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  Such an expression those eyes held—horror and grief mixed together. He stood rooted to the spot, the point of Raven’s sword at his throat, staring at me as if his heart was breaking.

  But I felt strangely disconnected from whatever ailed him. My head was exploding with new information as I looked around the clearing. I could feel Atinna, too. My gaze fell on her, and I knew immediately she wasn’t dead. In fact, she was stirring, having only been stunned by a blow from Ash.

  She struggled to her feet, her mouth falling open in shock as she took in Celebrach’s dead body. Then her eyes locked onto Ni’ishasana in my hand, and I felt the tug as she instinctively recoiled. But there was no breaking the new bond between us.

  A roar like the sea filled my head, and bright strands snaked away from me in all directions, like the afterglow of a child’s sparkler hanging in the air. I knew instinctively that each strand represented one of my Vipers. I could feel them all, however distant, the way I was always subtly aware of all the people in a room, even the ones behind me. At the end of each ribbon of light, a Viper awaited my orders. I knew who each of them was, tasted their thoughts and dreams in my head. We were inextricably linked.

  It was almost too much. Too many people, too much noise. Too much power. I was drunk with it. My heart began to pound with the enormity of the experience.

  The snake-haired woman—her name was Umarenthe, and she was indeed a great Air mage—spoke. “You will learn control. We will help you.”

  Understanding flowed between us, and suddenly, the noise abated. She was in my head, helping me, showing me how to sort through the bright strands and tug on the ones I wanted while leaving the others to fade into the background.

  “Sage,” Raven croaked. “Don’t just stand there. Get out of here!”

  I glanced down at my hands, almost expecting to see them glowing with the power pulsing in my veins. I was sure that any minute, it would burst through my skin, my body too frail to contain it all.

  “Sage! What’s wrong?”

  Raven’s words rolled over me without making any impact. I felt … I felt alive, for the first time. I could do anything, now. The world was not only my oyster but my whole damn ocean. I could fly if I wanted to, cast any spell. This was what I had dreamed of all my life.

  The shadow people pressed around me with proud smiles, welcoming me. Almost every Realm was represented among their number. Their powers—Ni’ishasana’s power—were a gift beyond measure.

  Pitch blackness descended on the clearing again, and a hand grabbed at mine. Not Ash—I would know his touch anywhere. Raven.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered.

  Impatiently, I blew his darkness away, Day magic bursting from me with such ease that I smiled even as I squinted against the glare. Raven grunted in pain and let go of my hand, subsiding into an untidy heap. The watching birds cawed and flapped in alarm.

  Atinna joined us, hesitating a step behind Ash. Her rage and hatred roared through our link, and I turned a frown on her.

  Immediately she knelt, head bowed, though her outer obeisance did nothing to hide the turmoil within. Did she realise she couldn’t hide her reactions from me? “Lady Serpent.”

  “Just Serpent will do fine,” I said, and raised an eyebrow at Ash. His mind was a storm of anguish, but he was still a magnet that kept calling me to him.

  He knelt, too. “My Serpent.”

  I stared at the top of his bent head, Umarenthe’s words echoing in my mind. Ashovar will be yours. I stepped closer, inhaling his ironbark scent, and tipped his head up. He met my gaze expressionlessly, though unshed tears sparkled on his long lashes.

  What was there to be upset about? I had it all. The power I’d always craved. Respect. My enemies were dead, and the man of my dreams was kneeling at my feet.

  I flexed my fingers. They still tingled with the power surging through me. I gestured for Ash and Atinna to stand, rejoicing at how quickly they obeyed me. Raven hadn’t moved, though I could see by the movement of his chest that he still lived.

  I could kill him, of course, but his death hadn’t been paid for. True, my fingers itched to try out my new powers in a bigger way. There were a dozen different ways he could die. I could boil him alive with Summer heat or stop his heart with Winter chill. I could choke him to death with the plants all around us or drag him deep into the earth and suffocate him. So many options. I had to take a few deep breaths to calm my sudden arousal.

