Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  The crow’s shadow winged away to the west. The breeze rattled the branches of the oak for a moment, then the sound vanished. I glanced over my shoulder. The tree had disappeared, too. And the sun-browned grass. And the glass and steel towers of downtown.

  Last of all, the tall grass and dandelions and the brackish water of the bayou began to fade, and Amy along with them.

  She raised a hand to wave. There were webs between her fingers.

  She turned to mist in front of me. Her voice shone in the diamond-droplet particles that hung in the air. I heard it not with my ears, but with my heart.

  “Try not to die, Kevin.”

  I blinked. The mist enveloped me. It filled my nose and mouth and shoved itself down my throat. I coughed until my lungs threatened to come up, heaving air, trying to breathe. In a flash, the mist dissipated. In that flash, I saw the shiny silver edge of a blade slash for my throat.

  I didn’t have time raise my arm in defense or to duck. I twisted away from the arc of the knife and did the only thing I could—I fell backwards, keenly aware of the wooden door and wall behind me, unsure how close. I landed hard on my left arm with my wrist trapped under my body. I heard the snap of bone at the same time I felt it and screamed with pain before my head whipped with the momentum of my fall and smacked against the stone floor. The world fuzzed for a long second. Then it snapped to Technicolor, everything too bright and too sharp.

  The blade whiffed through the air above me. The Mary-Jane-clad feet of Famine planted on the floor in front of me seemed larger than anything that should belong to a little girl. Famine’s feet looked enormous, matter of fact. Like small boats. And her legs could’ve been tree trunks. I drew back both legs and kicked her shin. She didn’t even flinch.

  “Kevin Landon,” she said.

  I looked up at her. She had to have been fifteen feet tall, her dark eyes enormous behind the lenses of her tortoiseshell glasses, her blond pigtails like small, furry animals hanging from either side of her head. The red polka dots on her dress looked saucer-sized.

  She held my knife in her right hand. She’d taken it from me and I hadn’t put up any kind of fight. How could I, when she had me trapped inside a world of her making?

  “She didn’t go through with it,” Famine said. Meaning Amy. Amy hadn’t killed me.

  It almost hadn’t mattered. If I hadn’t come to when I did—if Amy hadn’t snapped me out of my dream—Famine would’ve cut my throat and I’d have woken up dead right here.

  “She’s not the only one who missed,” I said.

  I tried to roll to my right, to use my right hand and arm to help me stand—or crawl. I was vulnerable as hell on the floor like this. My arm or my wrist or something was broken. I had no weapon.

  Famine raised a huge foot and brought it down fast and hard. I moved my leg in the nick of time. Her shoe smashed down where my knee had been. The force of the blow cracked the stone.

  I rolled fast, fueled by enough adrenaline to get a knee under me and gauge the distance to the wall at two feet and change. I lunged for it, using it to scramble upright. I dodged to get out of the way even before I heard the knife cut the air and whizz past my ear to stick in the wood of the wall.

  Where was Simone? Where was Malek?

  I spun to look past the giant Famine and caught glimpses of furniture—a brown leather chair, a sofa that appeared to be covered with moss, a tree stump that served as a coffee table. A pair of black wings framed a large, oval mirror that hung on the long wall across from me. Real feathers, real wings, really belonged to an actual bird. Or maybe an angel. Or another fae. Torn from their body and hung up like a trophy.

  They looked suspiciously familiar. Then it hit me. They looked like—oh, God. Like Max’s wings. Silver’s lover’s wings.

  Malek stood in the far corner. His face was slack and his eyes faraway. His hands hung at his sides, fingertips twitching. Trapped in a dream like I’d been? Jesus. If Famine had enough power to trap the serpent, we were all fucked.

  I yelled his name.

  He didn’t move. No, wait—he took a half-step forward as if he were walking through water.

  “Malek!” I yelled again.

  Famine backhanded me with stunning force. If the wall hadn’t been there to hang on to, I’d have gone down in a heap. The moss sofa and the tree-stump table blurred. I saw two of everything instead of one. Including Famine’s hands wrapped around the hilt of the knife, yanking it from the wall in a hail of splinters.

