Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

ONE

PART SIX — RENEGADE

Only chaos reigned true the day Pasiphae of Eo allied with the Seelie Crown.

Chapter One

In the dead of night, a horrible chorus of screaming echoed into the house.

Pasiphae of Eo startled awake. Her once comfortable bedsheets immediately became too warm and too restrictive as she sat up, blinking rapidly to gather her bearings.

This was her bedroom, her house, her homeland. But in a fashion that she had never seen before, the soft earth underneath her bed was trembling with some unseen force.

"Circe?" she whispered, knocking her knuckles against the wall that divided their rooms.

When there was no response, she focused her attention on listening carefully, trying to determine where the screaming was coming from.

Her initial thought was that perhaps the disasters were occurring again. She hadn't been in Medeis when they first rolled inland, but in that second between waking and dreaming, she had felt an archaic magic whispering down her neck.

That was what the disasters were: magical blowback reverberating from Airsei as the Seelie fae prepared for war.

Pasiphae untangled her legs from the blankets quickly and scrambled to the window. She pulled back the curtains, searching for the cause of the hellish screaming.

Circe had described the ground opening its jaws to form an abyss into the centre of the world; winds that curled into dark, hellish funnels; tides that roared higher than the sky itself.

This—this was not it.

"Oh, deaths."

Pasiphae couldn't quite believe what she was seeing. Well, she could, but she never expected such a scene in Medeis, of all places. Under the bright starlight, shadows chased witches through the streets, pursuers that were nothing more than a swirl of dark, maniacal air. With one glance, they were as flat as a two-dimensional shape, and in the next, they moved and fluttered with almost visible limbs and facial features.

Most witches had never seen a sylph before. With their limited education, they were not being attacked in their home territory by another species, but creatures of nightmares.

Pasiphae watched as her neighbour threw a bolt of tangible magic at the shadow in front of him. It was a feat that required concentrated power and years of study, an attack that could have burned another witch into ash and cinders. But all it did was go straight through the sylph, blowing up a nearby tree instead.

"This is bad," she muttered to herself. "This is really bad."

Pasiphae had run from murderous sylphs in the Unseelie Court, tried to fight off more murderous sylphs in a rotting building, and then somewhat made friends with one sylph named Stavros when she was leaving Khotadi, though she had no clue how that had happened.

Her familiarity with these creatures didn't lessen the heart attack she nearly had when a sylph smashed against her bedroom window. The shock sent her a few steps back, jittering away from the glass.

"Hello," it hissed, shadows that resembled arms pressing up against the glass. "I seek the Seelie Crown."

Pasiphae's horror immediately spiked from mild to intense. She may have escaped Khotadi, but Khotadi had followed her home.

"Circe!" she screamed, backing away from the window and throwing her bedroom door open. "Circe!"

Her sister appeared in her vision immediately, and the two narrowly avoided a collision in their old hallway. Pasiphae's arm shot out to steady herself against the wall, where the wood was slick with moisture.