  Something far away clawed at my memory, and I paused, looking down at him. Raven lay on his back, one arm flung up above his head, the other over his stomach as if it pained him. He looked oddly vulnerable, and my lips tingled with the ghost of his kiss. It felt as if that moment on the dance floor had happened to a different person.

  A tiny voice screamed for attention inside me, but it was buried too deep, too unimportant to bother with. I shrugged. He wasn’t a Viper. What happened to him was none of my concern. No doubt his friends would find him eventually.

  I walked away without a backward glance, followed by my Vipers, both the living and the dead. I was their Serpent, now, and I had other responsibilities.

  Don’t miss the next book, Assassin’s Dagger, coming soon! For news on its release, plus special deals and other book news, sign up for my newsletter here or by visiting my website, www.marinafinlayson.com.

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  Did you miss the original Thirteen Realms series? Turn the page to read the first chapter of Changeling Exile, and see where the magic began!

  Excerpt: Changeling Exile

  My earliest memory is of hiding: a note of panic in my mother’s voice urging me through dark spaces, the salt smell of her fear. Nice fae ladies don’t sweat, and I never knew her to do so, even after a day of working in our small cottage garden, yet the memory feels so real I can’t believe I imagined the whole thing. She says I did; just one more fault to lay at the feet of her disappointing changeling daughter. No wonder she was so keen to get rid of me.

  Now, I was hiding again, though it was no nameless terror that had me lurking in the tiny ladies’ bathroom of The Drunken Irishman at ten o’clock on a Monday night. Just good old stage fright.

  I jumped at a sharp rap on the door.

  “I know you’re in there, Al.” The voice belonged to my friend, Rowan, and it was tinged with frustration. This wasn’t the first time he had knocked. He played the drums in our small band, and I played the fiddle. Or guitar. Or anything with strings, really. But I didn’t sing. “We’re on in five minutes, and if you don’t come out right now, I’ll sic Willow onto you. She’s already pissed enough that she’s lost her voice. Don’t make me tell her you’ve chickened out.”

  Five minutes. Shit. My stomach, already seething with nerves, tied itself into a giant knot of terror. For a moment, I seriously contemplated climbing out the tiny bathroom window. But I’d probably end up face first in a pile of stinking rubbish in the alley behind the pub if I did—and Willow would still make me take her place as lead singer for the night.

  The door swung open and Rowan’s dark eyes peered around it, making sure I was alone in the tiny bathroom. With the door open, the bass thump of the music upstairs was more noticeable. It sounded like Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”. The musical tastes of Randall, the pub’s owner, were firmly rooted in the previous century. That worked in our favour, since not many other venues were prepared to give a gig to our kind of Celtic-influenced sound. I’d barely been born when The Corrs were popular. Now the drumbeat invaded my body and my heart thudded even louder.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but my throat was too dry to produce more than a raspy squawk. I swallowed hard and tried again. “I don’t think I can do it, Ro.”r />
  “Of course you can.” His long hair was loose tonight, making him look something like a cross between Thor and Captain Jack Sparrow. He usually wore it out when he was performing, and the girls went wild when he whipped it around like a seventies head banger. His open shirt showed his iron ward, a silver amulet on a chain around his neck. “You’ve got a great voice. I’ve heard you singing in the shower—and you sing harmonies all the time.”

  “That’s not the same as being lead singer. Everyone will be looking at me.”

  “Everyone will be looking at you anyway. You’re young, hot, breathing—every guy in the place will be imagining putting his—”

  Hastily I cut him off. “No one even notices I’m there when Willow’s on lead vocals.” Willow drew attention wherever she went. It wasn’t just the mane of ginger curls and the curvaceous body. There was something about her that simply commanded attention. She walked like a queen and bestowed attention as if it were a royal favour. Growing up a favoured daughter of the Spring Court had a lot to do with it—she’d been pampered from birth, and took adoration as her due, but it was more than that. She was a born performer.

  And, of course, being fae didn’t hurt. Men had been bewitched by fairy women since Moses was a boy.

  “Then I’ll do it,” he said.

