Chapter Seventeen #2
The faerie woman stepped off the embankment and made her way toward them. She scraped her talons against the trunk of a tree. Sap rose from the thin scratches she left behind.
“We need to go,” Daniil said lowly.
There was nowhere left to run.
A flurry of low barks shattered the silence.
Shea turned just in time to see a dog streaking past them like a bolt of white lightning.
Beann. He launched himself at the faerie woman, and she shrieked as his jaws closed around her arm.
She struck him with her free hand, but he hardly flinched.
If anything, he only locked on tighter and thrashed her, clearly intent on dragging her down onto the forest floor.
“Out, Beann.”
Shea knew that voice. Ciara.
At Ciara’s command, Beann released his grip and immediately trotted back toward her.
Shea shuddered at the sight of his muzzle stained black with gore.
Ciara stood on a deer trail, one hand resting on her hip in the very picture of nonchalance.
A few moths clung to the billowing sleeves of her cloak; Shea could see the elegant, striated pattern of their wings reflected in the fanciful designs around the cuffs.
In a tone of neutral curiosity, Ciara asked, “Who are you who wears the queen’s face? ”
The faerie woman cradled her mangled wrist. Blood dripped steadily from the ends of her taloned fingers and pattered sickeningly against the dirt. “I am no one to you.”
Ciara’s expression softened with surprise. “I do know you.”
Not-Aideen grimaced. “It seems the fae’s memory is longer than I’d expected. I’d hoped to dispose of these two first.”
Ciara slid her gaze toward Shea and Daniil. “Are you hurt?”
“Yes,” Daniil replied, before Shea had a chance. “We are.”
Shea shot him a glare.
“I see.” A flicker of anger kindled in Ciara’s eyes. Quickly enough, her expression smoothed over and grew haughty, almost bored. “What a shame you’re not mortal. The things I could make you do. Fortunately, I do not need compulsion to destroy you.”
She extended her right hand. One of the many rings she wore—this one on her thumb—began to glow.
It intensified until the brilliance of it seared Shea’s eyes, then took shape into a blade of light.
When Ciara closed her fingers around it, it dimmed and solidified into a spear far taller than she was.
The head was all delicate, filigreed metal, the handle a dark wood inlaid with gold.
A long length of glittering, white fabric was knotted close to the point, drifting behind her as if carried on an invisible current.
Ciara hefted it, then lifted her foot so that she balanced on only one leg like a crane.
A strange battle stance, Shea thought, but it seemed to cow her opponent.
“That is a weapon I haven’t seen in a long time,” not-Aideen said guardedly.
“Ah, good. You know it,” Ciara said pleasantly. “Then I do not need to warn you that it never misses its mark.”
Not-Aideen drew something from the folds of her cloak: a gnarled switch of rowan wood. It looked unassuming, but Ciara took a wary step backward. She stared at it as though it were a gun. The faerie woman smiled. “It seems you need no warning of what I am capable of, either.”
What happened next, Shea could not exactly describe.
Perhaps it was the black curtain of night, broken only by flashes of Ciara’s spear and the faint auras both women emitted.
Perhaps it was her feeble mortal mind refusing to accept such a display of magic.
Whatever it was, she absorbed the battle only in impressions.
The ring of metal and the tearing of fabric.
Swirls of glittering, violet darkness and the heady smell of seawater.
Weapons locked together and flung apart.
The snap of the switch slicing through air.
Every time not-Aideen swung it, things turned into other things: stones into serpents, serpents into shards of ice.
Ciara moved in a way Shea hadn’t thought her capable of.
She pivoted and dodged like a practiced fighter, swinging the massive spear with such grace and ease, it seemed like an extension of her arm.
Her loose hair and cloak trailed her like a comet’s tail, and her eyes were aglow with murderous intent.
Shea could see it on her face. If she could tear this woman in two with her bare hands, she gladly would.
For perhaps the first time, Ciara frightened Shea as much as she captivated her.
Mercifully, it ended quickly enough. Ciara threw the spear.
It sailed through the air like a bird of prey and skewered the woman to a yew by the meat of her shoulder.
She screamed, both pained and furious. Something dark and bilious burbled up from the back of her throat.
It took Shea a moment to realize that it was a crow.
It emerged, struggling and wet, from her flung-wide mouth.
First the beak, then the sleek head with its ruby-red eyes, then its wings, until it wrenched itself free and took flight.
Another followed soon after. Then another and another from each of her eye sockets.
It was horrible to watch her body become an empty husk—piece by piece, it tore itself apart; each scrap of her became another bird.
The murder took to the sky, cawing their thwarted outrage.
Beann ran after them, barking in frustration.
Ciara did not call him off, but she pressed her mouth into a thin, dissatisfied line.
She approached the spear, still embedded deep in the trunk of the yew.
She pulled it out and inspected the bloodied spearhead.
She wiped it off with the hem of her cloak, then gave an exaggerated shudder.
Once she finished, the spear transformed itself back into a ring and wrapped itself securely around her right thumb.
“She shall not elude me forever, now that she owes me a debt,” she said with feeling. “This is my favorite cloak, and now, it is ruined.”
As Shea stared at it, the blood dried and flaked away, leaving the hem unblemished. A new stain, however, was blossoming over Ciara’s left shoulder at a more alarming rate. Shea pointed at it. Wanly, she said, “Uh … You’re bleeding.”
When Ciara touched where Shea had indicated, her fingers came away red. She gasped. Her face went deathly pale. “So this is mortality.”
Shea just barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. The fae were not invulnerable to wounds, and a little cut like this was hardly enough to take someone like Ciara down. “You’re not—”
Before Shea could finish her sentence, Ciara’s eyes rolled to the whites. With shockingly little fanfare, she swooned. Shea barely caught her in time. For a few moments, she and Daniil stared down at her crumpled form.
“Well,” he said, in a tone of vague disgust, “I guess I’ll help you carry her to her room.”