I get exactly what he’s telling me.
Obey—or end up like her.
My mouth wobbles as, slowly, my eyelids sink shut. The burn of the torchlight sears into my eyelids, even closed over, but the sight of her bloody pretzel body is shut out for the briefest moment.
The fae rattles me, hard, and his hand shifts from my neck to fist in my hair.
A scream claws out of me.
My hands throw back to the strength of his wrist, but it doesn’t stop him.
He tugs my head back, strands pulling from my scalp. The tone of his command is dark, “Look.”
My lashes flutter over tears, but I do as he says, I lift my gaze—and I look at Emily.
Like before the winter fae shot her at close range with buckshot, her limbs were bent and twisted, and she was pretzeled in the net.
But now, her kneecap is blasted open.
The gun that lies across her chest must’ve gone off in the panic, because half of her fucking brains are out of her skull.
Every other shuddered breath, my eyes glaze again, a refill of fresh tears, before I blink and she clears once more.
Each time she does, it’s somehow worse.
Her jaw hangs aside, tipped into the slick black net, almost like it’s mangled.
There are holes all over her face, a cheek that is torn and shredded, an eyeball that looks like it erupted from the inside.
My breaths have turned so ragged that they are groans now, guttural and laced with the rising nausea.
My lips shudder with the sobs starting to grate through me, and it’s only now that his hand slips out of my hair.
I stagger with the release, stumbling right into the hood of the car.
My hands slap down, hard, and the waning strength of my arms barely holds me up as I fight off the nausea stirring and stirring in my stomach.
The retch that jolts through me is violent, and my legs waver beneath me. A second one strikes, this one burning with bile, before I sink onto the hood—and just flop.
The icy metal presses against my cheek, but I hardly feel it through the thudding in my head, the aches smearing my back,the tightness of my lungs… And I wonder, faintly, if I can survive this.
My mind is already unravelling.
I stare, now, at the rainfall of blood, watching it slow down, turn into drops and strings, but I don’t move.
I don’t think I can.
Not until the clatter of plastic and metal comes from behind me and, slowly, I struggle to turn myself around.
My backpack scrapes over the hood of the car as I turn to the fae warrior.
He’s crouched, picking through the fallen items from my pockets that litter the road. He flicks aside a lighter, gum, a packet of antihistamines before he reaches for the inhaler.
He drags it over the ice towards him, then lifts it—and studies it for a moment.
My lashes are lowering with the fatigue kneading into me, the gradual softening of my muscles.
Something’s wrong.