  “I wanted to possess you,” Famine said to me.

  “I’m not that easy.” A bluff, because I had been. She’d trapped me repeatedly. She was stronger than I could ever be.

  “You’re already chosen. Already marked,” she said. “I was too late to get a hook into you.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “If I have anything to say about it, you never will.” She tightened her grip on the knife.

  Behind her, Malek moved—this time, not just his leg, but his whole body. He launched himself at Famine’s back.

  She saw it on my face, but not in time to do anything about it. She narrowed her focus to me. If she could kill me before Malek reached her, she would. I read it in her eyes.

  Her arms arced over her head, fingers laced around the knife’s hilt. Malek grabbed hold of the blade and Famine’s hands and used her own momentum to force her off-balance, slamming her to the ground. The knife flew from her hands, the blade embedding itself in the back of the chair with a thump. Malek stomped a booted foot on Famine’s chest and left it there.

  She struggled to push it off, to get up, but she couldn’t budge him no matter how big she was compared to him. She opened her mouth, teeth bared. She lunged at his leg, ready to bite—then stopped at the last second.

  She’d forgotten for a minute who he was. What he was.

  “Kevin,” he said, “bring me the knife.”

  I pushed away from the wall, tripping over my feet, cradling my left arm in my right. There were two of Malek and two of Famine and— “Where’s the Singer?”

  Famine spoke through clenched teeth. “I took her down. I—”

  Malek pressed his boot harder into the Horsewoman’s chest, cutting off whatever she’d been about to say. “The knife, Kevin.”

  I stumbled past them. Famine reached for my ankle. I smashed her fingers with my heel.

  I sank to the floor behind the leather chair, the grain unnaturally large and unlike any leather I’d ever seen. The tip of the blade had pierced it and stuck in the stuffing. I narrowed my eyes. In a brief moment of clarity, I realized that what I’d assumed to be batting was flesh and blood. Living flesh and blood.

  Everything in the room was alive. The room itself was alive.

  It took all the strength I had to pull the knife free. It made a sound coming loose that I never wanted to hear again for the rest of my life, a sound that reminded me of the scream I’d let fly when my own bone broke. It made me want to throw up.

  I handed off the knife to Malek. Instead of using it to stab Famine through the heart or the eye or wherever he could reach, he sliced open his own arm. His poison blood dripped onto Famine’s dress. Where it touched, it sizzled.

  And it was on the blade now, for better or for worse. Anyone stabbed with that blade who wasn’t Malek or Beth would die in agony. Theoretically.

  If Famine were too powerful for Malek’s blood to kill her, it would hurt her. It had to, didn’t it? Judging from the way she looked at the knife now—calculating, but not cold, because she carried a touch of fear in her eyes now—it would do her some damage. Bad damage. She wouldn’t take that risk.

  We had her.

  That meant Silver was safe. She’d have time to heal. It meant Simone was safe, if she was still alive.

  Famine had taken her down. What did that mean?

  I searched for Simone in the shadowed corners of the room and found her in the space behind where Malek had stood, trapped in the dream F
amine had made for him. She laid on the stone, curled into the fetal position, hands protecting the back of her neck. Scratches had torn the skin of her forearms. She’d put up a fight. Blocked sharp fingernails, and from the looks of the scratches, teeth. Famine’s bite.

  Simone was breathing, thank God. And trembling. Shaking so hard her teeth rattled. She looked at me with one rolling, violet eye, like an animal bracing itself to be slaughtered. She blinked. Her gaze cleared.

  “Kev?”

  I knelt beside her and pulled her close with my good arm, trembling with her. “Tell me you’re all right.”

  She cupped my chin in her palm. “You’re not.”

  “I’ll be okay. I’m gonna need a cast, though.”

  “Where’s—”

  I answered the question before she could finish asking. “Malek has Famine. We’re out of the woods.”

