Page 24 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

It was churning away, burning brighter than ever as innocent Sidhe and Lliadhe were murdered next to one another.

Their differences didn’t matter all that much once they were dead. They all looked the same when she reduced them to a pile of meat and bone.

“She’s unhinged,” Nila said, stepping up beside me.

A Lliadhe woman, a satyr, approached her other side, leaning forward on her goat legs and hooves to hold my gaze as she spoke. “Pay close attention to the stone within her crown,” she said, her brow furrowed in confusion.

I looked to Mab, risking her wrath by looking at her when all else tried to fade into the background. A shadow of a figure moved within the gem, mouth parted to reveal sharp teeth and a serpentlike forked tongue. In all my years at Mab’s side, I’d never seen the woman in the stone.

Some claimed to have seen it when she was most angry, when she seemed to become less strategic with her killing. While I’d witnessed those occasions from time to time, I’d never found myself in the position to look at her straight on. Mab’s attention shifted to me, her gaze narrowing as she witnessed the company I kept for a brief moment.

“What is it?” Nila asked, standing in the center of the satyr and I, doing her best to look as if we weren’t actively engaged in conversation. She too was all too aware of Mab’s attention, having spent the better part of centuries trying to keep to the shadows and avoid her attention.

“I’m uncertain,” the satyr woman said. “My brother, Sisko, said there were stories in our village when we were children. A passing traveler spoke of the Gorgon who haunted the stone after it was stolen by the dwarves. He was not summoned to Tar Mesa when I was as a child, so he has not seen it in person. I can’t be certain of the origin.”

“A Gorgon? Are you certain, Maeryn?” Nila asked, gripping the satyr’s human arm with perfectly polished nails.

“Yes. That is what he said,” Maeryn answered, nodding her head as she looked back to Mab. The Lliadhe had not been present on the beach when Mab had sent Estrella into the cove. She hadn’t been there to know that the sole purpose of Estrella’s journey wasto gather a snake from Medusa’s crown. Most in Tar Mesa did not know the reasons for Mab’s constant need to send her prisoners into Tartarus to earn their freedom, but it seemed a far stretch to imagine this to be a coincidence.

I’d thought a snake from Medusa’s crown would be a trophy or make her control over snakes stronger somehow. I hadn’t begun to anticipate that there might be something more to it. Did the journey she sent Estrella on have more to do with her sanity and the woman in the stone that haunted her than we could have ever anticipated?

I chanced another look to Mab, her attention diverted as I stared into the stone itself. The figure was gone, vanished without a trace as if I had all but imagined it, but I couldn’t shake the knowledge that there was something more to the combination of circumstances than I’d expected. Nila’s knowing gaze confirmed my own suspicions, letting me know that I wasn’t alone in my desire to connect the pieces of the puzzle I hadn’t known I held.

“Mab sent Estrella to retrieve a snake from the crown of Medusa,” I said, echoing Nila’s train of thought. Was Medusa responsible for the cursed gem itself? Had she been its owner before the dwarves had stolen it?

Was she angry that Mab had sent someone to steal from her yet again and getting revenge upon her through her own rage?

“My brother will be most interested in that turn of events,” Maeryn said, retreating. Her hooves clomped against the floor as she made her way out the door of the throne room, retreating to safety as quickly as she could.

Her brother.

The thought tickled the back of my brain, the fact that she’d been so quick to want to go share the news with him, striking a thought into my head. There’d been a time when Estrella’s brother had been her confidante, when he would have been the first person she turned to when she learned something new about herself and her life.

Her fucking brother.

I’d watched him jump over that cliff, and while I hadn’t been in position to intervene during that first leap when he’d aimed to take Estrella with him, I could have intervened in their struggle after. I’d let the bastard die when Icouldhave saved him. It would have ruined everything, all my plans for glamouring myself wasted. I wouldn’t have been able to stop Holt and the Wild Hunt without revealing my identity to them and to Estrella and her brother in the process. I’d let him die, knowing damn well he would have only gotten in my wayif he’d survived. His disdain for me and the Fae had been obvious, even before I learned that he’d been an elder of the Lunar Coven. There would have been no chance of convincing Estrella to fall in love with me if she knew the truth of my identity then and there, but especially not with that bastard whispering in her ear.

In doing so, I’d betrayed my mate the very first night I’d met her.

I retreated out of the throne room without another word, ignoring the duty I had to collect the bodies upon the floor. Mab would only make more in the time it took for me to return anyway.

I had a riddle to answer.

SIXTEEN

ESTRELLA

Brann followed behind us, forcing us to move slower than I cared for. I urged him to move faster, pushing him to walk as if his life depended on it.

“Would you hurry the fuck up?” I snapped, all patience gone. If it came down to a choice between him and Caldris, I would choose my mate. Especially when I’d already lost time to save Brann, and his slow speed seemed deliberate and intentional as a method to delay the inevitable. I’d condemned my mate for saying he would sacrifice the world to save me if it came to it, but I was no better.

I was willing to sacrifice my own brother to make it to him in time, and that wasn’t a choice that I would have made lightly not so long ago.

Now it wasn’t a choice at all.

“I’m going as fast as I can, Estrella,” he snapped in return, that old sibling rivalry pulsing between us. Even if I knew better now and understood that Brann hadn’t truly grown up alongside me inanything more than an illusion, he stillfeltlike my sibling in my heart.

“I hope that’s true, otherwise I’m going to leave you behind. Either keep up or don’t, but I don’t have time for this,” I said, sending a pulse of love down the mate bond that arched between Caldris and I, hoping he could feel it even if I couldn’t see the threads or feel my magic in the same way. The lack of my magic had mostly stripped those from me, leaving me with only the shadow of them when the strongest magic was at play.

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