Page 20

20

Oberon

MY BOOTS DRAGGED against the aged wooden floor while I paced the length of my room. My thoughts should have been on the creature in the fields, the rot, the decay, and the strange symbols carved into every damned door in this rancid village. But my mind circled back, drawn to her instead.

The pained whimpers. Her fingers clawed at her back as desperation twisted her features, making her appear unguarded. She had gasped awake, drenched in sweat, as if she had surfaced from drowning. Her choked sobs were half-swallowed, and my name slipped past her lips in breathless panic before she even realized where she was.

I had sat there in hesitation.

Why did she call for me?

‘I am not afraid of you, Oberon Sinclaire.’

She should have been. She knew what I was. What I was capable of. Yet she had looked me dead in the eye and said it without a flicker of doubt. But whatever haunted her nights terrified her. Enough that in that moment of blind, gut-wrenching terror, she had called for me .

I had never been good with things that required comfort or softness. My hands knew how to wield a blade, break bone, and silence a threat. But what did you do when the battle wasn’t before you? When the enemy had already seeped into her being?

She flinched when I shook her awake in Silverfel before her eyes focused. Then she had brushed it off, thrown up her walls as if I hadn’t watched her unravel. Her composure slid back into place like armor, though her hands trembled as she suppressed her emotions. And I had let her.

I should have pressed, should have forced her to talk, but I wanted to see if something would slip. If she would say a name, a place, some sliver of truth to tell me who plagued her sleep, who had carved those invisible wounds into her. Instead, I only received silence.

The way she carried herself when we entered the mansion. The air had shifted the moment she stepped inside. Tension gripped my ribs, and my Fae senses hummed with unease. It was how her shoulders had tensed ever so slightly and her fingers had curled before she forced them to relax. It was how she had smiled when the lord mentioned our separate rooms and how it hadn’t reached her eyes.

That fleeting moment of hesitation. Of discomfort.

Why?

Why had she reacted as though being alone was the more significant threat? What was she so afraid of that sharing a room with me—a man, an assassin, a half-Fae—seemed like the safer option?

I combed through the memories of notes in her journal, searching for a thread to pull, a connection to make sense of it. But there was none.

Groaning, I dropped into the chair by the table, pulled off my gloves, and let my head fall back against the wooden frame. My fingers flexed against my palms. I was restless. My Fae was agitated. It prowled around the fringes of my thoughts, demanding answers. A novel feeling that she alone had pulled from it.

How the hells was I supposed to fight a ghost from her past? A tormentor I couldn’t name?

And now, whatever was in the field had targeted her.

I grit my teeth. My restless fingers flexed in my lap as the memory resurfaced. The strangled noise she made when she stumbled and her boots snagged on the decayed corpse at our feet. The way her breath hitched, her chest rising and falling in shallow, frantic gasps. Her eyes widened, pupils dilated, as the thing before her rose, its grotesque, jagged, unnatural maw splitting open.

The sound it made wasn’t meant for human ears. A high, ear-piercing shriek that sent bile crawling up my throat. Terror froze her. Locked every muscle in place. She was trapped, helpless, as the thing lunged at her. I had moved without thought when my blade cut through its form. The steel met resistance before the creature dissolved into nothing but mist.

It wasn’t just that creature.

I pressed my palms into my thighs to ground myself against the worn fabric of my trousers and the leather of my belts. My gaze fixed on the floorboards, but I only saw Silverfel. The dense, suffocating trees. The thing in the woods. The way it had fixated on her then, too. Not me, the one wielding the sword, the one it recognized and feared.

Her.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

I sighed and dragged a hand through my hair. My thoughts were tangled as I retraced every detail, every clue. There had to be something that connected them—Silverfel, Vaelwick, the rot that had spread in the villages, the creatures that moved through the dark. Was it because she was an herbalist?

The people of Silverfel had been desperate for a cure. They had whispered of sickness but ignored the curses. And here, in Vaelwick, they weren’t ignoring them. They knew. They carved symbols into their doors, strung charms over their homes, and muttered about rituals meant to ward off the evil.

Had her knowledge drawn these creatures to her? Had they come because of what she was?

