The fae lunges sideways.
Wood explodes. Vines snap like whips. The antlers tear free in a shower of splinters and broken branches. I stumble backward, my bow coming up, hands shaking so badly I can barely hold the arrow in place.
Not that it matters.
Two strides. That’s all it takes. Two strides and it’s on me so fast I don’t even have the chance to run. One heartbeat it’s tangled in the branches, the next it’s right there, towering over me, so close I can see the individual strands of its matted hair, the fine grain of its skin, and the cold fury blazing in those strange eyes.
Long fingers lock around my wrist and twist. Pain shoots up my arm, and I cry out. My bow clatters to the forest floor, and before I can stop it, the fae rips the leather strap holding my quiver in place like it’s nothing. It falls to the ground, arrows spilling free. I open my mouth to scream, and its other hand clamps over my face.
Fingers seal my lips. A palm crushes against my nose. The fae spins me around and hauls me back against its chest, onearm locking around my ribs, lifting me until my boots leave the ground. Its body is hard against my back, all bone and muscle with no give at all.
I can’t breathe!
Panic explodes through me. I claw at the hand over my face. I kick backward. The arm around my stomach tightens. My lungs scream for air. Black spots swim at the edge of my vision, crowding inward.
I’m going to die. Right here. Right now. Suffocated by the thing I came here to kill.
The hand over my face shifts slightly. Just enough to let air rush in through my nose. I suck it down in desperate, shuddering gasps.
Then the world spins as the fae tosses me over its shoulder and starts to move.
It carries me through the forest like I weigh nothing at all.
I grab for a tree trunk as we pass close to it. My fingers scrape bark, find a grip, and the fae rips me away so hard my arm feels like it’s tearing from the shoulder socket. My fingers are torn free, taking skin with them, and I’m dragged onward.
I try to scream. I put everything I have into it, filling my lungs with as much air as I can. And then my stomach bounceshardagainst its shoulder, winding me, and the sound that escapes is pathetic, a muffled whimper.
This is how I die.
The thought cuts through my panic with a horrible clarity. I’m going to be dragged into the forest by this thing I came to kill, and no one will ever find my body. My father will wait for me at dinner tonight, and I won’t come.
I thrash wildly, fueled by grief and terror, and a desperate animal need to survive. I throw my elbow back, aiming for the back of its head, and I’m rewarded with a grunt—the first soundit’s made since those two words—but its grip doesn’t loosen. I rake my nails down its arm, tearing at its skin.
It stops moving.
Hope flares in my chest?—
It spins me around and slams my back into a tree.
The impact drives every whisper of air from my lungs. My spine hits bark. My head snaps back. The world goes white, then black, then white again, and when my vision finally clears, I’m pinned against the trunk with the fae’s hand clamped over my mouth again, my feet dangling uselessly in the air, and its face inches from mine.
That burning gaze bores into me.
Up close, its face is even more alien. The angles are too sharp, the proportions subtly wrong in ways that make my eyes want to slide away. Its skin is smooth, with faint patterns beneath the surface—whorls and spirals like the grain of ancient wood or the veins of a leaf. The iron collar around its throat is thick and dark, so tight that it’s rubbed the flesh beneath it until it’s raw and weeping.
But it’s the expression on its face that stops my heart.
Hatred. Pure, burning, bottomless hatred. I can see it in the set of its jaw, the flare of its nostrils, the way its eyes have narrowed to slits. Every line of its body is rigid with it.
It wants to kill me. Not just hurt me.Killme. It wants to make me suffer, make me scream, and it’s taking every ounce of its will to hold back.
Part of my brain, the ancient, wordless part that knows what a predator looks like, is screaming at me to stop moving. Stop fighting. Play dead. Do whatever it takes to survive.
The fae stares at me for a long, terrible moment. My heart slams against my ribs. My breathing is loud in the silence of the forest. Tears spill from my eyes.
I don’t want to die.
Then the fae’s head turns and tilts slightly. A second later, I hear it too. Voices, distant but unmistakable. My name, carried on the air.
