Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Faun and I stood facing each other, my sword at her throat and the point of hers still piercing my left shoulder. We stared at one another as the howl resonated.
I could see it in Faun’s eyes. I was sure she could see it in mine.
We were afraid of each other. We were afraid of death. We were afraid of the kind of death we would face. She was like me. She was more like me than anyone else in this place.
I didn’t want to kill her. It was the last thing I wanted.
We didn’t speak, but our eyes did. I nodded, and so did she. I lowered my sword as she yanked hers from my shoulder.
The pain was worse this time. I dropped my sword and clamped my mouth with my hand to stifle my scream as my blood splattered.
The howl sounded again, closer. Faun turned toward it, swicking her blade free of my blood. She sheathed it and drew her bow. “Get up, coward.”
Not me. Him.
Her partner had dropped against the wall of the cave and sank to a crouch. At her words, he gathered himself and staggered upright. His knees trembled through his leathers.
I turned toward the mouth of the cave, to the veil of thundering water. My left arm hung limp, and my sword wavered in my offhand. I hoped Dorian was nowhere near—at least his death might not be this violent. Maybe when I died, he would only fall asleep and never wake up again.
The howl sounded a third time, closer than ever. It rang in my ears, a wincing noise, and it sounded like it was right on the other side of the waterfall.
We three stood there in the faint lavender light, waiting with our weapons in hand. Faun had nocked an arrow, her partner slower to do the same. I would have drawn my own, but one of my hands was useless.
It didn’t happen at all how I’d expected.
Silence fell—a silence so thick beneath the water you’d think the Hunt had forgotten about us. Perhaps they had. Maybe they’d caught wind of another, more potent fear—
A shadow appeared beyond the crashing waterfall. It loomed, growing, until it became hulking. Then it broke through in a spray of silvered droplets, maw open, a pair of canines as long as my head visible in the soft crystal light.
A wolf. Its fur gleamed as white as the moon.
It landed dripping inside the cave. It was twice as large as me, its eyes two enormous drops of night. Its claws tapped and scraped on the rock as it slid to stillness.
A wolf of the Wild Hunt. Gorgeous. Terrible. Made for violence.
Two of Faun’s red-fletched arrows flew, one after another. They should have gone straight into the wolf’s head, but they passed straight through the creature as though it were immaterial and clanked against the stone of the far wall.
I stared; my legs felt like ice, right up into my spine. I’d never felt defenseless in my life, not wholly. Not like this.
If their arrows didn’t even penetrate the creature, what use was my sword—my bow—my knife?
The wolf’s snarl made all three of us flinch.
It spun on Faun and her partner, lifted its head with a howl that echoed off the walls of the cave and back at us.
A mind-rending sound, a pain like I’d never felt.
The three of us dropped what we held and clutched our hands to our skulls.
Faun’s partner fell to his knees; Faun and I somehow kept on our feet.
Another form burst through the water. A second wolf, identical to the first. It landed with a wet skid, claws screaming grooves into the stone.
The two of them stood wide-stanced, teeth bared, one with black eyes on me, the other before Faun and her partner. They didn’t attack, but they didn’t move, either. When Faun’s partner tried to edge on his knees toward the cave’s mouth, the closer wolf stepped forward with a snarl like a slap.
They were keeping us pinned. Pinned and waiting for something.
For their master. A fae from below.
Their master was certain death.
Faun understood in the same moment I did.
“No.” Her hand flicked, and a branch from the nearby brush snaked across the cave’s floor and wrapped itself tight around one wolf’s leg. It yanked, and the creature’s leg rose from the ground before it realized it was caught.
Magic. That was earth magic, like Dorian’s.
The wolf landed on its side and was pulled with a growl toward the waterfall. Its claws scraped for purchase before it was flung through the water and disappeared from sight.
An arrow couldn’t touch it, but magic could.
A second branch snaked toward the other wolf. This one dodged with a leap backward, but it was buffeted by a gust of wind from deep in the cave. Beside Faun, her partner’s fingers were in motion.
