She shot a dirty look at the middle child of ten years, Iris, who kept collecting snowflakes in her knitted gloves and getting her hands wet. But it was the youngest sister that Dahlia lectured the most. Clover, despite being eight years old, had yet to learnmanners. Her teeth chattered loudly in the frost, and steams of breath blew out of her pouted lips whenever she complained about the cold.
Someday, when they visited the King of Gyldan, Clover would have to learn how to make a proper impression with human royalty. The winter nights were bitter, but if they secured a spot in his council, their new, luxurious lives would become the envy of the other nymphs.
Still, an unspoken silence cloaked the three of them like a patch of ice fog. A new faerie meant the king’s attention would be further divided. Already the three sisters together felt stifling.
They stood in the inner rows of the circle that gathered around their mother. Sweat slicked across her pale forehead as her back strewed over a bed of moss. She took refuge underneath a willow tree, where nymphs gathered a barrier of twigs and leaves, casting magic to prevent snow from falling inside. A few faeries brushed moist strands of hair away from her face. Others counted her deep breaths and extended glowing palms, keeping her warm.
The baby was coming soon. They could feel it in their bones like the chilling cold.
Dahlia’s heeled shoes tapped against the snow. She told herself the gesture was from impatience, not dread. Yet she couldn’t help but replay the past few months in her mind. She remembered the wails of pain and several times she watched their mother nearly collapse, tears streaking from bloodshot eyes. Their mother described the pain as a beast clawing its way out of her womb. She would squeeze out a few words before reeling forward and clutching her stomach, shrieking at the sharp kicks against her insides. On her worst days, when the three sisters clamped their handsover their ears to shut out her earsplitting wails, Clover would cry in fear that their mother was dying.
Tonight, her screeches made the saplings shiver around them. Dahlia had witnessed the birth of her two sisters to earn this intuition, but this birth felt different. A bitter wind nipped their ankles, like teeth scraping against flesh. She sensed the baby emerging soon.
With their mother’s final push, the head of the baby came into view. But rather than a round head of flesh, a pair of horns tore through their mother, ripping her apart.
The nymphs screamed. The baby had sickly skin, green as old spinach. Its cries pierced their ears, a wail that turned garbled as it began choking on their mother’s blood. Sharp nails grew from tiny fingers, gnarled and twisted like hooks. The sisters recoiled in disgust as the baby slithered out of their mother, who remained limp in her bed of dead leaves, the frail fragments of her life draining.
Dahlia jumped forward and thrust her open palms to the creature. Moss slipped away from the ground like melting ice. The barrier of twigs and leaves flew toward the monster and stacked itself into a makeshift cage. The other faeries dragged their mother’s limp body away from the creature, but she had already taken her last breath, a life lost for a monstrous one. The stench of death and life mixed together in unholy matrimony.
Inside the cage, the newborn’s screeching sounded like knives scratching against plates, a sound so horrible that Dahlia wanted to scream to drown them out. She saw Iris curled beside a tree trunk to retch the contents of her stomach, while Clover fell to her knees, crying until her face turned red in the snow.
Slowly, Dahlia paced toward the cage, where the creature’s wailing turned hoarse with each passing minute. She lookedcloser beyond the foliage of dead leaves. Blood and sweat slicked over the baby’s green skin. Black horns protruded from its temple, the same ones that had torn apart their mother.
The faeries recoiled upon sight of the grotesque creature, for their mother had not given birth to a baby sister.
She had spawned a monster.
CHAPTER 9
THE MONSTER STOOD at least twenty feet tall, the color of rotten grapes washed over its scales. Long claws scraped against the ice with a sickening sound that made Corin clamp her ears after getting out of the lake. A bloodred gem in the dragon’s chest flickered in the corner of her vision. Inside swirled a cloudy liquid, the familiar scent of iron wafting through the air. She tried to pinpoint where she remembered the smell, from but everything else was too foreign. The colossal creature flickered its forked tongue between its teeth, as if anticipating the taste of her flesh.
Instead of Corin’s direction, the dragon charged toward where Elly was draped over a tree and snatched the girl in its mouth. Her body dangled in the air, the collar of her shirt barely held within the monster’s bared teeth. She shrieked Corin’s name, and Corin could feel it then, the crack in her heart, like ice breaking apart the lake.
Corin chased after them by cutting into the snowy path, but with each flap of the dragon’s wings, gusts of wind pushed her backward. She dove to the ground to stay flat and grip mounds of snow for leverage. She wanted to scream for Elly, but her voice wastoo muffled by the snowstorm, her body as insignificant as an ant in a sheet of white.
No,Corin thought fiercely. She’d just found her sister. She would not lose her again. She sprinted forward and leapt off the slope, hurdling into the air at the same time the dragon took flight off the hill. Her body smashed against the monster’s tail. A pained gasp escaped her lungs as pain rippled across her abdomen. Her stubbornness had to override the pain as she forced her arms to wrap around the tail’s spikes and cling on tight.
The wind howled as they soared several feet above the trees. A fierce blizzard washed the world in white. Corin locked her elbows and crawled over the monster’s scales to get closer to Elly, who was still trapped in the dragon’s mouth. She grunted from the ice pellets raining on her face, pushing forward as if it didn’t feel like a hundred tiny daggers were stabbing into her skin. What she wasn’t prepared for was the creature circling around a jagged mountain, swiveling its back, and smashing her body against the rocks.
Sharp gravel tore through Corin’s skin. She screamed as she let go.
“No!”
She barely caught onto the end of the dragon’s wing, her body flailing in the snowstorm. A blast of wind turned over her torso. A sharp rock nested itself at her side, stuck like a knife. She felt like she was being split open. Even as she forced her legs to latch onto the dragon’s wing, her arms burned as she pulled up the rest of her weight.
The pain was too much. One of her hands slipped, and soon the other one would follow. She couldn’t let this be the end. She’d lost too much, and if she were to fall, she’d take everything down with her.
Her free hand pulled the rock from her side and plunged thejagged end into the dragon’s flesh. The stone punctured the monster’s wing like a stake. The dragon emitted a wounded screech and dove into the peak of a mountain. The world turned upside down as they toppled into the snow. Panic forced Corin to roll herself upright and locate Elly’s collapsed figure at the edge of the cliff.
“El!”
Her shout only caught the dragon’s attention as it whirled its head in Corin’s direction. The black slits of its eyes thinned as it stomped closer. She dove into the snow, frantically digging for another sharp rock to use. Her palm brushed against something hard as the snow uncovered a hilt instead.
She blinked in disbelief. The hilt was not the leather-skin grip of an old dagger, but a crescent-shaped pommel with a blade the length of her torso. Snow slipped off the steel, and its shiny reflection showed her own bewildered expression, a pair of widened black eyes that could not believe she’d stumbled across a warrior’s sword.
Both her hands attempted to lift the weapon, but the blade was so heavy it strained her arms. She swung with her full body weight and stumbled forward. The movement was slow and clumsy, giving plenty time for the dragon to rear its neck and dodge. The creature snapped its jaw forward and towered over her. She choked under its hot breaths, her skin burning from sparks that flickered from its mouth.
The bloodred gem on its chest glowed, and there it was again, the familiar scent of iron. Corin stared at the fork-shaped tongue that slithered over its teeth, the mouth that opened so wide she could have disappeared in one breath. She braced for the tear of flesh, the plunge of teeth.
