Chapter 35 Wings & Blades
Chapter thirty-five
Wings & Blades
Someone, a woman, was calling his name—all his names in turn, and she sounded terrified. Devil scrambled to his feet and listened again, then breathed, “Aliena…”
I was immediately behind him as he leapt to his feet. Once we made it around the oak tree, he spread his wings and looked back at me.
“Go!” I cried. He did not wait for another command, but took a running leap and soared ahead, dipping between the tree trunks and vanishing.
Too agitated and terrified to travel by magyk, I ran, not slowing my pace until I reached Aliena’s cottage.
When I saw Simeon standing beside Devil, however, I skidded to a halt.
Aliena, hands covering her mouth, heard me arrive and turned.
“There she is!”
“Thank the gods,” Simeon breathed, putting out his hand. “Please, my lady, there’s been an attack. Your gift is desperately needed.”
Simeon strode forward and seized my wrist without waiting for my reply.
I barely had time to think before reaching for Devil, pulling him along with us as we traveled through the Arden.
When we arrived, I saw Oberon first. He stood at the edge of a vast stretch of Rot, the lines on his face deepened by fear and consternation.
Behind him, someone was hunched over on the forest floor.
“Antenor…” I whispered, stumbling forward with my hand outstretched. Oberon stopped me before I could touch my cousin, however, and pointed.
“Careful. Look.”
Antenor’s great wings were splayed out on either side of him, and I had to fight back a strangled cry when I saw the splotchy tendrils of darkness.
The Rot.
Its sheen was unmistakable, as was the way it crept through his veins, inching along each wing’s membrane toward his shoulders.
He was injured too—large, bloody cuts covering his arms and upper back, every muscle in his body spasming in pain as he tried to fight against the sickness slowly overtaking him.
“If it reaches his heart…” Oberon said. He did not need to finish the sentence.
“Antenor!” I barked, dropping to my knees beside him. “You must stay still! Do you hear me?”
He only snarled and curled tighter into a ball, fingers laced through his own hair.
“Hold him down,” Oberon said to Devil, kneeling beside me and conjuring up a net of shadows, while Devil made one of golden light.
They covered him in their magyk, tightening the bonds around his stiff body.
I fell to the ground beside one of his wings and carefully placed my hands close to the joint, where the Rot had not spread yet.
Shaking violently, I closed my eyes and threaded my healing magyk beneath his skin.
But the Rot was not going to give up its victim, and I was slammed violently backwards.
No matter what I poured into him, I could not find a weak point in the roiling ball of anger and grief and hatred.
In fact, the harder I tried, the more viciously it seemed to fight.
Tears streamed down my face as I threw my magyk at it again and again, for how long, I did not know.
“It’s no use!” Simeon finally cried. “We must leave, in case it changes him.”
I stood to shed my moth cloak, then stepped away from Antenor and beckoned to Oberon.
“There is another way we might save him,” I whispered, rolling up the long sleeves of my shirt.
“Whatever it is, do it,” the faerie king replied, “and quickly.”
“We’ll need a blade…a sharp one…”
Oberon’s eyes widened as he realized what I was suggesting, but Antenor somehow heard me too. He surged to his knees, falling backwards and scrambling away.
“No! No, you cannot do that!”
As I turned to try and calm him, I was horrified to see that his entire face had been mauled too.
He was nearly unrecognizable from the man I had seen just that morning.
One of his eyes was slashed and swollen shut, his mouth twisted and bloodied, chunks taken from his nose and an ear.
The damage extended down to his chest too, and the grass around him was soaked in blood.
“Antenor,” I begged, kneeling in front of him again. “Please, I can save you…”
His good eye was wild with panic as he roared, “I would rather die! Oberon, please!”
“I am sorry,” Oberon whispered, even though he appeared conflicted. Without warning, dozens of shadowy ropes burst from his hands and curled around Antenor’s thrashing body.
“No! Please, Oberon! He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me!
I’ll be nothing! Less than nothing! Please, I beg you!
Let me go! Let me die by my own hand! Please!
” He continued to scream as the shadows bound him, holding him on his stomach and pinning his infected wings to the forest floor.
My chest heaved with emotion and terror, mind scattered and unfocused.
His desperation nearly broke me, but I met Devil’s eyes and he gave a sobering nod, then conjured up a scythe made of pure light.
