Page 80 of Tethered In Blood

“The dead do not linger where they are unwelcome.”

I stepped forward. “Then where is it?”

Its head tilted further, its movement sharp and disjointed. It mimicked life without understanding how it worked. It was a grotesque parody of human motion, a puppet whose strings had been tangled and pulled at odd angles. Then it laughed—a dry, brittle sound that scraped against the night. It wasn’t the laughter that came from amusement. There was no mirth, no warmth. It was hollow and soulless, like it remembered how laughter should sound but couldn’t replicate it.

I didn’t let my gaze waver. I didn’t dare. But it didn’t matter. There was no warning, no motion. It was there one moment and closer the next, as if the distance had unraveled between us. The space it occupied hadn’t just shrunk; it bent and pressed against me with a weight that had nothing to do with its physical form.

The air grew dense with rot that was older than decay. The smell of something long past putrefaction that should no longer exist but refused to be forgotten seeped into my skin and bones, crawling up my spine and pressing into the gaps between my vertebrae. It didn’t just stand before me—itimposeditself, warping the space between us until proximity became meaningless. It was toying with me. It knew, as well as I did, that I couldn’t kill it, that I couldn’t destroy it without its body. This was a game, and I had to play by its rules.

Its jaw creaked as it parted its lips—if they could even be called that. The voice that spilled into the night was hollow and jagged.“Tell me, Fae,”it crooned. “What do you fear?”

If it sensed my Fae blood with ease, what else did it sense?

The air between us throbbed with unnatural and probing energy—not physically, but more profoundly. the borders of my mind, testing and pressing as it searched for something to permeate.

Was that what fed it?

Fear?

That explained how it moved, spoke, and pressed closer, invading the space around it, a shifting shadow that refused to obey the world’s laws. This thing wasn’t just a mindless corpse-dweller.

It was a predator, and I was its prey.

“I don’t feel fear,” I deadpanned.

The thing laughed again, and the sound came from beneath me, risen from Elduvaris itself, something buried so deep that the weight of time couldn’t smother it. It was an awful rattling, hollow chorus that came apart and reformed in the same breath. “You lie.”

“I am an assassin,” I reasoned. “I have watched the light leave a man’s eyes as he clutched his own throat. I have heard the final, gasping breaths of those who realized—too late—that death had claimed them. I have known fear. I have seen it. Smelled it. Felt it clinging to the air like a dying ember.” I took a slow step forward, holding its hollow, shifting gaze. “But I do not feel it.”

Its head tilted further. The movement was unnatural, as if its bones—if it had any—were barely held together. The laughter that followed was worse than before, a chorus of voices speaking at once. A dozen, maybe more, echoed from the void where its mouth should have been.

Her scream, high and raw, as if ripped from her throat and twisted, pierced the field. My entire body tensed. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been. But my instincts didn’t care.

My body, my blood, screamed to run, to save her. I felt the shift in my veins and eyes as I forced myself to stay rooted where I stood. It was toying with me. It had seen the way I reacted. The thing made a sound between a chuckle and a rasping breath.

Mocking. Gloating.

“You have grown soft for a human, Fae.”

My jaw clenched, and my teeth ground as I swallowed the instinct to lunge, to silence it. That was what it wanted. It tried to unravel me. Picked at the threads of my restraint to pull them apart. “What do you want?”

The air shook when its voice darkened, turning jagged and violent.“The herbalist must bleed.”

24

Oberon

Myheartslammedagainstmy ribs hard enough to feel it in my throat. The laughter twisted and shifted into a soft and broken voice.Hervoice.

The breath in my lungs burned, and the world around me narrowed. It mimicked the way she had sobbed in her sleep. How she cried as she gasped awake, clawed at her back, and her fingers curled against phantom wounds that never faded.

The air between us was stretched tight, a thread on the verge of snapping. The creature loomed, flickering between solid and unreal. It was on the edge of existence, shifting, fraying, and bending in ways my mind couldn’t accept.

The echoes of Quinn’s cries still clung to the surrounding space, hollow and taunting, and needled me in ways I refused to let show. I inhaled slowly through my nose, forcing my muscles to stay loose and my jaw to remain locked so the words I wanted to say wouldn’t slip free. It wanted a reaction, a crack in my armor, a way to invade.

Beneath the shifting black mass that passed for a face, something moved.Watched.It didn’t need eyes. The weight of its stare pressed against my skull.

“You have to do better than that,” I said. “If you think I’ll run back trembling, you don’t know what I am.”

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