  Even in my panic, the thought of Rowan on lead vocals made me smile. “Drummers don’t make good singers.”

  “Phil Collins would beg to differ.”

  “Rowan, I love you like a brother, but you can’t sing for shit.”

  “So you’ll do it?” He cocked his head and put on his most appealing smile.

  I knew I’d been played, but I nodded helplessly. Sage, our bass guitarist, didn’t know the words to half our songs. Rowan sounded like a frog with a bad sore throat at the best of times—and Willow actually did have a sore throat. So sore, in fact, that she’d barely been able to whisper a greeting when she’d showed up half an hour ago.

  “Good. The show must go on, you know. In less than two minutes, in fact, so let’s get moving.”

  Resigned to my fate, I let him pull me out the door and up the steep, cramped stairs from the basement to the main floor of the pub, my legs shaking already. It wasn’t that I didn’t like singing. My mother had forbidden me to sing around the house, but once she’d thrown me out, I had sung wherever and whenever I wanted to. I just didn’t want to sing here, with all eyes on me. Playing the fiddle or the guitar, safely anonymous behind Willow’s mesmerising performance, I felt free to lose myself in the music. It didn’t even feel like performing. I was just rocking out with my friends.

  Sage met us at the top of the stairs, wearing dark jeans and a white singlet at least two sizes too small that showed off her assets and the considerable muscles of her upper arms and shoulders. Her black hair was cropped short, leaving the long, powerful lines of her neck exposed. Sage only had two hobbies—music and working out—and she was very good at both. “I was starting to think you’d fallen in. We’re on in two minutes.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll have to sing.”

  This time it came out more like a whimper. “I know.”

  She took my arm and hustled me through the packed tables toward the corner where the band was set up. “Sage is the smartest and most attractive of all my friends.”

  I blinked at her, momentarily startled out of my panic.

  She grinned, teeth flashing white in the darkness of the room. “I was shooting for another ‘I know’. Relax! You’ll be fine. Willow says to pick one face in the crowd to focus on and forget the rest.”

  Standing on the tiny stage with the spotlight blinding me a moment later, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so nervous as Rowan shoved the microphone into my hand and gave me a comforting pat on the shoulder.

  “Hi,” I said, then winced as the mic squealed. I moved it further from my mouth and tried again. “Hi, I’m Allegra, and we are The Outcasts.”

  There was barely a dint in the noise levels. Randall had turned off the jukebox, but the roar of conversation continued unabated, liberally sprinkled with the clinking of glasses. The cavernous room smelled of sour beer and stale sweat, and the mic in my hand began to shake. Willow only had to open her mouth to have the crowd hushed, hanging on her words, yet in that whole sea of faces hardly any were turned my way. I knew I would be crap at this. Why had Rowan made me do it? I threw a desperate glance at Willow, standing behind me in a tight black dress with guitar in hand, red hair piled up in a messy yet still elegant bun. She made an impatient “get on with it” motion.

  Okay, no small talk tonight. “Our first song is called ‘Wake the Fire’, written by our own drummer, Rowan Hart.”

  Rowan launched straight into the intro and I blew out a shaky breath, trying not to squint against the glare of the spotlights. A slowly revolving disco ball over the dance floor directly beneath our tiny stage threw blue and green speckles of light across the faces of the crowd. The dark pits of their eyes stared expectantly at me. Those who were watching, anyway. Many still talked among themselves. I couldn’t hear them anymore with the music behind me, but I could see their mouths moving.

  Usually we started with “The Devil Came Down to Georgia”, just to get the blood pumping and the crowd revved up, but Willow was no fiddler, so that was out. Hopefully, Rowan’s song would still get a good response.

  “Al!” Sage’s fierce whisper broke into my thoughts, and I realised with a thrill of horror that I’d just missed my cue.

  I cleared my throat nervously—right into the mic, of course—and waited while my friends repeated the intro. Come on, Al, how hard can it be? Just pick one person and sing to them.

