If you can call whatever the hell this is alive.
Their eyes are wide open, but with no apparent awareness of their surroundings. Not one of them seems to notice I’m there, not even as I pass by their beds. Their expressions all remain the same: in joyous, twisted awe. As if they’ve just glimpsed something beautiful—or something terrifying.
Something they would crawl for. Something they would die for.
I’ve never seen people so malnourished, so shockingly thin and emaciated that their cheekbones are sharp as blades. If I lifted those blankets, I could count their ribs. And their wrists . . . god, how delicate those are. How easily breakable. I can’t help but compare the visible bones of their hands to fragile, injured bird wings; their fingers clench and unclench as if they were in pain.
Each human has a small faery settled on the pillow beside them, wings curled up around their bodies as if they were sleeping—but they’re not. Every faery is biting into their human victim’s throat hard enough to draw blood.
My instinct is to attack, to grab those faeries and kill them all. But when I step forward, a will-o’-the-wisp goes still, looks up at me, and pulls its teeth out of the woman’s skin.
She seizes. Her too-thin arms grasp at the air as if trying to bring the wisp back. She makes a sound in her throat, a howling desperate cry like an animal caught in a snare. Her limbs start to thrash so violently I fear she’ll hurt herself.
I back away, slamming my ankle painfully into a nearby bed. I barely notice. A gasp escapes my throat and I cover my mouth at what I see when the blanket slips back from her body.
Marks on her arms and legs—scars too large to be caused by a wisp. Thirty-six human teeth. Forty-six thin fangs. Over and over and over. Not a single part of her body spared.
Oh god. Oh god oh god.
The small faery’s eyes meet mine as it settles its tiny teeth into her neck once more. It sinks its fangs in so deep that blood drips down to her collarbone.
And the woman settles back against her pillows with a sigh—and a smile.
My stomach heaves. I turn, shove the door open, and get out of that cottage. Away from those beds, those faeries, those humans.
Don’t look back. Forget everything again. Forget what you saw.
My toe catches a rock, but I manage to catch myself before I hit the ground. Someone calls my name just as I cross the clearing and empty the contents of my stomach into the bushes.
I rest my elbows against my knees, my breathing ragged. I shut my eyes as if that could somehow erase the image of that woman, alive with the desire for only one thing: a faery’s bite.
Kiaran once told me about what happens when the fae take humans. They waste away from it and still yearn for more. When a sìthichean decides to take a human, it’s not something they walk away from. Not ever.
I’ve never seen it before. I’ve never seen a human so addicted to the touch of a fae that it’s all that keeps them alive. I’ve experienced death and war, but there was something about that—about seeing humans wither and fade in beds, the fight taken out of them.
They might as well be dead.
“Aileana.” Aithinne’s voice is gentle behind me. She steps closer. “Are you—”
“Don’t.” I put my hand out and wipe my mouth with my shirt. “Please. I need a moment.”
Her expression is patient, understanding. “Very well.”
I support my body against a nearby tree and ease down until I’m sitting on the cold soil. I still feel sick. So damn sick that I can’t even stand. It takes a few minutes for the nausea to pass, for me to speak.
“I want you to tell me the truth,” I say, my voice flat, mechanical. “No faery half-lies. No riddles. Are those . . .” I swallow hard, because the words stick in my mouth. “Are those Kiaran’s victims?”
Aithinne says nothing. Her silence speaks for her. But as if that weren’t bad enough, she finally answers with a whispered, “Aye.”
I press my palm to my mouth. The vow Kiaran made to a Falconer he fell in love with thousands of years ago prevents him from killing humans, or he’ll die himself. Once a faery makes a vow, he’s bound to it forever.
But as the Unseelie King, his purpose is death, destruction. Without feeding on human victims, he dies. When Kiaran asked Aithinne to remove the part of himself that required human victims, she was able to help him, but only at a price: She had to bind the powers that made him the monarch of the Unseelie Court.
When Sorcha murdered me, she used the Old Kingdom crystal to override Aithinne’s binding and restore his abilities. And this is Kiaran’s fate. To kill a human and die, or feed on them and leave them like this.
“Why are they here?” I press the heels of my hands to my eyes, as if that could help me forget. Why are you keeping them?
“Kadamach leaves them on the border between our territories,” she says, her voice low. “Derrick told me that putting a blade through them would be a mercy. Either that, or I could take those fae from their veins and let them fade, but I can’t. I just . . . I can’t.” I swear I see pity in her expression. Pity for me. “You can try to save him, but I don’t know if he’s your Kiaran MacKay anymore.”
He leaves them there. Like when the sluagh used to bring Aithinne Kiaran’s gifts. A cruel taunt, a message. I’m going to win.
No, he can’t be like that. He can’t. There has to be a part of him that can still be reached, that’s still worth saving.
So many feelings lance through me, each one worse than the memory of Sorcha’s blade through my chest. I should never have come to care for Kiaran. I should never have let myself. Because I can’t be objective. I can’t give up on him.
He’s in my heart and I’m in his, and I think it’s going to destroy us both.
As if she has read my mind, Aithinne kneels beside me and puts her hand over mine. “You have to understand,” she says. “The curse of becoming too attached to a human is something my kind learn from an early age, because we can’t help but be drawn to human beauty. To its fragility.”
She continues, “My mother always said that loving a human was like loving a butterfly. When I was young, she used to ask me the same question every day—‘What do humans do best?’—and she was never satisfied until I found the answer.”
“What was it?” I say, dreading what I’m about to hear.
Aithinne looks at me. “You die.”
Of course. The Cailleach would teach something like that. She once told me that she could forgive Aithinne for creating the Falconers—a line of human women gifted with a small amount of Aithinne’s power specifically to help kill her enemies—but she could never forgive Kiaran for loving a human.
One of them has to die, she’d said. It should be Kadamach.
My fingernails bite into my palms. A small pain to ease my thoughts. “Why are you telling me this?”