“Don’t you?” He reached the center of the stream and paused, head tilted as though he were listening to something I couldn’t hear. “The trees are singing your name, Seris. They remember your bloodline. They remember what your ancestors could do when the world was younger and the barriers between realms were only suggestions.”
I tried to back away further and hit a tree trunk.
Trapped.
“I’m not my ancestors.”
“No,” he agreed, taking another step forward. “You’re stronger.”
The magic beneath my skin stirred at his words, responding to something in his voice. Or maybe to the shadows that moved around him like living things, reaching toward me with tendrils that felt familiar.
Wrong.
Right.
I couldn’t tell anymore.
“The prophecy calls you the Last Daughter,” he continued, still gliding across the water with impossible grace. “Last of the Veil-touched bloodline. Last hope for salvation or damnation, depending on the choices you make.”
“I didn’t choose any of this!”
“No one chooses their fate. But you will choose what comes next.” He reached the bank where I cowered, shadows pooling around his feet like spilled ink. “The question is whether you’ll do it willingly, or whether I’ll have to force your hand.”
I tried to run again. Stupid, maybe, but trapped animals don’t think clearly. I made it three steps before tendrils of living darkness wrapped around my ankles, gentle but implacable. They didn’t hurt. They felt almost warm against my skin, but they might as well have been iron chains for all the good struggling did.
“Let me go,” I snarled, wrenching against the shadow-bonds.
“So you can stumble through the forest until something worse than me finds you?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Nothing could be worse than you.”
His smile was sharp enough to cut. “You really don’t know anything about the Nightwood, do you?”
That’s when I heard it.
A howl in the distance, long, mournful, and definitely not made by any wolf I’d ever encountered. It echoed through the trees, seeming to come from everywhere at once, and the shadows around Daemon’s feet recoiled at the sound.
“What was that?” I whispered.
“Wraith-hound,” he said matter-of-factly. “They hunt by scent, and you’ve been bleeding for the past hour. It’ll be here soon.”
Another howl answered the first, closer this time. Then a third, from a different direction entirely. My blood turned to ice as realization sank in.
“They’re circling,” I breathed.
“Do I still seem like the worst thing you’ll find in these woods?” The shadow-tendrils around my ankles shifted, becoming more like hands than chains. “Wraith-hounds are what happen when wolves get caught between realms during a Veil-storm. They’re neither fully alive nor properly dead, and they have a particular taste for Fae blood.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He tilted his head toward the sounds drawing nearer through the darkness. “Feel free to test that theory. I’m sure they’ll be happy to prove me right.”
The howls were closer now. Beneath them, I heard something else, the heavy movement of large bodies through undergrowth, claws clicking against stone. Whatever was coming, there was more than one.
“Why aren’t you running?” I asked.
“Because I’m not prey.” His shadows rippled outward, forming a perimeter around us. “They can smell the death magic on me. It confuses them, makes them uncertain whether I’m predator or carrion.”
“And me?”
