Page 219 of Bedeviled

Hate is too soft a word for the burning in my belly when I look at her. When I think of what she’s taken from me.

But despite her efforts, she hasn’t taken this life. She hasn’t taken Memnon.

Nero creeps forward, his lips curling back in a snarl, and I think he, too, must remember the age-old vendetta between us.

Eislyn’s eyes flick to my panther, then back to me.

“I’ll admit, I didn’t expect you to live,” she says.

“If you didn’t want me to survive you, then you shouldn’t have given me lilac wine,” I say, my attention divided between her blade and her eyes.

The fairy gives me a sly smile. “I wanted to know what I was working with. Now I do.”

She lunges at me then.

I draw my dagger in one fluid movement, but I have to fall back to block her strike.

Her blade crashes against mine, her sword longer and heavier than my weapon. I feel the force of the hit up my arm, and I have to grit my teeth to hold my position.

She shoves at me hard, and I stumble back. Only she keeps coming, and her movements are different from what muscle memory predicts. She swings, jabs, and I am barely deflecting each strike.

Clearly Eislyn trained in another time and place. And she has undoubtedly had more years to practice her skills than I have. But she didn’t factor in my familiar.

My panther prowls forward and swipes out a paw. His claws gouge through her leather and sink into her calves.

Eislyn cries out, her form wobbling, and I use the opening to throw a weak wad of magic at her wrist.

The hit is powerful enough to dislodge her grip on her weapon, and the sword tumbles to the ground.

She lets her guard down then, when she lunges for her weapon, and I use the opening to drive my own dagger forward, where her leather armor doesn’t quite cover her underarm.

Steel sinks into flesh, parting it like butter, and I push a small burst of my power out to guide my blade between ribs.

Eislyn screams, her form crumpling against the attack. Defensively, she flings out a burst of magic. The spell hits me in the chest, sending me staggering, and as I fall back, my dagger jerks wetly out of the wound, ripping it open further.

Eislyn screams again, and the sound is not the cry of an opponent but of a creature in great pain.

She covers the wound and throws yet more magic at me. I don’t have time to duck out of the way, but there’s hardly a hiss from her spell before it breaks apart against my ward.

My eyes move where her magic dissolves in the rain to the sword in Eislyn’s hands once more.

“You’re weak,” I say, astounded. It is a revelation.

Eislyn has been omnipotent for so long in my mind and in my memory, so larger-than-life, that I assumed her power was endless. But it’s not. Perhaps it’s quite the opposite.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve only rarely seen her use her magic and why now she chooses to fight predominately with a blade rather than spells.

Perhaps it’s partly why she needed so many powerful supernaturals to fight for her, and why, even with them and her small claim to the throne, she still couldn’t take it. And maybe it’s why, at the first sign that she was losing the fight at the palace, Eislyn fled here, to her refuge on Earth.

“Your strength was always in scheming,” I continue as Eislyn begins to circle me. I mirror her movements. “You were a weak younger daughter of a king, destined to be married off or pushed out of the palace by your more powerful siblings. But you were ruthless and cunning, and you made an attempt at grabbing the throne when the fae least expected it, just as you tried to again today.”

However, when it came down to it, despite all the centuries of scheming and planning, in the end, Eislyn was just a little too hasty, a little too human.

She bares her teeth at me and rushes forward.

It’s a thrill to finally, finally see the unshakable fae lose her shit, and more satisfying still to stop her.

Our blades crash against one another again, and the two of us stare each other down. The wound beneath her armpit is bleeding profusely. Even with a sword as large as hers, she won’t be able to hold me back for long.