Bound by Fate

The night air crackled with arcane energy as Seraphine Nightshade crouched atop an ancient stone gargoyle, her small body barely distinguishable from the shadows cloaking the city’s skyline. Below her, the grey cobblestone streets of Shadowhaven pulsed with something darker than magic—pure fucking Evil.

Seraphine’s eyes, a swirl of piercing amber and crimson, scanned the twisting alleyways. Her senses, sharpened by years of punishing training, caught the faintest whisper of movement before her mind did. Her wolf growled, eager for the hunt. Her vampire instincts sharpened her focus—she could hear a woman munching on an apple twenty minutes away, and honestly, rude, some of us are trying to focus—while the witch’s power thrummed through her veins, fast and vicious, a constant reminder that she was more animal than human, and also that she’d skipped dinner. There was a chip in the gargoyle’s stone ear, she noticed, apropos of nothing. Centuries old and somebody had still managed to damage it. People got their hands on everything eventually.

“Fucking Council,” she muttered under her breath, her words carried away by the crisp cold wind. “One night. One. That’s all I ask.”

A slight movement caught her attention. Her target tonight was a rogue warlock who had dared to defy the Council of Shadows, darting between flickering lampposts, unaware of the death that quietly stalked him from above.

Sera allowed herself a small, predatory smile. This would be over quickly. Good. She wanted to be home before the good bath water got—there was no good bath water, there was a bucket and a rag, she didn’t know why her brain kept doing this—before the water got cold, if “home” was the word for a stone room with a cot in it, which it absolutely was not, but she wasn’t examining that tonight.

With inhuman speed, she leaped from the perch and landed without a sound. The adrenaline of the fall lit up her senses, each facet of her tribrid nature humming with the thrill of the kill to come. As the ground rushed up to meet her, Sera called on her magic, bending the shadows to cushion her landing.

She touched down mere feet behind her target, the soft tap of her boots on stone enough to freeze the warlock mid-step. “You—” he choked out, already turning, already too late. “They sent—” Before he could get the rest of it out, she struck. Her hand, wrapped in writhing tendrils of dark energy, plunged through his back and closed around his still-beating heart.

The warlock’s scream died in his throat as She leaned close, her lips brushing his ear. “Council says hi.”

The body crumpled to the ground. She crushed the heart in her grip, feeling the last of its owner’s magic dissipate into the night. She didn’t linger to savor it. There was no pride in this kill, no satisfaction beyond a job finished. Just another task completed, another order fulfilled. Another body on her. Somebody else’s problem to feel weird about later, maybe, if she ever let herself.

“Anticlimactic,” she grumbled, wiping her bloodied hand on the warlock’s cloak. “Really? That’s it? Come on.”

Seraphine melted back into the shadows, her thoughts already sliding toward her next assignment and, unhelpfully, toward whether the mess hall would still have food at this hour. The Council would be pleased with her efficiency—not that their approval meant anything to her, except it kind of did, and she hated that it did, and she wasn’t going to think about that either.

She felt the old ache of emptiness settle in as she crossed the rooftops of Shadowhaven, and immediately got annoyed at herself for feeling it, because ugh, not this again. She was the Council’s most lethal weapon, feared by allies and enemies alike, and also apparently starving and a little sad about it, which felt like a stupid combination of things to be at once.

Bells tolled midnight somewhere across the city. Sera paused, her gaze drawn to the Council’s fortress looming black against the star-strewn sky. Her shoulders dropped half an inch before she caught it and pulled them back up. Whatever doubts had followed her home, she pushed them down, mostly by thinking hard about food again. She had a report to deliver, and the Council did not tolerate tardiness, and also she was hungry. Both things could be true. Both things were, in fact, extremely true.

With the moon hanging low and blood-red on the horizon, Seraphine Nightshade slipped into the night, grumbling about dinner, with absolutely no idea that her night was about to get so much worse than skipped dinner.

The obsidian halls of the Council’s fortress were as cold and unforgiving as ever. Her footsteps rang out against the stone as she went to the central chamber, where the Council waited for her report. Guards posted at regular intervals watched her pass with a mixture of fear and respect. They knew what she was, what she could do. And they knew better than to get in her way.

As she approached the massive ebony doors emblazoned with the Council’s emblem, a dark hand clutching a bleeding heart Seraphine took a deep breath. She squared her shoulders, pushed down the nagging emptiness gnawing at her, and knocked. Her hand hovered a half-second longer than it needed to before she let it fall against the wood.

“Enter.”

She pushed open the doors onto a circular room bathed in eerie purple light. Five hooded figures sat on raised daises, faces lost to shadow. Arminius Vane, the Council’s leader, stood at the center, his silver hair gleaming in the dim light. She kept her chin level, her hands loose at her sides, the way she’d trained herself to stand in this room specifically — nothing for him to read.

“Ah. Seraphine.” Smooth as silk. Venom underneath. “Satisfactory, I trust?”

“He’s dead.” Clipped. Flat. “That satisfactory enough for you?”

A low chuckle rippled through the room. “We’ve come to expect nothing less. From our most... proficient asset.”

Asset. Right. Like a filing cabinet, or a really good stapler. She kept her face still, mostly out of spite, and privately decided that if he called her that one more time she was allowed to be petty about it for the rest of the week.

“That it?” Already halfway to done with this.

He probably thought that look in his eyes was mysterious. It looked constipated. She was almost sure of it. Almost. It was hard to tell in this light, honestly, everything looked a little constipated in this light.

“There’s a new assignment. One that will require—” he paused, savoring it, “—your full range of talents.”

Cool, cool, love a dramatic pause, very normal thing a person does. She only nodded, waiting for him to go on, mostly because she wanted this over with faster than she wanted to make a point. Her jaw stayed tight the whole time he let the silence sit there.

“Rest for now. We’ll summon you when the details are ready. This one, Seraphine—it won’t be like the others. Prepare yourself.”

He waved his hand at that stupid, cryptic line, dismissing her. Sera bowed stiffly and turned to leave, already composing the complaint she’d never actually say out loud. She’d almost reached the doors when Arminius’s voice stopped her.

“And Seraphine—the mouth. Do something about it.”

She bit back a retort, her hands curling into fists. One breath. Two. “Right.” Teeth gritted. “My fucking apologies.”

She felt his cold smile follow her out, and immediately regretted not saying something worse. The moment the doors shut behind her, she let out a string of curses that would have made a stranger question her sanity, and honestly, felt fantastic doing it. She should get to curse at him directly sometime. She was absolutely going to think about all the things she should have said instead of sleeping, this was extremely likely, this was basically already happening.

In her sparse room, she began her post-mission ritual, cleaning her weapons with the same precise, practiced hands she used for everything else. Her mind kept looping back to the words “full range of talents,” which sounded either extremely bad or like something out of one of the trashy romance scrolls Cassia hid under her mattress, and Sera genuinely couldn’t decide which was worse.

That night, lying awake in the dark, she told herself she wasn’t thinking about it, which was, obviously, a lie, since thinking about not thinking about something is still thinking about it, a fact she found personally very annoying. She turned onto her side. Turned back. Her tribrid nature felt restless under her skin. So did the rest of her, if she was honest, which she generally tried not to be, especially with herself, especially at midnight.

It would start with a name: Erevan Blackthorn