Page 46 of Fae Crown

Fuck me.

Apparently, nothing existed here beyond a corrupted light and many beasts.

Another claw or something cleaved open the length of my right thigh, pulling away what little focus I’d managed to gather.

It took the swat of a gigantic paw to the back of my neck to startle me back to the tenuous connection I had with the Mirror World.

My mother was the rightful heir to King Erasmus, I entreated the land, and I was her rightful heir, etcetera. No way was I getting more of my genealogical tree out right now. My very thoughts stuttered beneath the growling proximity of my impending death.

Either the Mirror World recognized me as its rightful heir or it didn’t.

Able to only pull in shallow breaths around the barrage of slams and slices against my body, I kept my eyes clenched shut. Now, it was mostly so my courage wouldn’t waver. Better not to try to make sense of the monster parts emerging from the concealing brightness.

“Please,” I muttered, not sure whom exactly I was begging.

I fought to find stillness, found absolutely none, and flung my awareness out toward the land another time. Still, I didn’t find it. The faith I’d allowed myself without my notice withered.

By dragonfire, where even was I? I felt like I was inside the pit of devouring that had opened in the coliseum, only I’d been sucked down into it with every damned predator in the Mirror World.

“Come on!” I snarled when all I sensed was my death closing in.

No land.

No magic.

No help.

So I sought to bypass the connection to the land’s power and wield magic on my own. Grunting, I pictured a glow pushing up and out through my skin.

All I managed was to experience exactly how many places I was cut open. As if I were at the edge of a raging storm, claws, teeth, barbed tentacles, and tails pummeled me. Surely by now there was no intact flesh left to shred. I bled in so many places that blood slunk everywhere along my skin, feeling as if ants were crawling across me.

Once more—one final time—I reached for that tenuous connection to the magic of this world. I’d touched it before. I knew what it felt like.

I found no hint of it in this horrible place so bright it was leached of all goodness.

Fucking fine. If the queen wanted me dead so badly, fine.Take me already and be done with it, you asshole bitch!

More snarls, growls, and chomps. More rending flesh. More blows, jostling me in every direction except away from here. Anywhere else would have been good. Absolutely anywhere else. I would have even done a celebratory jig to suddenly find myself back in the damn Sorumbra, in the midst of a horde of hissing, chittering umbracs with all those roving, predatory eyes.

The strikes passed the point of unbearable to truly insurmountable, to several too fucking many. I expected my mind to go blank. Maybe in that blankness I’d see Zako again, reaching for me from the Etherlands. Or maybe, by some miracle, the land’s magic would reach for me from the impossible, just as it had in the arena, bringing me back from the very brink of death.

Instead, the faces of every person and creature I’d learned to love over my short lifetime filled the space behind my eyes, where even closed the light seared through the thin skin of my eyelids. Hazy as their visages were, I saw Rush and Xeno and Saffron. And then Zako and Pru and Reed. Roan and Finnian. Rush, again and again, smiling at me as if I were the best thing he’d ever seen. Rush kissing me, filling my sight as his face hovered above mine. Him inside me, our bodies heated and flush. My mate. My friends. Then the sapphire-blue dragon from the throne room. And next the enormous black dragon from the Wilds.

I wasn’t through with any of them, nor with this life.

But it appeared I wasn’t getting a say in when my end came.

Now.It was coming now.

A set of claws dragged along the length of my back, gouging so deep I wondered foggily if they could reach through my back into my heart.

Now.

Tentacles weaving into what was left of the coronet the she-goblin had braided, tugging my head to the left, exposing my throat. Teeth sinking in, breaking me open. Sucking my blood.

Now.

The tatters of my dress yanked free from the blood that stuck it to my hips. Jaws clamping around my right thigh and ripping out a chunk.

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