  Naturally, my boyfriend, Adam, wasn’t here tonight. Seeing him leaning on the bar might have calmed me, but he’d been coming to our gigs less and less frequently lately. Desperately, my gaze roved over the crowd until it was arrested by a pair of eyes staring straight back at me.

  Their owner stood at the back, near the doors, arms folded across his chest. He wore a black T-shirt, and both the arms and the chest were so bulging with muscle that for a moment I forgot my nerves, forgot all about the music—forgot everything in rapt appreciation of his sculpted form.

  When I finally dragged my gaze back to his face, his lips were curved into a sardonic smile, as if he knew what I’d been thinking. Hastily, I looked away, a flush warming my cheeks.

  I managed to catch my cue this time, and launched into the first verse, filling the room with Rowan’s heartache over his ex. My voice was as good as Willow’s even if my stage presence wasn’t, and the conversations in the room began to die, more of the pale faces in the dark turning toward me. I could do this. Not that Willow needed to fear for her job. I’d much rather be back there on that guitar. I winced as she hit a wrong note. Yes, we both had our areas of expertise.

  When I sneaked another look at him, the dark-haired guy was no longer staring at me, which allowed me to admire him a little more. The coloured lights played across his hair, bringing out green and purple highlights. I was used to seeing gorgeous men—everyone in the Realms looked like a supermodel, and Adam was pretty good-looking for a human—but this guy had something else, a brooding quality that wouldn’t allow me to look away. Something about the way his dark brows drew together, or how his short beard caressed his square jaw, made him look deeply serious, yet his full lips suggested he knew how to play, too.

  His eyes met mine again, and a spark leapt between us. Or maybe that was just me. I stumbled, lost the thread of the music, and recovered it again, heart racing. This was no time to be fantasising about Mr Dark and Brooding. I had a job to do—not to mention a boyfriend waiting at home. Resolutely, I turned my attention away before I embarrassed myself by forgetting all the words to the damn song.

  A guy about my age, twenty-one or twenty-two, sat at the bar with a couple of mates, but they were chatting to each other across him while he stared down into his beer as if it was the most fasci
nating thing he’d seen all day. He was kind of cute in profile. I had the feeling that I’d seen him somewhere before, especially when he smiled suddenly at something one of his mates had said. I could almost picture that smile on another face, but I couldn’t quite place it. Maybe I’d point him out to Sage, who was currently unattached. He looked more approachable than Mr Dark and Brooding.

  We made it through the song and received a smattering of applause. Gradually, the knot in my stomach began to unwind. I was nearly finished the next song before my maddeningly familiar friend at the bar looked up from his beer again. I was looking straight at him, so I saw his flinch, so big and dramatic it looked as though he were trying out for a part as the villain in a kids’ pantomime. Then he grabbed the arm of the guy sitting next to him and shouted into his ear, gesturing wildly toward the stage as he did so.

  At me? I still couldn’t figure out why I felt as though I should know who he was—had he recognised me? I nearly lost the thread of what I was singing again. This looking at the audience thing sucked big time. How did Willow manage to concentrate? I shifted my focus to a point on the back wall instead, but I could still see the guy out of the corner of my eye. When the last chords of that song sounded, I could hear him, too, yelling over the low rumble of conversation.

  “Horns! He’s got horns! Look—can’t you see? Are you blind? Look at him!”

  Okay, he wasn’t waving at me. Heads started to turn in the audience and I sneaked a glance over my shoulder at Rowan, just to be sure he hadn’t flared accidently. In his fae form, he sported an impressive set of antlers.

  Of course he hadn’t. And antlers weren’t horns, anyway. Ro frowned at me as Sage began the next song, and his hands moved automatically over the drums even as his attention was diverted by the growing noise out front. He still looked completely human. If I’d watched him out of the corner of my eye for long enough, I might have glimpsed that other self, shimmering under the surface, but I was a changeling. I’d spent my whole childhood in the fae Realms, and I could see things that regular humans couldn’t. Fae like Rowan had the ability to hide their true nature from mortal eyes, putting on a convincing human front whenever they needed to. No one but other fae—and the odd changeling—should be able to sense his true form beneath the human façade.