Grave Visions(112)

Falin stepped closer, his eyes wide, fear reflecting in his gaze. Then his jaw clenched and he whirled around, marching through the huddled fae and shoving them aside.

I couldn’t see the graze the dart had cut across my back, but it was barely bleeding, and couldn’t have been much more than a scratch. Still, I twisted, trying see what they saw. Unfortunately, I could. Gray tendrils spread under my skin, crawling over my shoulder.

Iron poisoning.

I stared at the graying skin. The third Death, the one that wasn’t yelling, knelt beside me.

“It’s time, Alex,” he said, holding out his hand.

I looked from him to my shoulder and then back. “You’re still not real.”

With that, I concentrated on searching for the dart again. The blisters in reality were right in front of me. It had to be in that snowdrift.

Behind me, I heard a loud yelp, and I twisted around in time to see Falin’s hand clasp around the throat of a fae. He hauled the fae off the ground, one-handed, and the fae’s hood fall back to reveal Ryese’s crystalline hair.

“Don’t kill him, my knight,” the queen said, an edge of panic in her voice as she pushed herself out of the snow. “I killed him once already today. I can’t see it again.”

Rational or not, desperate or not, a command was a command, and Falin’s killing dagger thrust stopped, inches from Ryese’s chest. The man in his arms sagged, a smug smile slithering across Ryese’s face. Oh no, he wasn’t just walking away from this.

I thrust my hand into the snowdrift, searching. More than the feel of something harder than snow, it was the sudden stabbing pain that rushed down my fingers, even through my gloves, that told me I’d found the dart. Trying to insulate it with inches of snow, I scooped it out.

The dart looked innocuous enough. Just a bit of thin, dull metal no longer than my pinkie nail. But it was far from harmless. If Ryese had managed a clean shot at the queen, and she had died, the small dart could have easily been missed, the blame for her unknown cause of death easily falling on her feared bloody hands.

Patting it into the center of a small snowball like a deadly core, I climbed to my feet. Then I had to wait a moment as my vision swam. I braced my feet, trying to avoid crashing back to my butt in the snow. Deep breath. Two.

“Falin,” I yelled.

He stopped, looking up from where he was in the process of dragging Ryese in front of the queen. The slighter man thrashed in Falin’s grasp, the smugness now absent from his face as more and more bloody, dead versions of himself appeared around the queen. For her part, the queen seemed to have forgotten everything but the multiplying bodies, her distress feeding the drug and hallucinations.

“Catch,” I yelled, tossing the snowball to Falin as gently as I could. It still crumbled as he caught it, but the dart remained cushioned in a small layer of snow.

I’d been working without a plan, thinking only that the dart needed to get back inside the dampening effect of the blowgun.

Falin had other ideas.

He drove the thin bit of metal into Ryese’s palm. The other fae screamed, the sound a high-pitched cry of pain and fear.

The skin around the dart immediately darkened, the glow in his skin dampening. Whereas the tendrils crawling under my flesh were a cloudy gray, his spread out in ink-black lines. Falin had once told me he’d been switched during infancy so that he’d not only learn about the human world, but also gain some resistance to all the metals, especially iron, found in mortal reality. I’d also grown up outside of Faerie, so I had some resistance as well. But Ryese was a pampered noble, and the iron poisoning shot through his flesh, creating an elaborate spiderweb of darkness across Ryese’s palm.

“I’m removing this poison from our court,” Falin told the queen as he hauled the howling man to his feet.

The queen’s fevered gaze swept over Ryese, taking in the darkness spreading over his skin. Then she nodded and leaned closer. “If you are alive, my favorite nephew, blood of my blood, my Ryese, then you are banished from this court and all my territory. As long as I rule here, no door will open for you in winter. Here witness it, all of you.”

Ryese’s pitiful cries took on a new level of frenzy, but the words had the ring of a binding oath to them, and I felt the magic of Faerie shift, acknowledging the queen’s proclamation even as the huddled fae murmured their witness to her words. Falin gave no heed to the other fae’s pleading, but dragged him to where two winter guards stood waiting.

“See him to the edge of our territory in the mortal realm,” he told the guards. They nodded, and then hauled Ryese out of the room. As soon as he passed through the doorway, the sound of his cries fell off abruptly.