With a single clockwise sweep of her spear, the woman severed every reaching tendril before they could touch her.
The roots recoiled, blackening on contact with the air. The vines shriveled.
Faun dropped back to the floor, panting, one arm useless at her side.
The woman raised her spear again, the tip drifting between the three of us. Her voice when she spoke was just bones rattling, the words whispers.
“You are all unworthy.”
The spear’s point moved, moved, and settled on me. Directly at my throat. She stalked forward, her pale lips flat and impassive. The charcoal eyes deepened. The wolves stepped forward, tight at her sides.
I tightened my grip on the sword with my offhand; pain throbbed through my shoulder like a second heart.
I wouldn’t run. I wouldn’t kneel.
The woman’s spear lowered to strike.
“Don’t touch her.”
A wind kicked up, buffeting the spectral woman’s hair into her face. Not a natural wind. Too fast, too on point. This was magic.
A form stood at the threshold, framed by spray and rock. The crystal light caught his silhouette: battered, tense, unbroken.
Dorian.
He had found me.
No, no,no.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Dorian’s eyeswere fixed on me, wide and wild. His voice cracked with terror, desperation. He held his sword raised like it would do any good. Perhaps he didn’t know.
“Dorian,” I breathed. “No.”
The spectral woman turned, her hair blown high and wide by his windstorm. His magic wasn’t even powerful enough to set her off balance, to give her a moment’s pause. Her lips parted; a raspy ululation poured from her throat. She pointed at him.
Both wolves spun toward him. They were in motion before I could react.
They charged, leapt, and brought him down together, slamming him into stone. The three became a writhing mass on the ground.
The sight was a knife to my gut. Sudden, deep, irrevocable. Worse than watching Isa the nurse crushed by her own kingdom’s wall. More painful than finding a crater where my childhood home had stood.
This was my partner being torn apart. And I was helpless to stop it.
I was hardly aware of the scream at first. It started low in my belly, a sweep of molten heat. It roiled and writhed and forced itsway up my esophagus and into my throat. It curled my fingers, sent electricity up my arms and into my chest, neck, and face.
When it tore free from me, it wasn’t human. It didn’t belong to me.
Everything changed.
The waterfall, which had followed the pull of gravity a breath ago, shifted course. The water sheared sideways, jetted into the cave. The spectral woman was thrown from her feet and blasted into the cave’s wall, the horse screaming as the torrent swept it alongside her. The water poured over Dorian and the wolves, their bodies flung apart by the flood.
The fae and her horse were off their feet. The wolves were swept away toward the river beyond. The water flowed and flowed, jetting as though its course naturally took it into this cave.
I ran out of air. The scream stopped. I fell to my knees and dropped my sword with a hard clang.
Immediately, the waterfall returned to its normal flow straight down into the pool as though it had never altered. The water in the cave settled, washing over the rocks until only rivulets trickled over the floor.
