Page 44 of The Unseelie Court

She was meantfor this.

Meant for him.

He did not believe in the gods. Oh, he knew they existed—he had been borne by two, after all. But he did not believe that he would ever, in any sense, have the support or backing of any of them.

But someone—something—had sent his little butterfly into his Web, spurned by tragedy. But who? Who wished to see himsucceed, now, after so many centuries of failure? Who had sent him the one soul he might need to see his task complete?

It was too much of a coincidence otherwise.

He was not one to take this gift for granted. And what a gift she was. It wasn’t until he felt his venom on his tongue that he realized he had begun staring at the vein in her neck.

Death could not come for her, no matter how much of his poison he pumped into her veins. He could sink her deep into bliss. Take her to the heights of the stratosphere without a care for stopping her heart. Claim her in histrueform, without fear of her weeping in horror and disgust at the sight of?—

Perhaps the realization of her inevitable rejection of his being would have shaken him out of his reverie. It might have been sufficient to drive him out of his cloud of lust that had him inching closer to her, his fangs extended and dripping venom, ready to sink into her sweet flesh.

But the simple fact of the matter was, he never had the opportunity to discover whether or not he would have stopped himself from claiming the girl without her knowledge.

Because that was the precise moment in time when the apple…changed.

Ava screamed.

The apple was no longer an apple.

Well. She did it.

Go her.

Yay.

Huzzah.

She’d succeeded in changing it.

Kind of.

Six apple trees, clumped far too close together than they would have ever grown normally, burst into existence.

The marble floor cracked and shattered as the roots suddenly upended it, sending splinters of the stone flying in all directions. She covered her face with her arms and pulled her legs up to try to protect herself.

But the chaos had only just started. Because these trees werehuge.The boughs that stretched upwards toward the ceiling suddenly swung down, overloaded with ripened fruit.

Inertia was a bitch sometimes.

The trees shot upward from the ground as they hurtled into existence from downward to upward.

The branches that were overfilled with fruit, were now overfilled with projectiles. Apples hurtled down at them at the speed of a pitching machine’s baseball.

Sure, it probably wouldn’tkillher—apparently she couldn’t die—but in the one spare moment she had to think about the situation, what ran through her head was simply?—

This is gonna fucking suck.

Suddenly, she was knocked flat to the ground. She wasn’t sure by what at first. But as the sound of apples hitting the marble surrounded her, she realized nothing was hitting her.

Well—almost nothing—apples hit her legs. Whichhurt.It felt like getting punched repeatedly in random places.“Ow! Shit!”

But nothing was hitting her upper body. Or her head. Which seemed unlikely. Blinking her eyes open, she lowered her arms.

Serrik.

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