Page 44 of The Arcane God

Fucking Gaia and Iblis combined.

The story—the one Greya used to tell her. The one she was reminded of when they were trapped in the snowstorm.

A seer who fell in love with a stranger from the other side of the Chasm Mountains.

Gaia, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t put those two things together before. Could that really be true? Greya had told her the story so many times as a child, and she’d always known her grandmother had been a seer, and that she had gotten pregnant without being handfast, but she’d always assumed it was a mortal who’d done it, or someone else unsuitable—it wasn’t unheard of for witches to have babies even though they weren’t handfast.

Never in her wildest imagination would she have thought the story Greya had told her—the one she had learned from their father—was true. Could it possibly be?

“Ena…” Turner said. “You look like you’re having a thought. Care to share with the group?”

“The stryx,” she said. “Have any of them ever traveled to our side of the Chasm Mountains?”

“Not in many, many years,” Max explained. “Long before your birth. But there was one group—a group of three—who were sent right around the time I was born.”

“What happened to them?” Ena asked.

“They never returned.”

“Gaia…” Ena said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I think…I think it is possible. I think those three made it—or at least made it most of the way.”

“Why do you think that?” Kaya asked in disbelief.

“The story…” Turner said. She had told him the story when they’d been trapped in the snowstorm, and clearly he was putting two and two together just as she had.

“What story?” Kaya asked, trying to keep up.

“My father used to tell my sister this story before he died, and she told it to me. It was about an Aquilo witch, a seer, who helped three strangers stranded in a snowstorm in the Chasm Mountains. And how she…fell in love with one of them. I always thought it was just made up, but now…some of the things about the strangers makes me think they could have been stryx.”

“Like what?” Max asked, following her story raptly.

“Like they had pale skin and dark eyes, and that they’d traveled all the way there because their home was beset by horrible storms and they needed to relocate.” Ena looked up at Max, gauging his reaction to this information. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Max said solemnly. “It is why the three were sent over the Chasm Mountains. The storms have been getting worse for decades. Game has been dwindling. It is why there are so few of us left now—the blood is running out.”

“So it’s true,” Turner said, his voice in awe. “The story you told us is true. And if the seer from the story was your grandmother, that makes you…”

“Part stryx,” Ena said, her voice devoid of any feeling.

Because what? Like seriously. What in the actual fuck was happening?

Could she really be…stryx? How could she not have known this before? Had her father known? She knew she’d gotten her pale skin from him, but he was a witch. He had a Gift and never drank blood as far she knew—which was admittedly not much because he’d died when she was so young, and everything she knew was from Greya or Heran or other witches in the Coven.

All of a sudden, Ena felt her control crack, but it wasn’t sadness she felt, or overwhelm, it was anger. Because this was like the bond to Iblis all over again—more information about witches, daemons—stryx—that she’d never known. Knowledge that had been kept from her.

Had this been intentional too? Had her father known and never told anyone? Or had others known and never told her?

She hated the unknown of it all, and she couldn’t handle it. She didn’t want to think about this anymore—about any of it. It was too much.

“But wait,” Turner began, interrupting her spiral. “Why did she only just now start craving blood? Why hasn’t she craved it her whole life?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Max responded. “I have only known one other like you—someone who is part witch and part stryx. Our daughter,” he said, looking over at Kaya. “And she does require less blood than other stryx, so it’s possible that, because you are even less stryx than she, the blood cravings were dormant until you came of age, or were triggered by the pregnancy…any number of possibilities.”

Ena supposed that made sense, to an extent, but it wasn’t the dormancy of her blood cravings that she was focused on. It was the fact that Kaya had a daughter—another child besides Ty.

“A daughter?” Turner asked, his face grave, as if the idea of Ty having a half sister he never knew about haunted him too. “Is it Xoe?”

“No, no,” Max said. “Xoe is my niece. I adopted her when her mother, my sister, passed a few years ago. Our daughter is out on a solo hunt and has not returned yet.”