Grave Visions(110)

Falin paused in front of one door. Based on the runnels in the sleet, a lot of fae had passed this way, and recently. The trail dragging across realities was stronger here as well. Sharper, almost, and deeper.

And oh so very wrong.

If it had been something I could see, I would have expected an infected wound, open and dripping with pus. The trail led directly into the doorway Falin was about to step through. I grabbed his arm, making him hesitate.

“If Faerie rejects the queen’s right to rule the court, would that cause a wound in the fabric of Faerie?”

He tilted his head slightly, his gaze moving over my face as if he’d find the answer there. “What kind of wound?” he asked, his voice low, cautious.

I tried to think of a way to describe the raw sensation, but I was cold and exhausted, and I wasn’t even sure it was real and not another Glitter effect. Instead of answering, I shook my head and dropped my hand from Falin’s arm. He studied my face one more moment before his gaze shifted to the screaming Deaths behind me and then back. Reaching out, he pressed a hand to my forehead.

“You’re burning up.”

“I promise you, I’m freezing,” I told him, wrapping my arms around my middle in an effort to slow my trembling.

Falin didn’t argue, he just gave me a look—a sad, knowing look—and said, “Let’s get you your tie to Faerie.”

Then he stepped through the doorway.





Chapter 33





I’d grown accustomed to the bone-chilling sleet that had accompanied me since I woke in Faerie. I was not prepared for a full-on blizzard, but that’s what awaited us through the doorway.

The throne room was a blur of white. A howling wind tore around the room, pelting me with wet snow from every direction. Fae huddled in clusters around the door, snow piling up on their hunched shoulders and bowed heads. Sleagh Maith and lesser fae alike clung to one another, fear all but radiating off their trembling forms. But as close as they were to the door, they didn’t move, didn’t dare bolt. Some sense of self-preservation telling them that the first to move wouldn’t be moving for long.

And the reason for all that fear raged in the center of the storm. The queen, sword in hand, stalked across the center of the room, raving in one of the fae languages. A body at her feet.

Dark blood stained the hem of her gown, splashes of the blood dotting the tattered garment up to her high waistline. More blood soaked into the icy snow all around the body, like the nightmare version of a snow cone.

The queen whirled around as we entered. More blood had spattered her pale skin, momentarily distracting me from the madness burning in her eyes. Until that gaze landed on me like a hot iron in the blizzard.

“You.” She pointed the sword at me, and I froze. “Are you satisfied now? I’ve killed him. I. Killed. Him.”

I glanced at the body again, I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself. It was at an angle, the face turned away from me, blood mixing with hair that glistened even in the storm. I couldn’t positively identify the bloody shape from this angle. Not by sight. But by her words, I knew who it had to be.

Ryese.

Relief flooded through me, despite the queen’s growing rage, but something nagged at my senses. I tried to chalk it up to the drug, or my exhaustion, or maybe the impending hypothermia, but it persisted, drawing my eye back toward the body even as the queen stomped through the mounds of ice and snow, straight toward me.

Ryese wore a flamboyant court outfit, similar to how he’d dressed at the ball when I’d first met him. The shirt with its frilled collar and sleeves was soaked in blood all across the chest and up over the shoulder, but the flowy sleeve closest to me was hardly touched. Despite that, blood coated his palm.

Blood that hadn’t been there when I’d last seen him.

It was possible that he’d touched his own blood as he died, but Falin had said seeing Ryese’s bloody hands would likely be the only way the queen would believe he could be behind the plot against her. She’d killed him before I even presented what I’d learned. Something had changed her mind.

I peeled back my shield, gazing across layers of reality.

The body changed. A soul glowed from within, but the form was no longer Ryese. The form slimmed and curved into feminine lines. The hair darkened to a chestnut brown, twined with bits of mistletoe.

Maeve.

I saw both images overlapping. The glamour that wrapped the dead fae kept trying to push forward, make itself true. I’d seen fae disguised with glamour inside Faerie before. While Faerie tended to accept strong glamour and make it part of its reality, it couldn’t change a sentient being from one thing or person to another, but this one was trying to in a way glamour never should have done.