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CHAPTER ONE

I didn’t miss sight anymore. Sight was an inefficient way to perceive the world around you. It was a crutch. What I was given instead was far more useful.

Take this moment, for example—this moment when my back was pressed to the wall, dagger in my hand, as I waited to kill the man on the other side.

If I was relying on sight alone, I would have to crane my neck around the doorframe. I would have to risk being seen. I’d have to go by whatever I could make out in the darkness of him and his lover, squint into that writhing mass of flesh, and figure out the best way to make my move.

Inefficient. Room for error. A terrible way to work.

Instead, I felt . I sensed . Through the magic of the threads, I could still perceive the boundaries of the physical world—the color and shape of the scenery, the planes of a face, the absence or existence of light—but I had so much more than that, too. Crucial, in my work.

My target was a young nobleman. Six months ago, his father died. Within weeks of him receiving the keys to his father’s significant cityscape, he began using all that newfound wealth and power to steal from his people and build more wealth for the Pythora King.

His essence now was slick with desire. The Arachessen could not read minds, not truly, but I didn’t need to see his thoughts. What use were his thoughts when I saw his heart?

“More,” a female voice moaned. “Please, more.”

He mumbled something in response, the words buried in her hair. Her desire was genuine. Her soul shivered and throbbed with it—her pleasure spiking as he shifted angles, pushing her down to the bed. For the briefest of moments, I couldn’t help being jealous that this snake had better sex than I did.

But I drove that thought away quickly. Arachessen were not supposed to mourn the things we gave up in the name of our goddess—Acaeja, the Weaver of Fates, the Keeper of the Unknown, the Mother of Sorcery. We could not mourn the eyesight, the autonomy, the pieces of our flesh carved away in sacrifice. And no, we could not mourn the sex, either.

I wished they’d hurry up.

I pressed my back to the wall and let out a frustrated breath through my teeth. I blinked, my lashes tickling the fabric of my blindfold.

{Now?}

Raeth’s voice was very quiet in the back of my head—she was nearly out of Threadwhisper range, all the way downstairs, near the entrance of the beach house. When she spoke into my mind, I could sense a faint echo of the ocean wind as it caressed her face.

{Not yet, } I answered.

I felt Raeth’s irritation.

{I don’t know how much longer we have. He’s distracted, isn’t he? Take him and go before he starts to pay attention.}

Oh, he was distracted, alright. His woman wasn’t the only vocal one now, his grunts echoing against the wall behind me.

I didn’t answer right away.

{Sylina—} Raeth started.

{I want to wait until the girl is gone.}

As I knew she would, Raeth scoffed at this. {Wait until the girl is gone? If you wait that long, someone will notice that something is off.}

I clenched my jaw and did not answer, letting her Threadwhispers fade beneath the sounds of our target’s enthusiastic climax.

Threadwhispers were very useful. Communication that couldn’t be overheard, that could transcend sound the same way we transcended sight. It was a gift from the Weaver, one for which I was very grateful.

…But I hated that it meant I could never pretend I hadn’t heard something.

{Sylina!}

{She might not know,} I told her.

What he is. Who he is. What he’s doing, and who he’s doing it for.

I had no qualms about killing the nobleman. I would take more joy than I should in feeling his presence wither and die beneath me—and that would be my little secret, a guilty pleasure. But the girl…

Again, Raeth’s scoff reverberated between us.

{She knows.}

{She—}

{If she’s fucking him, then she knows. And if not, she has terrible taste in men. What difference does it make?}

And then I felt it.

A sudden crack through the air. Sound, yes, a distant BANG —but the sound was nothing compared to the sensation that ripped through the threads of life beneath the physical world, a force powerful enough to set them vibrating.

I froze.

My target and his paramour stopped.

“What was that?” the woman whispered.

But I was no longer focused on them. Not with the force of the vibrations, and Raeth’s wordless panic spreading slowly across them, rolling toward me like a pool of blood.

{Raeth?}

Nothing.

{Raeth? What was that?}

Confusion. Fear. I felt it, though it was dimming, because she must have been walking away from the door—then running, out into the city streets.

{Raeth!}

But she was out of range now. All I could feel from her were faint reverberations.

That is, until I heard her scream.

An Arachessen was not supposed to abandon a mission for anything, not even for the sake of saving a Sister’s life. But every thought of my dutiful teachings drained from me the moment I felt her terror, visceral and human and too familiar in ways I’d never admit aloud.

I ran.

Down marble steps, across tile floors, newly slick with I didn’t-even-know-what, through the door where my Sister had been moments ago, standing watch. The air hit me, salty and ocean-sweet.

And with it came the sensation of them .

The vampire invaders.

Decades later, I would not forget this moment. Exactly how it felt when they made landfall. Their magic sickened me, tainted and cursed, making the air taste so thickly of blood I nearly gagged on it.

