Page 129 of A Courage of the Chosen

It grows as it soars through the air, lengthening at my command. Raghnall dives out of the way and Tavish steps aside as it harpoons through the chest of three Dorche soldiers. Their bodies splinter, disintegrating into blackened corpses that collapse in a shapeless heap on the ground.

Raghnall looks at where his men once stood, puzzled at first, then furious that his feared army has a flaw.

Me.

I don’t take pleasure in killing, in fact it makes me nauseous if I think about it for too long, but that felt really fucking good. And the picture of Raghnall’s face will be worth the inevitable guilt I’ll feel later.

“Get off your horse right now,” Callahan makes the demand to me as he dismounts.

One of the guards takes the reins, leading Mabel and Callahan’s horse into the shelter of the trees, away from what’s about to happen, before he returns to take Brodie and Rach’s as well.

The soldiers around me stay on horseback, a line of steel and mist between us and the Dorche already on foot before us.

Callahan and Brodie stand at the front. Two immovable objects that they’re going to have to get around to get to us.

Unlike last time, Callahan doesn’t hesitate to wield his magic. All of it.

Raghnall watches the light crackling through his mist with amused eyes. “Freya was always too spirited for what I needed. Not quite as moldable as my Ailsa. I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t the first to catch my eye, but I decided your aunt was a better fit.”

Tavish scowls at his father as he reveals this truth, mouth clamped shut in barely restrained violence. His father pays him no attention and continues to mock Callahan. “It seems I picked the wrong twin after all.”

Callahan points his sword at Raghnall, his hand steady and his voice fierce. “Keep my mother’s name out of your mouth.”

“Fine. But I make no promises for her flesh.” Raghnall hunches over, and his Seelie form melts away as he becomes something else entirely. The thing that has always lived inside him. A being that’s part-Brollachan, part-monster, and thoroughly hellish.

They took what was not theirs, turning it into something that should not exist.

The Druid’s words slam into me.

Raghnall was the person they were talking about. He took something from Ruival and turned it into this. Whatever corruption strips Seelie of their choice, their very sense of self, comes from him.

Blackened, scale-like skin replaces the smooth tan features he possessed a second ago. His body grows until it’s almost double the size of the man he was, putting this thing at over ten feet tall.

Where the Brollachan are all skin and bone, Raghnall’s beast is pure muscle, and it ripples as he continues to shift.

His mouth elongates into something similar to that of a wolf, and his teeth become long dark canines, built for tearing flesh and ending lives. His fingers arch into five-inch serrated claws, dripping with shadows.

And his eyes? His eyes become black, bottomless pools, with irises of deep burning hazel that shine bright like hot coal. Disturbingly, my crown is still nestled on his head. Perched between the two horns that have sprouted from his skull, with pointed ends that curl back on themselves.

The painting in the gallery at the palace, the eyes I saw within the shadows in Granny’s memory of the day she fled her home . . . it was all him.

The face of the king that everyone knew was a mask to hide who he truly is. A creature that not even the worst of my nightmares could conjure.

This is what Erin saw, the monster that took her mother away and then made an eight-year-old child run for miles to deliver his message.

Raghnall lifts a now-giant hand, points it directly at me, and speaks one word in a voice that’s utterly inhuman and entirely unholy. “Kill.”

His guards spill out around him, descending on us in a torrent of swords and corrupted magic, while Tavish chooses to remain in the middle of the path.

I lose sight of Callahan and Brodie as they’re the first to meet the Dorche, and I have little time to worry for them as we’re overrun. The guards on horseback do the best they can, but the Dorche are fast, and a few of them manage to slip through to where Rach and I are waiting in a crouch, weapons raised.

They’re stronger than the last time we met them in battle, and the first clang of my sword against theirs rattles through my teeth.

They don’t wait on the fringes to taunt and pick holes in our defense, and Rach and I are swarmed by multiple enemies at once as I deploy every ounce of fighting knowledge I have to avoid the blades and magic that come for me. Under Tavish’s control, they’re smarter and more calculated in how they attack, altering their approach to the fight based on their opponent, and making them more dangerous than they’ve ever been.

They work out that I tend to leave my right side vulnerable, and that Rach relies on their momentum to counter their movements. They use their shadows to fight our mist as they aim for our bodies with their weapons.

The rain comes down harder, turning the ground into an enemy in its own right. If it’s not moss, it’s mud, or slick stone trying to trip me. Rach slips down, falling to her knees.