“Liah?” I bolted upright, my eyes darting around. I’d grabbed her just before I’d been pulled back. Where was she? Why wasn’t she here?
I glanced down at my hand, still feeling my fingers gripping hers. I screamed as I saw what I clutched in my fingers.
A pretty hand cut off just above the wrist in a bloody stump.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BLAKE
“No!” I threw Liah’s hand across the room. It slammed against a bookshelf and slid down to the floor, leaving a trail of green fae blood along the gilded spines of Corbin’s beloved magic books.
“What the hell is that?” Maeve moved to look at it.
I grabbed her hand. “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”
Flynn, however, I wasn’t going to save. He bent down and picked up Liah’s hand, then shrieked as he dropped it again. “It’s a fecking hand!”
“Yes, it’s a fecking hand.” I cursed my stupidity. I’d tried to save Liah and all I’d done was maim her horribly and left her in the hands of the fae. In the pain of the nightmare, I’d completely forgotten about the wards around the castle. They’d repelled Liah when I tried to pull her in, slicing off her hand when the dream closed around me.
Without her hand, Liah couldn’t draw her bow. If she was even still alive, she was going to curse me so fucking bad.
“Whose hand is it?” Maeve asked, touching my wrists as if to reassure herself I still had both of mine. The touch mademy chest ache for no reason. “Blake, you need to explain what happened.”
My heart sank. I folded my arms. “What happened is that I found someone I could trust and she gave me valuable information and then I accidentally ripped her hand off. But at least I know what your father dearest is planning to do. He’s making a blood sacrifice to the unhallowed ones to raise the Slaugh.”
Flynn’s face paled, but Maeve squeezed my wrist. “What is this Slaugh? Corbin mentioned it once but I thought it was a legend.”
“The Slaugh are the fairy host – resurrected spirits of the recently departed, twisted and corrupted by fae magic. They ride over the countryside on skeletal horses, a black storm of chaos and hatred, devouring everything in their path. The last time the Slaugh rode on earth was the Black Death. And now…” I stared at Liah’s limp hand lying on the carpet, and a shudder ran through my body. “Now they’re coming to us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MAEVE
“Every delicious mouthful of this has been worth the wait,” Blake gushed between bites, cradling his first-ever plate of curry in his hands. He seemed to have recovered from the shock of severing his friend’s hand.
The coffee table in the library contained stacks of unopened takeout containers. None of the rest of us felt like eating, especially not after Corbin and Rowan had returned about an hour ago, just in time to see the grisly evidence of Blake’s dream walk lying on the library floor. Corbin still wouldn’t say where he’d been – and Rowan shook his head sadly when I asked him – but both of them had a haunted look in their eyes. Unfortunately, we couldn’t give them the good news they so desperately needed.
“Found it.” Corbin laid one of the Briarwood grimoires flat on the desk, holding down the edges with book weights. Unlike the volume Flynn took to the ritual, this one didn’t have an arrow hole through the parchment to mar the horror between the pages.
The particular page we were looking at was filled with an illustration. In the bottom left corner, villagers cowered in terrorinside their homes. From the top right, a dark swirl of black clouds, skeletal limbs, and cloaked figures whirling swords, maces, and daggers descended upon them. As they flew down, they razed the village church, the fields of wheat, and the tiny houses in their neat little rows. Spirits with haunted faces rose from their graves to join the host, swelling their ranks.
In their wake, they left mounds of dead, disembowelled, dismembered bodies. The once-living mutilated by their own beloved dead. A date in the bottom corner read 1351.
The final year of the Black Death.
“Shite.” Not even Flynn had something smart to say. All eight of us crowded around the table, staring in horror at what might be our future. The only other person to make a sound was Connor, who gurgled happily as he teethed on a silicone ring.
“How do we stop this?” I breathed.
Corbin slumped against the desk. “I don’t know that we can.”
I tore my gaze from the book to look at Corbin. There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen in him before. Defeat.
“There’s got to be a way.”
“Nothing in this library will tell us how to stop the Slaugh,” Corbin explained. “According to this, they were only contained again because they gorged themselves so fully on the blood and souls of the dead that they became stupefied, and beasts of hell managed to tear them from the earth and drag them into their fiery depths. By then sixty percent of Europe’s entire population were dead. We can’t afford to wait for the ‘beasts of hell’ to sort their shit out.”
They killed sixty per cent of all people on earth.That number was so enormous, that it had practically no meaning. I tried to ignore all the words that gave me empirical problems, likesoulsandfiery depthsandbeasts of hell. I could deal with my scepticism later. “So how do we stop them before they get to the raising the souls of the dead stage? Isn’t that what this coven didtwenty-one years ago, stopped the fae before they could begin the Slaugh?”
