The Fae Queen's Captive (Peculiar Tastes, #6)

by Sierra Simone

I’ve learned the hard way that insatiable girls don’t get happily ever afters. They eat their way through lovers and friends too heartily—and that they also want to be eaten alive, their blood drunk and their bones cracked open, is irrelevant.

Insatiable girls stay alone. Insatiable girls settle for living by proxy, for craving and wanting and shoving those wants down where they won’t scare anyone away.

I don’t like all this mortal talk. Because—well, look: after spending the past six years dissecting medieval narratives about demons and witches, I’m hardly one to jump into Satanic Panic mode, but there are a lot of the right ingredients here. I’m being carried off from a pagan tomb on Halloween night by attractive but possibly sociopathic strangers, and they’re talking about queens and mortals, and oh god—I’m going to die, I’m really going to die, and it’s not even going to be while I’m having an irresponsible but murder-podcast-worthy good time…

“I mean it, Janneth. Some lovers might enjoy gifts of jewels and gold, others might want ballads or praise, but I have no need of those things. Instead, I want to see inside you. I want every ugly secret and thwarted hope; I want whatever makes you flush and squirm and hate yourself at night. I suppose it might be because, in the most literal sense, people have always been able to see inside me, but it could just as easily be that I’m more than a little sadistic. Whatever the reason, you need not treat your humiliations as things that will diminish what I feel for you. Your trust in showing them to me will feed me, delight me, because you delight me. It is like seeing your heart naked, or your mind naked, and I think as I’ve established earlier today, I like seeing you naked very much.”

“I want things too much,” I say simply. “So I had to stop. If not the wanting, then the wanting where everyone could see. It exhausted people, but it exhausted me too, you know? I hated feeling so needy, so gross, like some kind of vampire that couldn’t quench her thirst no matter how much she drained from the world around her.”

“You should never be less than yourself.”

Packed like Walt Disney World in July.