Page 13

I missed him. I hated him. I missed him. I loathed everything about him. Except the calming forest of his eyes. The strength in his arms. The way he watched me. The way he shared in his sins with me. The way my heart beat around him.

I hated everything about him, except all of him.

Chapter 6

Ard Tiarna Emrys of Breacadh an Lae, The Raven of the Dawn

“My Raven.” Her husky voice filled the sky of my dream, so close I could feel the gust of her heated breath on my cheek and feel the way her dripping wet pussy gripped my fingers. Not sanitized and distant like when I had tortured myself with the gloves—I could feel the heat of her radiating through my palm and her heartbeat at my fingers.

“Feidlimid be blessed, little bug. Come for me again. Sing for me,” I purred, the rumble of the words leaving my lips and jolting me awake.

The room was cold. Dark.

Empty.

Rage and desperation tore through the ephemeral rapture of having her near me again. Where the warm amber glow of pleasure had lived, the hot slice of the blade within me slithered along my veins and scoured every last drop of its memory. My magic vibrated within me, thorned and vicious like a swarm of wasps trapped within my skin. Their wings buzzed at my head and filled it up where the hangover from the milúll wine had left room for them to slip in.

I rolled over in my bed, trying to escape the pain within me. Misery was my only bedmate though, and it wrapped its biting tentacles around me and held firm no matter how I thrashed.

As Fae, we are raised on the cautionary tales of those who lost their anam cara. Our nursery stories are full of what happens to Fae who have the misfortune of their bond being severed. It starts with the gentle reproach of a rhyme about bleeding colors, and as we grow older, the warnings more explicit. Tales of Fae who were driven mad enough to slowly cut limbs off, chasing the rot from within themselves, trying to head off the burning agony corrupting their magic from their very center.

We are prepared from the cradle for what lies ahead of us should we be so cursed and maligned by the gods as to have the poor fortune of losing our anam cara.

And yet, I foolishly thought I would not be one of those Fae. I foolishly believed that surely I could never succumb to such torment. Even if I had joined their ranks, I—a Fae who had suffered so deeply already by the measure of my own crimes—I would be able to weather the storm with dignity and grace.

What an ignorant, vainglorious, stupid child I had been. What an absolute idiot. No number of stories could have properly prepared me. No one could have explained fully that the assault to my defenses would come from all avenues. My body betrayed me, the longing to touch her so acute and sharp that it felt like daggers slowly piercing me. My mind whispered treasonous and unwanted torment by turning every whistle of the wind, every footstep, every rustle in the eaves outside my window into her voice, her sighs of pleasure, her footsteps, her laugh. My heart was a shattered mess, no longer a haunted necropolis bearing the names of all those I had disappointed, but now, a blasted, salted land unwilling to sustain life for any purpose other than to wound me further.

But my magic was the worst of all of them. It sat within me more present than it had ever been before, so close to the surface that should I exhale too forcefully, it might flee my body. I had never thought of it as anything more than a weightless part of me, but now I felt every inch of its true gravity, a weight that pressed me down into a bed of brambles with all its might. When I reached to touch it, tried to let it move within me, it split itself across the shard of glass and bled agony.

I was nothing more than a beast for misery, and I would bear it all, and more, just to fill the void that she had left. A single moment with her again, just a single flash of those fiery eyes. Just another press of her lips to mine. I would give it all, endure it all, do anything, just to share breath with her once more.

It was unbearable. It was what I deserved. It was a flavor of torture that no stories could have ever prepared me for and the injustice of it, the perniciousness of it, the endlessness was like an open vein bleeding any hope left from me. The pain assaulted me from every angle, and there was nothing to assuage it.

Even in my darkest times, trapped in the Maw, shackled to the floor with a bar of iron across my throat, didn’t hold a candle to this. Not even watching the ashes of my relationship with Daróg molder while he lounged, milúll swirling in a glass as he watched his chief torturer mark my skin with iron needle and specially made iron oxide inks. I had never experienced such total suffering.

I pushed from the bed, unable to stay still as it rampaged through me. My feet tore at the cold stones of my room as I paced, trying to outrun it. But there was no outrunning this. No respite was coming for me.

I understood now why some Fae went mad from it, and I wondered how long I could hold out before I too succumbed.

My toe nudged a stone long ago pried up and replaced back in the floor. My attention, momentarily pulled from my affliction, slid to it. I had buried something there decades ago . . . something that might be able to help me.

I collapsed to the floor, pulling at the stone, splintering my nails as I scratched at the surface, prying it up from a space it had been lodged into for far too long. Smears of blood painted the sides as I hauled it up and pulled free the parcel.

Shaking red fingers glided over the ornate carved wooden box, hazy purple-tinted memories floating back to me to remind me of the lover that I had put away. She had almost destroyed me. She had almost resurrected me. There were times before I set her aside where there was nothing but Siur Dobh to keep me from falling into the abyss and never crawling free. So many times, especially after I was freed from the prison, that I couldn’t stand the idea of my next breath, and she would keep my lungs from collapsing in on themselves with the weight of my grief, shame, and heartbreak.

She had comforted me the day my little bug had flown from me, kept me from following her into the grave.

“Can you help me again?” I asked the box, shaking from head to toe. I shouldn’t be doing this again. I shouldn’t be carefully extracting the dark oak mortar and setting it next to the polished ivory pestle. Even the little tinted glass vial filled with precious dark red resin crystals should be something I never touch again. The herbs had all seen better days, dried nearly to a powder on their own. I shouldn’t be frowning, knowing that while they would suit my needs perfectly fine, they would be most potent when freshly picked. Even more so if collected during a strong magic tide.

My fingers quaked, muscles screaming for me to stop, and the misery within me pushed me onward. I measured out each ingredient into the mortar and began slowly, methodically pounding it before adding the resins to the flashing rainbow of a shell. The keratinous flat spoon was still covered in dust when I pulled it from the box and slowly began sprinkling the powder into the still sticky resin, gently folding it in.

I left the mixture on the floor to hunt for a bottle of milúll wine among the forest of them that still had some left. That it took me a few moments should have been the time when I stopped, when I thought better of what I was doing. I had spent months sweating, screaming, clawing at my skin and bleeding magic to purge myself of it the last time I had seen this box.

But I didn’t stop. I convinced myself that it would just be this one time. I would just have a little, and then I would burn the remnants, so I wouldn’t be tempted again. It had taken me years and years to become accustomed to it before.

I would keep it to myself. Without Daróg and Oaken Rose or any of the other Fae that we had surrounded ourselves with, or the booze-and-drug-fueled parties every night, there was no way that this could progress like it did last time.

It couldn’t.