The two fae were working in synchrony.
The branch caught the wolf’s leg, twined around it, and flung the wolf in the same direction as the first.
Faun’s eyes met mine. For the first time, I saw something new there—not pity, but a sharp, measured look. The way Isa the nurse had looked at me after I told her how I’d gotten a broken nose.
“Run.” Faun gestured deeper into the cave where the light did not reach.
She had only turned toward me a second before something long, slender, and pointed pierced the water and drove itself into her shoulder. She was thrown face-first against the cave’s wall and pinned there with a cry.
A spear. Impaled by a spear some twenty hands long. Its length shimmered with a strange iridescence, and it had flown so fast and straight it had pierced straight into rock. Now it remained horizontal above the ground, its point driven into the wall and the shaft emerging from Faun’s shoulder.
Beneath the waterfall’s surge, footsteps sounded. No—hoofbeats. Faun’s partner and I turned slowly, even as Faun herself let out a low, serrated wail.
A horse’s white head appeared, pushing past the brush along the narrow path. Its hooves echoed off the stone as it entered the cave. Legs thick around as trunks, hooves bigger than my head, withers so high up my eyes lifted and lifted.
Beside the creature stalked two white wolves. And atop it sat a woman with alabaster skin and no eyes.
The horse’s hooves clopped, each strike deliberate, echoing to the sound of Faun’s groans.
The woman’s white hair hung in long waves from her crown to the ground, flowing over her naked body and merging with the horse’s tail.
Full, pale lips, prominent cheekbones. She rode without a bridle or saddle, just one long-fingered hand wound into the horse’s thick mane.
Where her eyes should have been lay two burnt-out charcoal pits.
When the horse had fully entered the cave, she sat back. All four creatures of the Wild Hunt—horse, the two wolves, and the eyeless woman seated high above them—came to a stop.
She considered the three of us.
Faun, still moaning with her face to the rock and the spear sticking out of her bleeding shoulder.
Faun’s partner, who now stood on quavering legs.
And me, the human with one eye poisoned shut, who bled from her puffy face and shoulder and held her sword with an offhand grip.
The woman dismounted, bare feet slapping stone.
Slap, slap, slap. She walked with the same slow certainty as the horse had.
She crossed the cave to Faun, set both hands around the shaft of the spear, and yanked it free.
Faun’s scream ripped the air and she crumpled to the ground, blood pouring from the hole in her shoulder.
Faun’s face turned up toward the spectral woman, agonized and furious.
The tendrils came first, snaking across the cave’s floor from the walls and brush—the first wave of Faun’s anger. But more followed.
Roots burst through the cracks in the stone. Vines from the thicket behind the falls pushed through the cave’s mouth, clawing for the spectral woman’s bare feet. The very earth seemed to answer Faun’s rage.
Power. So much power.
Faun’s face twisted, teeth bared in a silent snarl. She lifted one hand, trembling but defiant, as if she might tear the Wild Hunt itself from the world.
With a single clockwise sweep of her spear, the woman severed every reaching tendril before they could touch her.
The roots recoiled, blackening on contact with the air. The vines shriveled.
Faun dropped back to the floor, panting, one arm useless at her side.
The woman raised her spear again, the tip drifting between the three of us. Her voice when she spoke was just bones rattling, the words whispers.
“You are all unworthy.”
The spear’s point moved, moved, and settled on me. Directly at my throat. She stalked forward, her pale lips flat and impassive. The charcoal eyes deepened. The wolves stepped forward, tight at her sides.
I tightened my grip on the sword with my offhand; pain throbbed through my shoulder like a second heart.
I wouldn’t run. I wouldn’t kneel.
The woman’s spear lowered to strike.
“Don’t touch her.”
A wind kicked up, buffeting the spectral woman’s hair into her face. Not a natural wind. Too fast, too on point. This was magic.
A form stood at the threshold, framed by spray and rock. The crystal light caught his silhouette: battered, tense, unbroken.
Dorian.
He had found me.
No, no, no.