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“The devil only tempts people to sin, Darling,” I reply bitterly. “I am the sin itself.”
“Rest assured, Darling, I won’t touch you. But I’ll do exactly as you say…” I dig my teeth into my lower lip and set her with a searing gaze. “I’ll dream of it.”
The sight has been burned eternally into my mind for over two centuries, a floating monument to my hubris.
The Pixie’s Hollow
An innocent-looking faerie dressed in large swathes of green leaves and donning a flower crown that brings me a small measure of amusement every time I see it.
“Rough seas bring the calmest mornings,”
The blight plaguing Willa’s world has only made the pixies’ struggle more dire. Borne of a child’s laughter, nurtured by innocence and dreams, they’ve been living on the edge of extinction for more than a century.
his
Dawson, de facto leader of the Strayed,
Pan is dead and any talk of an heir is treason.
But what made me a good captain, and an even better king, is that surviving has never been one of my goals.
Carrion King does—like a bottomless chasm to fall headfirst into.
beauty exists everywhere. And no one seems to notice.
She’s dressed in an assortment of silks and wraps, each intricately braided and draped to make an odd, but beautiful, dress. Her dark hair hangs in a shining curtain down her back, and her umber skin is painted with elaborate swirls of electric blues, deep violets and moss greens.
The girl—woman—fits me with an unapologetic look. “You lament the loss of beauty and hope like you did not have the chance to stop it.” My heart stumbles over itself, and my breath freezes in my chest. If she notices my sudden horror, she doesn’t acknowledge it. Rather, she wrinkles her nose and says with no small amount of disdain, “You and Niko deserve each other.”
She laughs again, an ethereal, twinkling sound, that heightens the cold rush of blood past my ears.
“I have no allegiance to him,” the woman says gently as if I’ve somehow cast my thoughts aloud. “In fact, there is no one in the world I despise more than the King of Carrion.”
“Have you not spent the entirety of your life cowering in the shadows?”
“What would a spoiled, selfish, monster know about—” “Everything.”
But as I stare up at him, it isn’t fear that winds through me. It’s something more like velvet; like the beckoning call of the wind over a night sea.
there is something in the Carrion King my soul recognizes.
“They’ll mostly be after the children, so long as they don’t realize who you are. And let’s hope to the star above they don’t.”
“It is better to be dead than taken prisoner by a Strayed.”
“Go straight to the palace and wait for Niko inside. You can never be too careful in Letum…what does not exist one day may appear the next. It isn’t safe to wander.”
Somehow, it’s the creature I dreamed up in childhood, the one I’d imagined on all those walks home.
And now, I’m staring at some beast on my palace grounds that looks like something straight from a child’s nightmare. Ridiculous, imagined, and vicious.
“You are immune to the plague.” It isn’t a question, and Willa doesn’t answer.
How had I not looked at her face, and immediately been reminded of both my greatest mistakes?
Blood and lilies.
“You’ve seen firsthand what happens when imagination dies, Darling. The toll it takes on the world when there are no more dreams.”
“It…it kills imagination?”
The death of dreams.
“The star you fell through. Which one was it? The second from the right, perhaps?”
“The stories are all real somewhere,” I reply with a shrug. “Whether your mind or another reality, does it truly matter?”
“Do not speak that name again unless you wish to rot from the inside out,” I thunder.
Willa…Darling…Fredrik.” Her full name rings through the room, and I swear, the shadows of the island stand up and pay attention.
“I know exactly who you are because you were born for me. And now…now, I will take what’s mine.”
The name in anyone’s mouth would have startled me. It’s been years since I’ve been called by it as there’s no one left alive to remember my last name, let alone the ridiculous middle name my mother insisted on giving me.
Which means I need to get the fuck out of here before he can figure out the rest.
Only an expanse of unmarked skin, a blank canvas. Like I’ve never lived at all.
To me, there’d been an insidious selfishness beneath his charming exterior. A warning as to what happens to those who refuse to grow up.
Suspicion prickles at the base of my skull, as I realize Sam and Tiernan are nowhere to be found.
A furious gasp escapes me. There are two identical scars on either side of her spine.
You’re leaving her to her death, just like you always do. You left Celie. You left Zenni. You left them all. Selfish to the very core.
But in the same breath where my guilt lives, so does memory. Of my blood dripping onto concrete floors. Of the burn of acid on my skin. The cold sting of a scalpel. The raw ache of my throat, ragged and raw with my unending screams.
Adira’s other warning races through me as one of the children digs a small knife into the siren’s eye. It’s better to be dead than be captured by a Strayed.
It isn’t kind like Sam’s or even arrogant like the king’s: it’s manic. Rotten.
“So nice of you to finally join us, Willa Darling. We’ve been waiting ages.”
If they figure out how Willa broke through the wards and use her to lure more children here—” I cut myself off with a violent shake of my head.
“No one appreciates anyone marching through their home while they’re trying to sleep, Sam. Perhaps you could try more of a gentle walk.”