  She shook her head. “We’ve never been out of the woods, Kev.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “We can’t stop what’s coming,” she said.

  “Apocalypse.”

  She pressed her mouth into a thin line. “We’ll have to put ourselves on the line. Every ounce of magic we have, every piece of power, we have to gather it and use it to fight.”

  She was right. I knew it in every fiber of my being, every molecule of my body. I pulled her tighter to me. “That’s tomorrow. Tell me for right now that you’re all right.”

  “I will be,” she said. “But, Kev—it was too easy. There’s no way we captured Famine that easy.”

  “You call that easy?” I asked.

  “Scratches and broken bones? Yes.”

  When she put it like that, I couldn’t argue. I wanted to believe. I’d fought my way out of Famine’s trap with Amy’s help. I’d nearly had my throat slit. I had at least one broken bone and a concussion to match Beth’s. If Malek hadn’t snapped out of his dream when he did, I’d be a tenderized, pulverized, bloody mess on the floor, bleeding out.

  Easy?

  I glanced over my shoulder at Malek. He met my gaze with his ancient eyes a heartbeat before he sailed into the wall, slamming his back and his head and plummeting in a heap to the stone. Famine, who had somehow thrown him, rose to her feet in one fluid movement, the knife she’d ripped from Malek’s hand clenched in her fist. She opened her hand, balancing the hilt on her palm for an instant. She popped it into the air and grasped it with her fingertips and launched it in a silver flash at me.

  I couldn’t move out of the way this time. Not with Simone in my arms. I had seconds. The knife would slide into me. It would pierce some vital organ. My lungs. My heart. Malek’s blood, still on the blade, would enter my blood stream like a curse. I’d die like the others Malek had killed.

  I pushed Simone away from me in case I misjudged Famine’s aim. It was all I could do.

  Simone moved—but not away. Not to safety.

  She was fae grace to my solid, human clay. Liquid fire to my earth. She couldn’t move fast enough to shield me completely, but she could get in front of the knife. The blade buried itself in her arm, slicing through flesh and sinew like butter, the tip catching on bone.

  Malek’s blood entered her body, poisoning her. I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t see it in her eyes. But I felt it in the slowing of her heartbeat. In the lightning pain that seized and held her heart prisoner. I felt the torture begin, the rending of every cell into bloody pieces, before she drew a shocked breath. The bloodcurdling terror that clawed its way up her throat and into her mouth.

  Simone screamed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SIMONE’S SCREAMS STABBED through to the core of me. Her agony became mine. She crumpled to the stone three feet away, writhing. So close. I reached for her with my broken arm. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t even comfort her as she died.

  I stretched my good arm to brace myself against the oak wall behind me, cornered like an animal. Dangerous as I could ever be with an open wound in my own beating heart, but still cornered in this hellish room with the mirror framed by Max’s torn-off wings and the chair that housed flesh and blood inside its leather façade and the sofa made of moss. A chill swept through the soles of my sneakers from the stone. It felt like death, coming hard and fast.

  The Horsewoman of the Apocalypse barreled toward me, snarling like a predator sure of the kill. She was on me faster than I could stand. Faster than I could get a leg out front to trip her or slide out of the way.

  Famine wrapped her fingers around my throat, and lifted me off the ground high enough that the toes of my sneakers barely brushed the stone. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t speak. I swung my legs, trying to land a kick. I struck air, nothing more. My head felt like a grape under the weight of a boot—pressure building with nowhere to go, skin bulging, ready to explode any second.

  I clawed at Famine’s grip with my good hand, trying to peel away even one of her fingers. I couldn’t get any traction. All I could see were Simone’s own wings creeping open, strong and fragile and transparent over the feathers of her peacock top, her back arched and mouth open in agony. Malek’s prone body at the foot of the far wall. The line of his arms and the cut of his muscles as he heaved himself upright and got his feet under him. All of it black and white and fuzzy, the images fading in and out.

  This time, I wouldn’t give Malek away. There was no room for feelings to show on my face. I couldn’t do anything except gasp and hurt and suffocate.