“Will this do?”
I could only nod.
“Show me where to cut,” he murmured. My trembling hands indicated the place on each wing joint where a blade would encounter the least resistance. Attempting to block out Antenor’s cries, I pulled up the magyk of my healing gift and prepared to close the wounds as they were made.
When Devil’s scythe made the first cut, I nearly fell to pieces.
It was all I could do to pour a steady stream of magyk out, to staunch as much bleeding as possible while Antenor begged over and over for me to kill him myself.
Hot tears slid down my face, mixing with his royal-red blood, but I could not wipe them away without severing my connection to his body.
Oberon and Simeon watched in stoic silence, keeping an eye on the Rot, which was still spreading, seeking out a heart to tear open.
When the first wing fell away, already dead and dessicated, Antenor’s wretched pleas turned to quiet, pitiful sobs.
His muscles gave out, and he hardly even flinched when Devil began to cut away his remaining wing.
Just as blade met sinew, there was a flash of light nearby. I looked up through my tears to see Titania and Hippolyta. Prim hovered just above them, wringing her tiny hands.
“What happened?” the queen demanded, moving forward and sweeping her amber eyes over the gruesome scene.
“He was attacked, my lady,” Simeon explained, quickly stepping between her and Oberon. “Forced to use his wings as a shield against the Rot. Whoever it was, they got away, and he has not been coherent enough to give us any details.”
Hippolyta’s face hardened and she drew the sword from her belt.
“You must leave him,” Titania called out to me. “You must all go, quickly!”
“It’s not spreading!” I shouted back, battling to maintain my stream of magyk.
“No, but they are coming.” She pointed past me, into the darkness of the Rot-tainted forest, and I was too afraid to look.
“May,” said Devil, keeping his focus on the task at hand, but speaking urgently. “Run.”
“No!” I cried. “I won’t leave him! It’s almost done.”
“May!” Devil snarled, pressing the blade harder into Antenor’s wing joint. I looked over my shoulder at Titania, and out of the corner of my eye, caught something creeping slowly along the blackened forest floor.
Panic rose in my throat. “Someone help, please!”
It was directed at Titania, but she had moved to stand between us and the Rot, summoning an enormous shield of blue flame between her hands.
Hippolyta, however, stepped forward and raised her sword.
Devil lifted his hands and aimed a beam of light at it, making the blade glow white-hot as she swung it down.
With a sickening, crunching rip, the wing tore free.
Immediately, Oberon used his shadows to launch Antenor’s prone body away from the Rot, just as Devil wrapped his arms around me.
His wings flared out, coated in light, shielding me from… something.
I could not see what it was, but I heard its voice—screeching and shrieking.
It sank between my bones like unholy ice, expanding and cracking and filling me with a dread the likes of which I had never felt before.
Hippolyta, Oberon, and Titania closed in behind Devil, blocking another attack as I scrambled back and drew out my own shadows.
I had never fought before, especially not with magyk, but I was not about to leave them to their fate.
“May, you have to run!” Devil begged, closing his shielded wings around me. “Take Antenor and go to the Hollow, please!”
“I’m not leaving any of you!”
He had no time to answer before Hippolyta slammed into his back, sending him to the forest floor, and I finally saw what the Rot had sent for us.
The creature had clearly once been fay, with a pair of shredded, rotting butterfly wings hanging limp from its back, and huge, glassy eyes sunken into a hairless skull.
Blackened, festering flesh hung from eerily long, mismatched limbs and brittle bones.
It crawled back toward us, its movements jerky and unnatural, like a spider missing half its legs, but also disturbingly quick.
Before me, Titania’s blue flame and Hippolyta’s glimmering sword, Oberon’s forest of shadowy spears and Devil’s golden scythe closed ranks.
The monster snarled at them, reaching beyond the Rot with spindly but lethal clawed hands.
Its human-ish jaw hung loose, dripping black ooze onto the forest floor, and yet somehow it still made that terrible noise.
I could not tell if it was contained by the boundary of the Rot, or by my family holding it at bay.
Slowly, I backed toward Antenor, forming my shadows into small, sharp arrows that I hoped I might be able to launch if the Unseelie thing came for me.
From my vantage point, however, I was able to see the second monster closing in, and to cry out a warning.