I collapse to my knees as the magic releases me, gasping for air that tastes like copper and smoke. My skin is on fire. My bones feel like they’ve been rearranged and put back wrong. There’s blood in my mouth. I must have bitten my tongue. And my hands won’t stop shaking.
Morrigan kneels outside the circle. Her silver eyes hold something I’ve never seen before.
Fear.
That’s...not reassuring. When the goddess of death and battle looks scared, you know you’re properly fucked.
“Ash.” Her voice is gentle now. Maternal. The voice she probably used when I was three years old and crying in a hammock beneath stars she was naming just for me. “The glamour must come off. Do you understand? It must. If you face the courts with it still clinging to your essence?—”
“Then take it off yourself.” I spit blood onto the salt. “Oh wait. You can’t. Because it’s mine now.”
“I wove it into you as an infant.” She presses her hand against the barrier, and I see her fingers tremble. The Morrigan. Trembling. “Twenty-eight years of survival magic, designed to make you forget what you are. I thought, I was certain I could unweave what I created.”
“You were wrong.”
“Yes.” The admission costs her something. “I was wrong.”
I laugh. It comes out cracked and wrong, more sob than sound, and it hurts my throat where the screaming scraped it raw. “So what now? You keep trying until you kill me? Because that worked out so well for the courts at my trial.”
“No.” She stands. Her expression hardens into something ancient and terrible. “We find another way.”
“Great. Fantastic. Love a good plan B.” I try to stand and my legs buckle. The world spins. The smoky haze inside the circle is dissipating, but I can still feel it. The wrongness, the fractures, the places where their magic tore at something that refused to be torn. “Can I go back to bed now? Maybe cuddle with my mates who didn’t try to MAGICALLY LOBOTOMIZE ME?”
Morrigan’s mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “The glamour is failing on its own. Each day more of your true form bleeds through. Perhaps...” She pauses, calculating. “Perhaps we simply need to accelerate that natural process.”
“And how do you propose?—”
“Don’t you dare, Morrigan.”
Magic pulses around us again. I drop to my knees, coughing as it hits the center of my stomach.
The door to the rooms explodes inward.
Not opens. Explodes. Wood splinters flying, hinges screaming, cold air rushing in with the scent of blood and burning.
Kieran stands in the doorway, shadows writhing around him like living things, ice-blue eyes blazing with a fury that makes the temperature drop twenty degrees.
“What,” he says, each word a blade, “are you doing to her?”
39
Kieran
I waketo a purple haze stretching across the windows and Orion’s arm across my chest like a fallen tree.
“Get off of me.” I grab his wrist and attempt to lift it.
The bastard grabs my side and curls me toward him. Trapping me. His leg hooks over mine like I’m a body pillow he’s claimed for the night.
I’m no small Fae. Three centuries of combat training. Unseelie prince. Shadow magic that could flay the skin from bone.
But Orion has a foot on me in height. At least fifty pounds. And by the gods, he’s like sleeping next to a forge.
He mumbles something against my hair. Something about warming me up. Then, and I will take this to my grave, he snuggles.
I count to ten in Old Fae. Then in Common. Then in the human tongue Ash sometimes curses in when she’s particularly annoyed.
I make it to seven before he nuzzles my neck.
