Lightning spits through Vothe, silver flashing through his vision as he suppresses the urge to leap over the table and throttle Heelyn. But Trystan doesn’t react. He just stubbornly keeps his eyes focused on the table before him, even as fire scythes through his lines.

“You’re Gardnerian. Not Noi.” Heelyn venomously insists. “Get back in your blacks. Your kind are reviled by Vo.”

“You think I should wear Gardnerian clothes,” Trystan says quietly. A statement, not a question. His tone is neutral, but Vothe almost draws back from how intensely his waterline is now storming.

“Yes,” she sneers. “Stay in your own culture.”

“You think that’s my culture?”

“Of course it is!”

Trystan’s expression has gone very cold as he continues to stare at the table, and Vothe is momentarily overwhelmed by the sense of just how much power Trystan is holding back.

“Heelyn, leave it...” Vothe cautions.

“No, Vothe. No.” She swings back toward Trystan, like a torch leveled, her eyes glazed with outraged tears. “My parents were killed by your grandmother!”

Trystan winces. “So were mine,” he says, almost inaudible.

Heelyn’s mouth turns down into a trembling grimace. “I don’t believe you!” she hisses. “And now your sister might be here in the Realm, as well. Where is she, Crow? Where is the Black Witch?”

Silence.

“You know, don’t you,” Heelyn hisses. Her hostile gaze swings to Vothe. “Do you know, as well? Have you become that much of a traitor to your own people?”

Vothe’s horns spiral up from his head with a tight sting, his teeth elongating. “I stand with the Eastern Realm,” he says, low and dangerous. “So does Trystan.”

Heelyn leans toward Vothe. “We don’t need Crows standing with the Realm.” She jabs her finger toward Vothe’s chest for emphasis. “And you need to start guarding him like the enemy that he is! Not flirting with him. Every shape-shifter who gets within ten feet of the two of you knows what’s going on!”

“Leave. Him. Be.”

Vothe turns along with everyone else, all of them collectively surprised by the deep, resonant female voice, an undercurrent of lethal threat in it.

Sylla Vuul is standing a few tables away, the petite Death Fae’s dark-clad form resonating the pause before an attack, an additional six eyes sprouting around the two dark ones she has pinned on Heelyn. Elegant Death Fae Vesper is seated beside her, his gleaming black cane in hand, his eerily attractive eyes pooling to a solid black.

Heelyn attempts not to wither under Sylla’s spider-shifter stare, but Vothe can sense her flash of fear. Justified fear.

A swarm of spiders flows down from the hem of Sylla’s dark pants and scuttles toward Heelyn, some of the other patrons letting out sounds of alarm as they get up and move away from their tables, away from the Death Fae.