My jaw tightened.

No.

It didn’t sit right. The pieces were too scattered, and the logic was too thin. If they hunted herbalists, why her? Why had the thing in Silverfel fixated on her? Why had the creature in the fields lunged for her instead of me?

It wasn’t just because an herbalist meddled with forces beyond her control. There had to be a connection I couldn’t see yet.

What I saw was that they hunted her.

And she hadn’t even realized it.

WHEN MORNING CAME, I still hadn’t slept. Not for lack of trying. I had laid there, staring at the ceiling, waiting for exhaustion to take hold. I willed my mind to be quiet, but it didn’t. My thoughts churned, picking apart every detail, every inconsistency, and every damned thing that didn’t sit right with me. I dragged a hand down my face, irritation bristling beneath my skin. None of it made sense.

Eventually, I gave up. Sleep had eluded me, and waiting for it to arrive did nothing to change that.

With a deep sigh, I pushed to my feet and ran a hand through my hair, the strands sticking up in every direction. Quinn’s room sat next to mine. She hadn’t said a word to me since we had parted for the night, which wasn’t unusual. But after Silverfel, I had minimal trust in her ability to stay put.

I rapped my knuckles against the door.

No answer.

I waited a beat. Then another. Still nothing.

If she had slipped off without telling me again, so help me—

The door swung open when my fingers wrapped around the knob, and Quinn barreled into me. “No time!” she clipped, slipping past my grip.

“For fuck’s sake, Herbalist, not again!” I snapped, spinning on my heel and taking off after her. She was ahead of me, dodging around corners as if she had planned this.

I cursed under my breath as I bolted down the winding staircase, my boots slamming against the wood. Quinn, however, had made my life even more difficult. Instead of running like a normal person, she launched herself onto the handrail and slid down it with infuriating ease. I gaped for a moment, then moved faster, my frustration boiling over. She landed at the bottom with the practiced grace that told me she had done it more times than I cared to know.

Saints fucking preserve me.

“Dilthen Doe!” My voice thundered through the vast mansion. “At least tell me where you’re headed this time!”

She nearly crashed into Lord Everette. With infuriating nonchalance, Quinn recovered with a half-hearted bow before slipping past him as if he were furniture. Lord Everette’s brows shot up in surprise as I stormed after her, bracing myself for whatever madness she dragged me into this time.

Quinn skidded to a halt when we reached the stables, where Neryth stood behind a gate. His ears flicked as if even he knew something reckless was going to happen. I hadn’t even caught my breath when Quinn spun on me, her eyes gleaming with wild, exhilarated intensity. She heaved, her chest rising and falling in frantic bursts. Sweat clung to her brow, and strands of hair stuck to the flushed skin of her cheeks and neck.

Despite Vaelwick’s warm weather, she wore excessive layers, pulling her sleeves down to her wrists for extra protection. It should have been obvious by now. How had I not noticed?

I pushed the thought aside and opened my mouth to demand what in the five hells she had been thinking, but she didn’t give me the chance. “I figured it out!” she blurted, throwing a shovel at me. Its weight felt like an omen in my grasp. I couldn’t even properly scowl at the damn thing before she gripped another, ready to march forward, her eyes burning with that reckless, unshakable fire. “There’s something buried in the crop field.”

Saints, help me.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I steeled myself against the frustration that clawed at me. Naturally, she had figured something out, and it had led to this.

I didn’t doubt her. Quinn didn’t charge headfirst into chaos without reason. She was sharper than most, quicker, and annoyingly perceptive. But she had no sense of self-preservation. No hesitation or fear. She threw herself into the unknown with nothing but sheer willpower and the unspoken expectation that I was right behind her.

The problem was that her expectations had been correct. I would have followed Quinn Larkspur through the Veil if it meant I could have kept her safe. Alive. With or without Alric’s command.

And that unsettled me more than I cared to admit.

My jaw rolled as I glanced at the shovel in my hand, feeling the weight of inevitability. With a resigned sigh, I hoisted the damned thing over my shoulder and met her eager, determined stare.

“Then let’s go dig up some nightmares.”