The rock fall had been his doing? So, this was real. All of this was real. And he was wrapped in illusion. “What do you want, Dreamweaver?”
He took my hand in his—the touch so gentle I could pretend it meant something—and pressed it to his chest. “Mother’s gift was not enough.”
His heartbeat drummed against my palm, and inside, tek ticked. Mab’s magic hadn’t cured him. He still had his human-made metal heart.
Shouts erupted around me, but all I could see was his terrible beauty, his piercing eyes, his razor-sharp smile. I saw it all, and I saw the truth behind it. The fae weren’t beautiful. They were monsters. They might have raised me and I might have spent my entire life begging them to let me love them, but that life was over. That nothing girl was gone.
I stretched onto my tiptoes and brushed my lips against his. “I’ll remove your heart, Prince.”
With his hand on mine, our wrists pressed together, I felt the shape of the dagger hidden inside his bracer. His mouth brushed against mine, his breath cool on my tongue. I remembered his taste, his poison.
With my left hand, I snatched the blade free—the same dagger he had slashed across Kellee’s neck—and thrust it forward. The blade punched into his chest. Magic burst, and his illusion collapsed. He roared and tore away, stumbling over Natalie’s body and into the crowd of stunned onlookers.
“They see you now,” I whispered.
Blood dribbled down his chest and dripped around him. I had missed his heart, but that didn’t matter. I had never seen anything so satisfying. I wanted more.
Eledan’s face twisted into a snarl. He snagged the gazes of the two people nearest him and barked, “You. Humans. Stop her. Don’t kill her.” He swayed and looked down, noticing the blood coating his hands.
The two onlookers—drenched in his magic—charged. I spun away from the first, sinking an elbow into his neck to drop him, and kicked the legs out from under the second.
“I see you now,” I called to him. “I see you, and I will ruin you like I promised I would.”
Shouts rolled in from behind me. More people were coming.
“Stay back!” I barked, hoping they listened. He would kill them.
Eledan straightened and pulled his top lip back in a snarl. “You’re nothing, Messenger.”
I eyed his chest and twisted the dagger in the air. Blood coated my hand and ran down my arm. “Come close and I will carve out your heart for you. Isn’t that what you want?”
His gaze skipped behind me, and whatever he saw gave him pause. He didn’t want me dead, and the situation was rapidly spiraling out of his control. This wasn’t the place for us to dance. We both knew it.
He turned and ran.
“Don’t,” I warned those who started after him. They saw the blood on the dagger, saw the raw intensity on my face, and hung back. “You won’t catch him.” But I would.
Their faces turned to me. Anger and fear blazed in the eyes of the young and old. They weren’t soldiers. Eledan would toss them aside the way his kind did with saru. But I wasn’t just saru. I wasn’t just a messenger. I had one more trick up my sleeve.
I breathed in, denying the itch of insanity its hold, and addressed them all. “There’s a fae among you. The Dreamweaver.” Gasps broke the quiet. “Stay together. If anyone starts acting out of character, restrain them. Nobody goes anywhere alone.”
Fearful shouts rose up. “We have to run.” “Can’t fight him.” “He’ll kill us!”
He might. “No!” I barked. “Stay calm. Stay close. I will stop him.” His blood, stark against the steel of the stolen dagger, sold my argument for me. I lifted it, let them get a good look at the dagger, at me. It was real, so damn real. And there would be more fae blood spilled. A river of it. “I’m your messenger, and I promise I will end all of this.”
The crowd huddled closer, Natalie’s body between them and me. Beside her lay the discarded comms unit. I picked it up, ignoring the wary but hopeful glances flicking over me.
“Kesh, he’s here!” Kellee said. “You need to get off Calicto—”
“No. I need to kill a prince, and you, Marshal, are going to help me.”
Chapter 26
That fae prick is somewhere in the mines. He won’t stray far from the unmapped section where the well is.” The marshal—bloody and racked with too many emotions for me to decipher—paced back and forth in a room that had once been a monitoring station. Some of the cameras still worked, relaying live images from the inhabited sections of the mine. Talen monitored the screens, his hood up to conceal his faeness, while Kellee seethed behind him.
It took a day to dig out Kellee and the rest of the survivors, during which time I walked all the tunnels and shafts, leaving no corner unexplored. I had found no traces of Eledan.
“I knew…” Kellee muttered. “I knew something was wrong. That section of mine should never have collapsed.”
“It’s done.” I watched the screens, searching for anything suspicious among the displaced miners while keeping Kellee in the corner of my eye. “He wants me, and to get to me he’ll use anything he thinks I care about.” I didn’t look up, but I sensed Kellee abruptly stop pacing.
“So, whatever you care about, we use it as bait,” Kellee suggested, apparently volunteering. He just didn’t know it.
Eledan had ensured, during the long nights of loneliness when he had pretended to soothe me to sleep, that I cared for the marshal. I despised how easily he had suckered me. The thought alone twisted my insides. But that didn’t change the fact I did care for Kellee, even though I hardly knew him.
Talen looked my way, reading my expression without me having to say the words.
Kellee noticed our shared glances. “What is it?”
“Marshal Kellee.” Talen turned the chair to face Kellee. “You are her weakness. He uses you against her. Why do you think it was your name she called out while we worked to bring her back from the madness?”
“I…” the marshal stammered. He looked at me, and then quickly darted his gaze away.
I leaned back against the monitoring consoles and folded my arms. “He went to a lot of effort to use you, or my knowledge of you, against me.”
Kellee laughed, actually laughed. It was so unexpected I couldn’t hide my surprise. “You know that wasn’t real,” Kellee scoffed.
My feelings were a joke now? “It was to me.”
“Whatever it was or wasn’t,” Talen interrupted, “he will use you or Kesh’s awareness of you to pull her back in. We need to set up the trap on our terms.”
Kellee dropped into a chair and hunched forward, sinking his fingers into his hair. He stayed that way—shoulders locked—long enough for me to worry. His friend had died, and he hadn’t once mentioned her. I’d seen him angry, seen him barely restrained, but this was different. He was hurting, and I couldn’t help him. It was made worse by the fact I had watched Eledan kill Natalie and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop him.
“He needs the tek removed.” I sighed and rubbed at the ache building at my temples. “The fae won’t accept him if they know he has human tek around his heart. That’s why he’s here and why he’s desperate. He’s the returning prince. He’s supposed to be their hero. As Mab’s son, he’s in line for the crown, but the tek taints all that. He’ll do anything to have me remove it. I’ve already shown him that I’m willing to kill myself to protect you… He will use you, Kellee.”
Kellee lifted his head, dragging his hands down his face. His eyes were brighter, glassier, but he had packaged away the hurt. “All right. We trap him. How?”
“Iron. There’s a ton of iron-based equipment just lying around. If there’s a furnace somewhere or another heat source, I want two collars forged.”