I could curl up in a ball in the snow and let go. Give in to the fuzzy feeling in my head, close my eyes, and sleep.
But no, if I did that, what would happen to Rianna? To Ms. B? The garden gnome? No, I had to get up. To do . . . something.
Thoughts were getting harder to string into coherent ideas. I needed to stop Ryese. I needed the queen to grant me a tie to Faerie. I needed to protect Falin. I needed to make Faerie stop screaming. . . .
That last one made me stop. The Deaths were screaming. Some of the gathered fae—those not frozen in shock—were screaming. But Faerie itself wasn’t, was it?
Not exactly, but it was in pain. I could feel it, sense the pain in unraveling layers of reality.
The dart.
I could feel the trail it had sliced through Faerie. More than that, I could feel the disturbance it still made, like a festering wound, blistering reality around it. The blowgun Ryese had smuggled the iron into Faerie in must have had some hard-core spells on it, because the iron hadn’t been doing this much damage before. Now the layers of reality felt like they were withering.
I twisted, looking for the projectile, and beside me, the queen sucked in a breath.
“Planeweaver, what? No. Someone send for a healer.” She reached for me, but her hand stopped before she touched the bare skin on my shoulder.
Falin stepped closer, his eyes wide, fear reflecting in his gaze. Then his jaw clenched and he whirled around, marching through the huddled fae and shoving them aside.
I couldn’t see the graze the dart had cut across my back, but it was barely bleeding, and couldn’t have been much more than a scratch. Still, I twisted, trying see what they saw. Unfortunately, I could. Gray tendrils spread under my skin, crawling over my shoulder.
Iron poisoning.
I stared at the graying skin. The third Death, the one that wasn’t yelling, knelt beside me.
“It’s time, Alex,” he said, holding out his hand.
I looked from him to my shoulder and then back. “You’re still not real.”
With that, I concentrated on searching for the dart again. The blisters in reality were right in front of me. It had to be in that snowdrift.
Behind me, I heard a loud yelp, and I twisted around in time to see Falin’s hand clasp around the throat of a fae. He hauled the fae off the ground, one-handed, and the fae’s hood fall back to reveal Ryese’s crystalline hair.
“Don’t kill him, my knight,” the queen said, an edge of panic in her voice as she pushed herself out of the snow. “I killed him once already today. I can’t see it again.”
Rational or not, desperate or not, a command was a command, and Falin’s killing dagger thrust stopped, inches from Ryese’s chest. The man in his arms sagged, a smug smile slithering across Ryese’s face. Oh no, he wasn’t just walking away from this.
I thrust my hand into the snowdrift, searching. More than the feel of something harder than snow, it was the sudden stabbing pain that rushed down my fingers, even through my gloves, that told me I’d found the dart. Trying to insulate it with inches of snow, I scooped it out.
The dart looked innocuous enough. Just a bit of thin, dull metal no longer than my pinkie nail. But it was far from harmless. If Ryese had managed a clean shot at the queen, and she had died, the small dart could have easily been missed, the blame for her unknown cause of death easily falling on her feared bloody hands.
Patting it into the center of a small snowball like a deadly core, I climbed to my feet. Then I had to wait a moment as my vision swam. I braced my feet, trying to avoid crashing back to my butt in the snow. Deep breath. Two.
“Falin,” I yelled.
He stopped, looking up from where he was in the process of dragging Ryese in front of the queen. The slighter man thrashed in Falin’s grasp, the smugness now absent from his face as more and more bloody, dead versions of himself appeared around the queen. For her part, the queen seemed to have forgotten everything but the multiplying bodies, her distress feeding the drug and hallucinations.
“Catch,” I yelled, tossing the snowball to Falin as gently as I could. It still crumbled as he caught it, but the dart remained cushioned in a small layer of snow.
I’d been working without a plan, thinking only that the dart needed to get back inside the dampening effect of the blowgun.
Falin had other ideas.
He drove the thin bit of metal into Ryese’s palm. The other fae screamed, the sound a high-pitched cry of pain and fear.