will return for you.”

Rosalie seems to barely register his words as she clutches her hip, then herabdomen. “The lumps... they’regone. What did you do to me, my son?”

“No,” Goryl snarls, grabbing her arm. “No more falling into his thrall. This endsnow.”

With that, he drags Rosalie out of the cottage and into the night, slamming the door behind them.

Stunned, Tierney looks at young Viger, two snakes now twining around his shoulders as he stares the older couple down with unnerving, emotionless focus even as blood streams over his lips and chin.

“Here,” the woman says, retrieving a cloth and dampening it before offering it to Viger. “For... for your face.” But she seems scared now, and Viger makes no move to take the cloth.

“Well, Viger,” the bespectacled man says stiltedly. He clears his throat, his wariness of the horned teen before him evident on his face. He motions to a room at the end of a narrow hallway. “We’ve prepared a room for you. You... you must be tired.”

In a blur, Viger is on his feet and striding down the hall, his dark cloak billowing behind him. He reaches the room, enters, and firmly shuts the door behind him.

The couple stares in his direction for a good, long moment before the man turns to the white-haired woman. “What is he, Emilin?” he asks in a tremulous whisper.

She swallows. “Primordial Death Fae.”

The man sucks in a long breath, fear in his gaze. “We can’t have a Death Fae living here with us...”

“He has nowhere else to go.”

The man shakes his head. “Emilin... I’m sorry, no. The Asrai and Lasair Fae... that was one thing.Thisis entirely different. You can tell him in the morning. Hehasto go.”

With that, the man walks out, leaving the woman alone. She stands there for a long moment before she, too, casts one last anguished look toward Viger’s room, then turns and follows the man out.

Tierney is frozen, her heart in her throat.

Forcibly getting hold of herself, she creeps through the kitchen and down the dimly lit hall, dark mist seeping out from under the door before her. The closer she gets to it, the more she can feel the troubling vibration of fear and sorrow in Viger’s thrall.

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