Page 11 of Fae Reckoning

And right as it was in the process of doing so, Millicent dove through, her maw open, teeth glistening with crimson?—

The wall clamped down around her neck as if it had jaws of its own.

On this side of the wall it was ominously dark. Without the pink of Larissa’s magic, my tattoos extinguished at present, I couldn’t make out much until I conjured my lumoon. Its warm yellow light cast deep shadows across Millicent’s feethle head as it gave the impression of being fused to the stones. No blood marred her neck.

Despite the fact that Millicent was currentlyunable to attack, a familiar unease penetrated every area of my body, imploring me to flee—to absolutely anywhere but here.

“That sensation,” I told Larissa without turning away from the feethle I wasn’t yet convinced wasn’t a threat, “like you can’t stand to be here for a single second longer?”

“Yeah…? Can’t help but feel it,” she said with a shudder. “It’s awful.”

“Yep. Guys and I felt the same last time we were here. Probably a defense.”

“One that would work, too. If I didn’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side, I’d be running back through the wall right now.”

“And I’d be beside you.”

But by holy dragonfire, we’d actually gotten through the wall so that none of our would-be attackers could follow! I scarcely believed it, though it was what I’d been feeling would happen all along. Unless the queen or Braque were to arrive, the feethles, queen’s guards, and pygmy ogres would remain squarely on the opposite side.

Shit,that wasn’t true! The pygmy ogresliveddown here, for fuck’s sake. Surely they could pass through the bespelled wall without intervention. We had to hurry.

Even so, at times the queen had kept Millicent close, a preferred, privileged pet. The sycophant might have observed something that could help inform us about the queen and all she’d done recently to transform herself. If the queen had actually gainedimmortality, we needed to know how if we had any chance at reversing the effect.

The feethle’s features were frozen, eyes unblinking as they appeared to study my knees. Not even a whisker twitched.

“Think she’s dead?” I asked Larissa as I weighed the risks of entering Millicent’s mind. If ever I were to join the mind of someone dead, mine would likely be trapped with theirs, amounting to my own death.

Larissa drew beside me with another shiver. The dread was thick in the air—a billowing, inescapable fog. She canted her head to one side to study the feethle. “Not sure. I didn’t do anything to kill her.”

“So she may still live. If the stones’ substance is affected by magic, it may be that it captured hers within it. The wall might let her go the next time someone goes through it.”

“It’s possible.”

Without warning, Millicent’s head—her very, very severed head, as it turned out—dropped to the floor with a squelchingplopbefore beginning to roll. The neck left a thick streak of blood and gore in its wake.

We stood on a narrow ledge that bordered a sheer drop. An even slimmer stone walkway stretched across a deep, yawning chasm of a pit to the other side. The head rolled across the stone ledge until, after a final wet squish, it bowled off the edge of the cliff, fell, fell, and still fell without a single sound. When it finally hit bottom, it was with a soft, remote thud I might not have registered had I not been listening for it.

“Guess that answers our question,” Larissa eventually said after she’d joined me in peering carefully—extremely carefully—over the edge into the swallowing darkness. “She’s definitely dead.”

Indeed, I’d wager that one couldn’t get much deader—not even in the queen’s palace of horrors.

5.DO AND GIVE AND TRY TILL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT

ELOWYN

Xeno and I slowed along the walkway to the ruined cabin only long enough for Reed to get out, “It’s Ramana,” before the three of us were bolting the rest of the way and barreling around a demolished wall instead of bothering with the front door. Most everyone else was clustered around the doorway that led to the bedchamber. Even the black dragon, who now stood more out than in the house, craned his long neck down to peer inside.

“What the hell’s going on?” Xeno asked of no one in particular as he shouldered a path through our clustered friends and reached back for me, as if I needed an escort or protection.

He’d never been this way with me in Nightguard, when he, along with Zako, had been the only one to see me as someone as capable as the dragon protectors. When I’d been in Nightguard, wholly unaware of the dubious fate that awaited me in the Mirror World, thequeen hadn’t yet tried to murder me. Despite the perhaps reasonableness of his protectiveness, I sidestepped the hand that waited to brace my arm and lead me, and stalked to join West, Ryder, and Hiroshi on my own.

Unlike the others, the three men stood solidly inside the room, along with Bertram and Bolt. The giant frog and horse stood between the wall and beds, making the space feel unbearably small. But it was safer for Bertram and Bolt beneath a roof than exposed when full-grown dragons had full-grown appetites. I wouldn’t have put it past the black dragon—with whom I hadn’t yet had the chance to bond—to take a chomp out of any of the rest of us either. Everyone here was appreciably wary, constantly alert, and watchful of any threat. As a whole, we were twitchy and on edge. Our unease practically vibrated in the air around us.

Hearing Xeno, Hiroshi turned. He cradled Saffron in his arms as if the little dragon were a baby. Since the dragonling really wasn’t, he dwarfed the tall, broad warrior drake, concealing his entire torso. Hiro bobbed his head to one side of Saffron’s wing.

“It’s Ramana. She—” Saffron pushed off Hiro’s abdomen with anoooooffrom the drake, leaping straight at me in a tangle of knobby arms and legs, wings, and claws.

I scarcely had a chance to open my arms for him before he slammed into my chest. Xeno was a firm wall that caught me. While Saffron licked theblood that had dribbled onto my neck, I peered up at Xeno and rolled my eyes.

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