Blake passed me the red salt shaker from the kitchen and a red candle. “Cast the circle,” he said. “And do it quickly. No excessive chanting.”
“I couldn’t chant even if I wanted to,” I said, taking the objects. As soon as the candle rested in my hand, the flame flared to life. I glanced up at Arthur and he nodded to me.
I’d seen Corbin cast the circle before we took the sleeping draught, so I knew vaguely what to do. I walked counterclockwise around the sidhe, sprinkling the salt in a circle, keeping the candle held aloft. When I’d seen Corbin do this, he’d chanted something, but I didn’t know the words and I’d feel too self-conscious mumbling ‘abracadabra’ – the only vaguely magical word I knew. I felt silly enough sprinkling salt on the grass, and that was with the pulse of the magic clawing at my body, desperate to be free.
Instead, I focused on imagining magic pouring up from the earth, drawn to the line of salt I’d laid and the light of my candle. I pictured tendrils of energy seeping through the soil, rising and curling around each other to create a net of protection, sealingoff the sidhe and trapping the fae inside. Imagining stuff wasn’t really my forte – I was all about what could be observed and measured – but the image in my mindfeltreal.
My veins hummed and my body flushed with uncomfortable heat.Either it’s working, or I’m in super-early menopause.
When I returned to my spot, I set the candle down in the dry grass in front of me, hoping I wouldn’t accidentally kick it over. Too much of the grass had already burned tonight. Corbin started to speak but Blake interrupted him, starting a chant that was really just a string of guttural noises. The others took up the weird noises, and I tried my best to follow the pattern of sounds. I noticed Corbin’s voice didn’t join our grunting chorus until many beats later.
I watched Blake while we chanted, waiting for a cue to do something. He raised his arms, throwing his head back. I copied him, feeling even more self-conscious, as if the mean girls at my old high school were lurking in the woods at the edge of the field, ready with their camera phones to plaster pictures of Maeve Crawford getting her witch on all over social media.
Which was ridiculous, because there was no one around for miles except for my guys. But I was the one waving my arms in the air of my own volition, so it was by far not the most ridiculous thought that had occurred to me tonight.
The heat in my body pulsed as the magic threaded its way through my veins, starting in my toes and swimming upwards through my body, like a sickening wave rolling through me.That makes sense, I guess. Heat rises and follows the path of least resistance, so?—
I cried out as the heat burst from the end of my fingers, flaring up into the sky. Thunder cracked overhead, and the earth beneath me shuddered. The candle toppled over and the flame flickered out, plunging me briefly into total darkness.
My heart thudded in my ears. My breath came out in ragged gasps.What the hell just happened?
“You can’t do this to us,” a dark voice rasped in my ear, so close his breath tickled my earlobe. I froze.
A cold shiver ran down my back. I knew that voice.
Daigh.
My father.
He was here. He’d come through the portal.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CORBIN
Everything about this waswrong, wrong, wrong.
Ever since I’d woken up to see that Unseelie in the Great Hall, things had been arse-backwards. The air around his body was all fucked up – air responded to emotions, creating a thin aura around a person that I could pick up on. While Arthur’s burned with dry, choking heat and Rowan’s trembled with pre-storm tension, Blake’s fluctuated in heat and density and wind speed, as though it didn’t know it was supposed to be obeying the laws of this universe.
The fact that the others said this Blake was human and that he saved our asses shouldn’t matter – he was raised faeandhe was a traitor. History taught us that we couldn’t trust either of those.
But Maeve trusted him, and so I ignored my better judgement and let it slide, at least while he seemed to be giving us helpful information about Dora being compelled and about the fae king. But now he was standing insideourcircle, leading the ritual as though he’d been the one doing it all these years.
I could barely concentrate because the urge to punch him in the face was so strong.
I darted a glance at Rowan on my other side, and found his big eyes locked on me. His lips moved to repeat Blake’s chant, but his eyes said,are you okay?
Bloody hell, is it that obvious I hate this?
I had to keep my emotions in check. I wasn’t going to have the others seeing this weakness. Especially not Rowan. He’d already seen too much of that from me.
I nodded, sucked a breath through my teeth, and tried to grunt out Blake’s ridiculous chant. The others wouldn’t recognize the language, but I did – Common Brythonic, an ancient Celtic language, one of the oldest languages spoken in Britain, from which derived all our other native dialects – Welsh, Cornish, Cumbric, Breton, Pictish. The language survived now only in archaic linguistics departments at certain universities and among the Unseelie, where it was the tongue of choice.
It was a language of blood and chaos and brutality, and hearing it on the tongues of my closest friends – of Maeve – made my blood boil.
But the Brythonic did serve its purpose. The magic welled up inside me much quicker than usual, and as Blake raised his hand to the heavens, I followed him, pushing the energy out through my fingers, feeling it leave my body and arc across the sidhe, meeting the others with aBANGthat clattered my teeth.
The ground shook, rolling under my feet. I glanced at Rowan, but he was holding a long tuft of grass on the sidhe for support. He wasn’t doing it.