  The huge lenses of Famine’s tortoiseshell glasses reflected my bulging eyes and beet-red skin. She grinned, not from enjoyment, but with determination.

  “If I can’t make you do my will, you can’t be allowed to survive,” she said. “You’re marked and you don’t even know it. You’re marked for the sacrifice.”

  Sacrifice? Was that what she was doing to me now?

  Whatever Malek could do to help, it wouldn’t be in time.

  I heard a voice call my name. Not his. Not Simone’s. Not Famine’s.

  The voice held the authority of a Queen. The voice was Silver’s. “Hold on, Kevin. I’m coming.”

  Had Silver gathered enough strength to have half a chance of defeating Famine—or at least a shot at holding her own? Having been caught in Famine’s trap, I didn’t have a good sense of how much time Silver had to get ready. Could it be enough? I didn’t see how. With the wound Famine had dealt her, Silver didn’t have much life left. She was the one who should hold on. I should be coming to her. But I couldn’t. Because I was dying, too. Famine saw to that.

  She hadn’t gone after Silver. Famine had, from the moment I entered the room, focused on me. There were far more powerful people in this room. People who could cause her far more trouble than I ever could. People who qualified as actual enemies, who could square off against her and matter in apocalyptic times.

  Why? Why me?

  Famine tightened her grip. The gray in my vision darkened. The pain of my arm receded. I couldn’t feel my legs. Simone had stopped screaming. Whatever remained of my heart shattered into a million pieces.

  I tried to hold on to consciousness. Because Silver was coming. I had no idea what she could do other than sacrifice herself—and her whole world—to take out Famine. But not to save me. I was the distraction. Someone to hold Famine’s attention so she wouldn’t see Silver bearing down on her until too late. An honorable way to die.

  I could no longer see Famine or Malek. I couldn’t see Simone’s body. I couldn’t see the door to the room. I trusted my ears to hear it open when Silver came through. Then I could let go.

  I held on with everything I had.

  The door didn’t open. I understood that it never would. Not from the outside. Something else was happening.

  I didn’t hear Silver come, but I felt her—the spotlight, the sun’s light shining on me, hot on my face and filling my eyes. Suddenly, I could see. My vision cleared. It pierced the mask that Famine wore, her little-girl costume grown large. Behind the glamour, Famine was a bottomle
ss pit.

  An empty hole that sucked everything into it, and that everything went nowhere at all and filled nothing. A hunger that could never be sated. Even when the world finally died and nothing remained but the stars, Famine would still be this thing. She’d outlive us all, and she’d never know what it meant to be filled, what it meant to be at peace, what it meant to be loved.

  Silver’s light took hold of my body, penetrating my skin, slicing into my flesh and blood and bone, unmasking whatever I could possibly hide, everything I’d never wanted another person to see: my insecurities, my fears, my broken heart:

  How I could never have been enough to stop my father from drowning himself in alcohol or going after the Faery King. The way I almost hadn’t been enough to rescue him. I could never have done it without my friends’ help. Dad appreciated it, but some part of him wanted to get lost and I didn’t think that part of him would ever go away.

  The fact that although I was willing to die, I was terrified of dying right here and right now. Mostly I was terrified of not being there to help my friends when they needed it, even if I could never be more than the third spear-carrier on the left, or the guy who cooked spaghetti for dinner while we hashed out magical threats, or whatever other nameless, faceless, thankless role needed me to fill it. I wanted to see them again. I wanted to at least say good-bye.

  Simone. Simone had died saving me. She’d suffered a death I wouldn’t wish on the Devil himself. I hadn’t been able to save her. Would I find her on the other side? Would she wait for me? I thought she might.

  We could be together then. It would be all right.

  My mouth opened. Words flowed out. They were not my words, not spoken from my heart or mind, but they rang in my voice.

  “You’ve lost,” I said. Not my words—someone else’s. Silver’s.

  Famine flinched, but she didn’t loosen her grip. “You can’t have him. He’s mine. He’s almost gone.”