Page 38 of A City of Emeralds and Envy
But he freezes mid-spring, caught in a watery illusion like the one Riordan is suffering. He’s surrounded by figures, both Fae and human, and they’re all facing him at first but then, one by one, they turn their backs on him. He calls out to them, pleads, persuades, but no one responds. Even when his body alights and begins to burn, none of them look at him. Ashes flake from his charred flesh—he’s shrieking, crumbling, and still no one in the vision notices or cares.
“Too easy.” The Witch yawns. “You, Kin-Slayer, are a little more difficult to read. Let’s try a few things, shall we?”
He snaps his fingers, and the cries of Jasper and Riordan vanish, muted by magic. When he turns to me, Fiero leaps forward, barking, sensing my peril—but the Witch swirls him into an illusion of hunting tender rabbits through a green forest. Harmless enough. The Witch could have done far worse to my pet.
I reach for my own power and find that it’s there again—but the brush of my mind against that inner energy is half-hearted. I’m uncertain what to do with the power I do have, not sure how to use it to turn the tables on him. Besides, what he’s doing right now is physically harmless, and I hesitate to use my magic when I’m not in serious danger. I might need it later.
And perhaps I’m a little too curious about this game of his. Perhaps part of me wants to be known—split open to my core and touched at the quivering, vulnerable center of myself.
The Witch stands opposite me, a smirk tweaking the corner of his mouth, one eyebrow hitched more sharply than the other, as if he’s waiting for me to notice something. His gaze lowers, just for a second.
When I look down, my clothes are gone. It has to be an illusion, because the Tama Olc is still in my pocket—I can sense it there. But it feels so real, right down to the whisper of night air against my skin.
Someone walks out of the forest—no, several people—a mixed group of Fae and humans. At the sight of me they pause, then form a half-circle around me and stare openly at my body. Some of them look disgusted, others merely bored. Their whispered comments swirl around me—comments about the squareness of my shoulders, my narrow hips, and my strange-looking ears, neither Fae nor human. They criticize the unevenness of my skin tone in places, the moles on my thigh and my right side, the contrast of my blue eye and my brown eye. They comment that my ass is too flat, my legs too scrawny, my elbows too pointy, and my knees too knobby.
Anger churns inside me, but I’m not afraid of them. I grit my teeth and plot how I might kill them all—until they vanish, and I remember that it’s an illusion. I can’t see the Witch, or Jasper, or Riordan—I’m alone in the forest, naked, or so it seems.
Movement on the ground catches my eye. Out of the undergrowth slither two pale snakes, their scales as white and glossy as milk. I step back as they slither toward me, but they’re too quick—they’re already coiling around my ankles, sliding up my bare thighs. One glides around to my backside, and the ripple of its smooth, tiny scales over my ass cheek sends a flood of arousal through my body. The snake continues up my spine to my throat, where it coils, tightening slowly.
Meanwhile the other serpent is nudging between my legs, parting the lips of my sex with its head, worming its way inside me, coils of its body disappearing into my entrance—I part my legs and look down between them, gasping as I see the tip of the white tail vanish into my pussy. I can feel the snake moving in my lower belly, but strangely, I’m not frightened.
A flicker of alarm runs through me as the snake around my neck pushes its head between my lips, into my mouth, and begins pouring itself into me, filling up my throat. Still, I’m not terrified—I’m titillated, fascinated by how marvelously full my body feels.
A second later, the slithering sensation in my throat and my belly disappear, and I remember, once again, that it was all an illusion. Every time another waking dream begins, I seem to forget what’s happening.
“Most women would have screamed.” The West Witch appears a few steps away, tapping one finger against his lips thoughtfully. “I know many an Unseelie who would have cringed at that, and you didn’t flinch. You’re a little pervert, Kin-Slayer.”
“And you’re being too gentle,” I retort. “People ridiculing my body, telling me I don’t belong? Snakes entering my holes? Surely you can do better than that.”
He peers at me. “That’s a challenge. Ah, Dorothy, how foolish of you. Very well then—prepare for the most terrifying night of your life.”
14
I shouldn’t have challenged him.
I don’t know how long he bombards me with swarms of spiders, delusions of drowning, visions of monsters, and images of my parents and friends being skinned alive. Apparently nothing provokes the reaction he’s looking for, because he gets progressively more frustrated every time he appears to me, between illusions.
After one particularly harrowing vision of Alice’s little siblings being boiled and eaten, he lets all the veils drop. I’m no longer naked, and I can see our camp again, with Riordan and Jasper still trapped in their fears. If either of them have managed to comprehend what’s happening, they still haven’t guessed his fear correctly.
The West Witch charges me, collars my throat with his hand. He towers above me, his eyes snapping with vicious intent. “What is wrong with you? Is there nothing that terrifies you? I’ve sensed disgust, fascination, arousal, concern, anger, vengefulness, and moderate fear, but not true terror. Nothing that constricts your heart and makes you crumble into ash. What more can I do to make you afraid?”
I stare up at him, caught in the storm of his rage, riveted by the sense of sheer, unstoppable power flowing from his fingers into my body. He’s so much stronger than I am—the things he could do to me—the things I want him to do—
“Wait…” He frowns, peering into my eyes. “Wait… I wonder...”
And in a blink, everything drops away. His touch, the forest, everything. It all disappears.
I’m alone. Just me, in a dull black void. Nothing above, nothing below—a vast nothing stretching endlessly in every direction. I have no magic, no strength, nothing except the dread certainty that I have been cast out by both Fae and humans because I amwrong. I am too different. I don’t belong to either race—I am something Other, some rejected thing floating like a bit of rancid shit in the bowels of the universe. And worse than the encroaching panic is the horror, the certainty, that this place has no escape, and no end. It is interminable, unbearable monotony. There’s nothing I can try, no magic I can do or words I can say. I am voiceless, powerless, and isolated, doomed to be conscious amid all this nothing, forever. Nothing to invigorate my mind or entertain my senses. No power of imagination I can summon for relief—my brain is entirely flooded with wretched, debilitating terror.
I can’t scream. I can’t die.
I am doomed to exist alone in timeless, merciless Nothing.
But one thought quivers in my stricken brain. It comes to me in pieces, and I struggle to assemble it, to make it coherent until it finally takes shape and struggles to the forefront of my consciousness.
He couldn’t scare me with anything else, so he used the thing that scareshimthe most.
“This is your worst fear, Witch,” I gasp out. “Yours and mine.”
