Chapter one
Everil
What was the line?Something about the world ending, not with a bang but with a whimper. Everil’s appeared to be ending with the crisp rap of knuckles against his warded and locked front door.
The utterly ordinary noise twisted in his stomach like a blade of ice. Only another fae could make it to his door. And the list of fae who might seek him out after a century was short indeed. As for the why of it, well, that was simple. Heirs didn’t get to disappear into silence and obscurity, no matter how unfortunate and disappointing they might be.
Another knock, no louder than the last. Impatient, without being aggressive. Already, it sounded like an accusation.
“Do hurry up, Everil. What’s taking you? Don’t tell me you can’t even manage to open a door.“ Nimai’s voice. It was always Nimai’s voice in his memory. The bond he’d broken. The first lover he’d betrayed.
Best to get it over with. As he made his way downstairs, Everil couldn’t help but see Brookhaven as another fae might. Peeling wallpaper. Heavy furniture that he’d never found the will to replace or rearrange. The house looked very like it had when he’d come into possession of it back in the twenties. Only shabbier. At least the previous owners hadn’t been trendy sorts, or it’d be all gilt instead of leather and dark wood.
He was delaying.
Forcing a slow breath through clenched teeth, Everil straightened his shoulders and opened the door. Not one person waiting, but two. Better and better.
The first, he recognized. Suire, with her wild curls and sharp smile. A will-o’-the-wisp, sworn to his House. They’d been friends most his life. He wasn’t sure what they were anymore.
At Suire’s side was a girl of perhaps seventeen, her face pleasantly round where it stared out from her oversized, tatterdemalion hoodie. She looked like the teens Everil sometimes saw from his window; a local kid dared to brave the woods around Brookhaven. But unlike those children, she was surrounded by a nimbus of pure power.
Everil didn’t recognize her, but that was no surprise. Gates were reborn every hundred years or so. Still, he knew who she was. Everil was the last of his line, a line that had sworn guardianship of one of Faerie’s nine Gates since before the convergence.
If this Gate, his Gate, was here, it could only mean one thing. Everil’s mother, and his mother’s bond, were dead.
Everil swallowed, waiting to feel grief and feeling only a hollow sense of inevitability. He and his mother had not parted on pleasant terms. He had let her down, and she’d made it clear that if he wished her acknowledgment, her love, he would have to do better. And better meant returning to Nimai, the man he’d last seen washed in his lover’s blood.
How appropriate, that her death would thrust him down the very path that would have earned her approval. There’d be no avoiding Nimai now.
“Please, come in,” he managed. “Suire and…”
The Gate met his gaze with a clear, green-eyed stare. “Call me Talia.”
The name came without the ring of truth, as was appropriate. Later, when he swore his oath, he would need her true name from her. But not in front of Suire.
“Talia. My blood–”
She shook her head, which only made her disappear further into her hoodie. “Can we skip all the big scary fae stuff? I mean, it’s not like you can swear your oath now.”
“Of course,” Everil murmured, habit keeping the confusion from his voice. The young Gate wasveryodd. He would expect his mother to have raised someone more traditional. “It can wait.”
Suire exhaled, a sound of quiet exasperation. “For my part, I’d prefer to get the formalities out of the way and return to Faerie. Everil, she came against my advice, and the sooner we get her back to your lands and sworn to you and Nimai, the better.”
Sworn to him and Nimai, as if the past century had never happened. Everil’s throat burned with the remembered taste of Nimai’s magic, that dry itch of cinnamon, and he nearly gagged.
“Now?” he asked, hating himself for asking a question with so obvious an answer.
“Cake first,” Talia interjected. “And a soda if you have any. Do you know how hard it is to get human food across the veil? Besides, we’ve been invited in. There isProtocol,Suire.”
“This,” muttered Suire, “is what I’ve been attempting to manage. Alone. Soon enough, she’ll be your problem.”
The smirk she sent Everil was far from kind. But at least she wasn’t pretending to comfort him over his mother’s death. Later, he would surely mourn her. That hollow absence replaced by true grief.
But for now, all he could feel was dread.
“I’m sure I can manage refreshments,” he said, voice level and calm. “If you’ll come this way?”
Protocol.
