“And now she’s in charge,” I say. How convenient. “How do the children of Morrígan . . . feed?” I ask. When the king fed from me in the dream, it felt like I was being ripped to bits from the inside.
His shoulders stiffen and at first he doesn’t answer. Then he says quietly, “We pull spirits from their bodies.”
Chills rake over me.
“A bit at a time.” He sounds tired saying it. “It can be very painful.”
I remember.
“As a fire demi, what you take from a body is related to their molecular structure; it’s physical. The Morrígan children take the essence of a person’s spirit,” he continues. “It can be messy if it’s not tightly controlled, and pieces of the spirit itself can peel off in the feeding. That’s why most of my younger siblings have shade consorts—they’re already dead in the important sense of the word, only threads of spirit left behind. You can’t usually pull those threads from a shade by accident, so they’re more likely to survive.”
I let all of that soak in. Then I ask, “Do you kill every time you feed?”
“Not anymore.”
The pathway narrows and the trees become thicker. I’m wondering if we’re ever going to get there, when Kieran says, “It’s just up ahead.”
We pick our way through a section of dense ferns followed by some pretty crazy brambles, pushing forward. And just when I think he’s lying and we’ll be walking in an endless loop for an eternity, we stumble out.
Right into a huge field of purple and yellow flowers.
I gasp, taken off guard by the beauty in front of me. And I immediately recognize it as the place Lily wanted to return to, the woods of Caledonia, a field of bluebells and daffodils.
A rush of elation washes over me. “Oh wow, it’s barely changed at all.” I search the other side of the clearing for the juniper tree. It has twisty limbs, I remember—
My gaze catches on an overgrown area on the far side of the clearing. A branch sticking out looks familiar, so I head toward it.
FORTY-SEVEN
FAELAN
I burst through the French doors of Marius’s house. Screams fill the air around me, coming from upstairs. Two females, from the sound of it.
I take the stairs two at a time, pulling out my dagger. When I get to the landing, I slow, trying to catch a scent in the air that might tell me what I’m walking into. But I don’t sense anything odd or off. There’s soap and old perfume. One of the females is Aelia, I think. The other is a human, likely the mother, but it could be one of the servants.
I move along the hallway, aware now that the arguing is coming from Aelia’s room. I pause outside the door, peek through the crack, and push the door open while trying to stay back.
My thundering heart stops.
Marius is on his hands and knees on the floor, the hilt of a dagger sticking out of his back. He’s gasping, gagging, trying to reach out for someone, trying to speak, but he can’t. Blood is coming from his ears, his nose, his lips, dripping onto the wood floor.
Aelia is shoving a woman against the wall—the wife, Barbara. She sobs, then screams in her mother’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”
The human looks confused. She’s shaking her head, but she’s not fighting back. “It was to help him,” she says. “He was sick. I was told to put the medicine in him.”
“It wasn’t medicine, bitch! It was a poisoned dagger!” Aelia shoves her hard and turns to her father, crumpling beside him. “Oh, gods, oh, Daddy, what do I do, goddess help me.”
I rush in as she’s reaching to touch the hilt. I pull her hand away. “No,” I say, “it’s cursed, like the ring.” I watch my mentor struggling to move, to speak, my mind frozen in horror. His eyes find mine, and tears spill from them.
“What’s happening, Faelan?” Aelia grips me. “Stop it, please make it stop.”
“I can’t,” I whisper. Rage unfurls in my gut as she clings to me, shaking, desperate. I should’ve moved faster. Only minutes earlier and I could’ve stopped it, seconds faster and he’d have been spared. “We’ll fix this. Don’t be afraid.” I hold her to me as we watch him convulse, his features contorting.
The poison is filling his skin now, spreading out, weaving its black web through his veins. He goes still, black ooze slipping from his mouth in a thin string. He collapses to the side, eyes wide, face contorted in pain—am I truly seeing this?
Aelia clutches me as we watch her father disappear inside himself.
Barbara just keeps talking, telling us that it’ll help in a second. It’s got medicine on it, the dagger, she was told it would fix him. She’s obviously been severely glamoured—she’s in some kind of trance, barely aware that her husband is on the floor in front of her.
After a moment, I grab a scarf off one of the mirrors and gag her. Then I pull her to the closet and shove her in, blocking the door with a chair from the vanity.
It’s either that or I cut out her heart. The way I feel right now, I’m barely sane enough not to kill her. Even though I don’t think she knew what she was doing.
Aelia sniffs, like she’s trying to collect herself. “We can’t just leave him here,” she says. “What do we do?”
“He’ll need to be put somewhere until we can get the antidote.”
“Maybe his study? It has a view of the lagoon. I think he’d like that best.” She looks up at me, her cheeks glistening with tears. “I can’t take the knife out. Will you do it?”
“Yeah,” I say, but the word barely emerges. I stare down at my mentor, not sure what to do exactly. As if I were a newblood all over again. “We need to call Cias. Hopefully, he can start making the antidote right away.” Marius will be in excruciating agony as long as he is under.
I kneel beside him, pull off my shirt, and use it to grip the dagger’s hilt. I slide it out, my gut rising, thinking of who this is, how strong he is, how helpless he’s become, in seconds.
I should have been here to stop it.
I wrap the dagger in my shirt. Aelia helps me move Marius into his study and lay him out on the long window seat. She sits beside her dad, taking his hand in hers, and I go to the safe, locking away the cursed dagger.
Looking at them tears me in two, knowing I can’t stay. I have to get back to Sage. But how can I leave Aelia alone like this?
I step into the hall and pull out my phone, tapping in James’s number.
“Everything okay?” he asks, his voice tense.
“I need you to come back to the Cottages right away. Aelia needs you.”
“What is it?”
I don’t know how to say it. “Just come.”
Back in the room, Aelia is still sitting beside her father, both of them framed by the picture window. “I have to go,” I say.
Aelia turns slowly, her eyes lost. “What?”