Dorian.
I scrabbled at the mud beneath me. My left shoulder cried out. “Let me go.”
His hands didn’t move; they were two vise grips on me. “If I let you go, you’re dead.”
The ferocity of the dream was still in me, the feeling of being overpowered. I struggled against his hold. “You bastard?—”
“Curse me. Hate me.” His fingers dug in, pressing me into the water. “I’m not letting you die here.”
My struggling slowed, but my heart didn’t. Where were we? Was this some new fae torture? My eyes went on darting, seeking familiarity, until they froze.
Across the pond, on the far bank, stood the spiritstag.
It was, as ever, impossible to look at—and impossible to look away from.
I stilled. All fight left me; in place of it, I could only stare. Awe expanded my chest.
Dorian’s hands squeezed my shoulders. I sensed him getting to his knees on the bank behind me. His breath touched my ear. “You must beseech it,” he said. “Beseech it for healing.”
My voice was raw and thin. My eyes didn’t leave the stag. “Healing?” I echoed.
“Yes.” Dorian sounded wrecked, desperate. “You used too much magic, Eury.”
Too much? No, I’d used just enough. Beneath the water, my body wasn’t blackened like Rhiannon’s. It wasn’t?—
I raised my good hand. As it neared the water’s surface and the moonlight gleamed over it, I sucked air in. Dark veins pulsed over my hand and forearm. Unseelie magic.
That wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. I’d barely touched the magic.
“No,” I said. “Ididn’t?—”
“It doesn’t feel that way when you’re in its thrall,” Dorian whispered. “It feels wonderful. Intoxicating.”
A flash of Rhiannon’s face in the storm appeared before me. Her wild eye, the sclera tar-black. Her face eaten by the acid. Another flash: of the magic pouring off me, carried up into the torrent.
Yes. Yes, it had felt like that.
Wouldn’t I have seen it on myself? Perhaps, if I had been looking. But I hadn’t been. I’d only been full of need.
Need to kill her.
Need to survive.
Need to win.
I stared at my hand. The fingers looked like they belonged to someone else. Like the hand my mother had described seeing from under a guard-drawn cart when she was a girl. “Dorian…”
His hand came around and angled my chin up until I had the stag in view again. His fingers were rough and unyielding. “Beseech it.Please, Eury. I can’t see you become—” His voice cut off; he couldn’t finish.
Ice flowed down my spine. My chest constricted until I took only shallow breaths.
I couldn’t become one of those things. Not after what they’d done to my mother, Theo, Elisabet, all those people I’d known all my life.
My gaze sharpened on the spiritstag. Before I could think of what to say, its voice resonated inside my head.
He is wrong, Eurydice Waters.
I breathed out. The voice was like balm on my ears.