Sisters of the Arachessen are trained extensively in the magic of every god. From the time we were children, we were exposed to all magics, even when our bodies protested, even when it burned us or broke us.

This, I recognized immediately, was Nyaxia’s magic. The heretic goddess. The Mother of Vampires.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them crashed upon our shores that night.

Sound was useless, all the bangs and screams and groans of crumbling stone running together like the rush of a waterfall. For a moment, I was blinded, too, because the sensations were so much—every essence, every soul, screaming at once.

In that moment, I didn’t know what was happening. I wouldn’t understand until later exactly what I was witnessing. But I did know that this wasn’t the work of the Pythora King. These were foreigners.

{Raeth!}

I threw the call as far down the threads as I could, flinging it toward her like a net. And there, near where the land met the sea, I felt her. Felt her running—not away from the explosions at the shore, but toward them.

No .

Idiot girl. Stupid girl. Impulsive. Impatient.

I ran for her.

{Raeth! Fall back!}

But Raeth didn’t listen.

I was getting closer, dodging slabs of broken rock, dodging clusters of the strangest fire I’d ever felt—not hot, but cold, devouring trees, devouring buildings. My head pounded, my magic wailing with overexertion at having to constantly reorient myself, over and over.

But I didn’t miss a single step.

Raeth was at the shore. At the docks. Many, many presences surrounded her—so many I struggled to separate them from each other. Human. Vampire. I couldn’t count them. Too many. More coming. Pouring onto the shore in a wave of sea froth and magic and explosives and bloodthirsty rage that I could feel throbbing in my veins.

{Sylina!}

Asha’s voice was sharp as she called to me. Even a little afraid.

I’d never felt my commander’s fear before.

I’d never disobeyed her before, either.

Because in that moment, Raeth screamed. Another explosion of dark magic roared through the air, so powerful that when it faded, I was on my knees, splinters of the pier digging into my flesh.

And Raeth was simply gone.

It is difficult to describe what it feels like to sense the death of a Sister. I could not see her. I could not hear her voice. But when you’re near another of the Arachessen, you can simply feel them the way that one feels the body warmth of another, all their threads connected to yours.

All that, all at once, severed.

The dead did not have threads.

Raeth’s color was purple. Sometimes it was a little warmer when she was happy or excited, a glowy pink hue of delight. Sometimes it was colder when she was moody, like storm clouds at sunset.

Now it was nothing, a hole in all of us where Raeth should have been. It was strange how viscerally it reminded me of another distant memory, a memory I was no longer supposed to have, of how it felt to witness life snatched away in the unforgiving jaws of war.

Asha felt it, too. Of course she did. We would feel it everywhere.

{Let her go,} Asha said again. {Come back. We need to leave now. We’ll complete our task another time.}

Task? Who cared about that limp-dicked little nobleman now?

I had bigger game.

Because there he was.

Even in the sea of vampires and magic, he stood out. His presence was bigger than all of theirs, a gravitational force. All the rest of it—the countless souls, the grey of the sea foam, the cold of the night—framed him like a throne, as if the universe simply oriented itself around him as he rose from the surf.

Even then, through the chaos, with the lack of information I had, I knew I was witnessing something deadly and incredible and horrible. I knew, from that first moment, that he was the leader.

I’d burn his presence into my soul after that. Every angle of him. Every scent that war carried across the sea breeze. Even from this distance, I could sense his appearance through the threads—that he wore fine clothes, and even finer armor over them. His hair was long and reflected the moonlight, soaked in salty tendrils around his shoulders.

And of course, there were the horns. Black as night, protruding from his upper forehead and curling back. They were like nothing I’d ever witnessed before. The product, surely, of some dark, unknown magic.

He was cursed. He was tainted. I could feel that even from here. And as he stepped right over Raeth’s body, I didn’t even think as I reached to my back and withdrew my bow.

I was a fantastic shot. Human eyes are fallible. But the threads are never fooled.

I had a perfect opening. A single thread stretching from me to him, straight to his heart.

{Get back here, Sylina!} Asha commanded.

{I have the shot.}

{You’re too far. }

I was not too far.

I drew.

{We can’t sacrifice another Sister here!} Asha roared—so strong her words made me lurch, my head splitting.

He stepped onto the shore. The thread between us stretched tight. I felt his head turn. Felt his gaze fall to me. Felt his toxic magic shiver down the connection.

{Sylina, the Sightmother commands that you come back.}

I could make it.

I could make it.

My hands shook. Every shred of my focus went toward cutting through all these sensations, falling only on him. Nothing else existed.

But the Sightmother’s stare was on me, too. A Sister did not disobey the Sightmother.

I lowered my bow and backed away, fleeing into the chaotic night. By the time I reached Asha, I had so overexerted my magic and my senses that I was stumbling over rocks in the road. I knew I had a punishment waiting for me at the Keep, but I didn’t care.

It was punishment enough. That moment.

The moment I let him go.

I’d think about that moment for a long, long time.