Chapter Forty-Six
Screams.
The guards stumble away.
I rise, naked and bloody, radiating a furious, fiery tempest. Around me, the guards burn alive, shrieking, clutching their hands, their arms, their feet.
It should not feel good to watch them cower. Their fear and pain should not feel right.
But they do.
I flick my hand, and flames blast the nearest guard, smoke curling up through the chinks of his glowing armor, the male inside screeching. The smell of burnt flesh fills the air, but I do not stop. Discarding the charred shell, gone silent, I reach for the next.
The nearest guards wail and wail until they stop.
Briar battles with another halfling, a flow of water dancing around her like a current, slinging ice needles into his exposed neck above the chain mail. He goes down.
Next to her, the mother struggles under a halfling. I reach for his neck, singeing his skin. He cries out, stumbling back. The fae grapples for something in the growing ocean of slippery blood. She grips something between her fingers—the shard of glass—and whips it across the jugular of the guard.
I survey the scene. Six dead bodies, four remaining guards. Arrows stick out of the far wall, the ceiling. The siblings are gone. Yet we still fight like rats in that bucket. We must, for we do not know when someone will drop the entire thing in a river, all of us drowning.
A guard charges me through the flames, knife in hand.
I dodge his swing too slowly and find my shoulder nicked.
His weight drops down on me and I hiss, incinerating the arm bracketing my throat, and he screams, then goes limp.
The weight lifts, the halfling unblinking with two of Briar’s ice picks up his nose.
A mirror cracks, crashing to the floor on the other side of the room.
The siblings tumble into sight, seeming to materialize from nothing, as if they laced.
As they wrestle, both of them flinging out bands of power that cut down furniture and bodies—another guard falls—I understand they are not lacing; they are rendering themselves unseen.
The remaining two guards assess their movements. I help Briar to her feet.
Someone grabs my arm. Clara, her face drained of all color. She glowers at me with hollow eyes, her entire bottom half dripping with crimson.
“We’ll call for a Healing fae,” I say.
“You,” she says. “I remember you from that day.”
“I—”
“You have condemned us all.”
Then she draws the glass across her own throat. Her blood spits, hot and metallic, in my face, and Briar cries out. I grip Clara’s elbow as she falls, lowering her next to her husband. The family of three no more.
In total, ten bodies soak in the carnage.
The air is thick and wet and full of iron.
I swallow back vomit. The plane roils around us, and Briar heaves next to me.
Kassandra and Dominik struggle in and out of our perception.
Power explodes outward, unnatural and sickening, sending the two guards to their knees.
My body rolls with nausea, and I sink to the bloody floor, aware that I have burned away all my clothes. Briar sheds her sweater, handing the dripping cotton to me, and I throw it over myself.
Dominik stands over Kassandra, her face pressed against the ground. Both of them are covered in cuts and bruises. Dominik grabs her arms, fitting both wrists in one of his hands.
“No,” I croak, but my mouth burns with that strange magic. The bizarre, unnatural power. I gag.
“Guards,” Dominik calls.
The two stumble to their feet.
“No!” I shout, slipping in blood. Beside me, Briar lurches forward.
“I want you to remember this,” Dominik says.
“Kassie,” Briar cries, and it is almost the sound of my mother.
Not this again. Not this.
Anything but this.
“Any House member you buy from me, I will just buy back,” Dominik says.
A glint of silver in his hand, a flash of his arm. Before I can reach outward, Briar is tackling me to the ground. I scream, thrashing—until I hear the thudding.
The guards collapse, two daggers across their throats. As they fall away, blood splatters and leaches into the oak floor. From the mass of bodies, Dominik stands tall.
“There were too many eyes in this room anyway.”
Beside me, Briar yelps, sputtering. A force wraps around my neck, dragging me to my feet. My fingers spark with little heat, my genius spent.
Dominik wraps a hand in Kassandra’s hair and jerks her head up so she’s looking at us, her face cut. I scratch harder at the hands that hold me, hiss, flashing my teeth.
“Spare them,” she begs, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Even if it means you will be harmed instead?”
Her eyes flick to him, and my heart grows heavy.
What is he saying? My sluggish brain cannot put it together.
“Whose arms shall I break tonight?” he asks. “Theirs or yours?”
“Mine.”
“No,” I cough. I snap my fingers over and over but there is no air. I cannot find my fire.
Dominik glances between the two of us. “A lovers’ quarrel? Interesting.”
The only sounds in the room are our choking.
“Since you two can’t decide…” he starts, flicking his wrist.
Briar’s left arm snaps, the white bone jutting out from her tunic. She screams, then goes limp, head rolling. Kassandra cries out and I kick outward, ripping at the force around me.
He drops his grip.
I crash into the floor, gasping for air.
Briar falls facedown in the blood. I drag myself on hands and knees, but Kassandra is already kneeling, flipping over the faerie, wiping blood from her pale face.
She cradles Briar with a care I have never seen in her before, have only ever known from my mother, from Lila and Briar.
It is the tenderness with which a female holds a life in her hands.
“Consider it a mercy I only broke one,” Dominik says, stepping over us.
“Every night you go without being in the king’s bed will be another night I shall break limbs.
And when I am done with Briar, I will move on to Avery, then you, Kass.
Remember, faeries do not heal as quickly as you. You have three days.”
He navigates the ring of dead bodies, the finished family by the table. As he reaches the door, he glances back at us.
“Remember your options, Kassandra. Either Maxian will sire the future Illusion king, or I will.”
With the slam of the doors, Dominik is gone, leaving Kassandra and me in the carnage of blood and bodies and our broken friend.