Alysa Campbell knows exactly how this ends. She has seen it once already; her mother, worn to nothing by the Banshee's unrelenting pull, the wail of death living inside her until there was no room left for anything else. Alysa was the one who found her. She was the one who watched the Banshee try to tear itself free.

She swore she would not become that. She built a life in isolation to make sure of it. No connections, no warmth, nothing the Banshee could use to drag her toward the same end. The visions come regardless. The wail rises when death is near regardless. And Keith Mille, longtime friend, family doctor, and the one person who has refused to let her disappear, is the one thing she has never found a way to protect herself from.

Keith knows what she carries. He has known for years, the darkness, the grief, the quiet terror that her story is already written. He stays anyway. What Alysa does not know is that the Banshee has already decided how it feels about Keith. It wails for many things. For him, it rises like a warning. Not of his death, but of something that wants it.

The Beithir is ancient. Older than the keeper system, older than the Pantheon Guard that oversees it, older than the agreement that bound cryptids to human vessels in the first place. It has decided that agreement is a desecration. It is hunting every keeper it can find and it is not interested in leaving witnesses.

As the Beithir closes in and the Banshee's warnings grow desperate, Alysa is forced to confront everything she has spent years running from the bond she feared would destroy her, the love she refused to name, and the possibility that what she has carried all this time was never trying to pull her under.

Some inheritances cannot be outrun. But some loves are bright enough to light the way back.