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I yank off my leather jacket. It’s the only thing I can think to do. Rushing toward Dusk, I try to beat the flames out.
It doesn’t work.
It’s almost like I’m fanning them, instead. Even as the leather beats down on them, the fire bounces back, glowing hotter, burning brighter. In the middle of it, Dusk hunches over, trying to break out of the circle of flames. He can’t. Something is keeping him inside of it.
He doesn’t go down. How is he still standing? The fact that he’s being burned alive is so much worse, especially when I know that I did it. But how was I supposed to know that a tiny flame like that would turn into this?
I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t.
Beneath the terror of his screams—and mine, too—I hear the same high-pitched trill of an alarm that sounded the day Siúcra went on lockdown. I don’t know how the prison knows that something is wrong, but it does, and I’m so damn glad when both sides of the wing open, Seelie and Unseelie guards pouring toward my cell.
Dusk’s shadowy curtain is gone. As soon as the fire hit him, he lost control of it and it vanished. That’s a good thing. The guards immediately can see what’s happening and they separate: Unseelie hanging back while the handful of Seelie guards run forward.
Since my leather jacket isn’t doing anything to help, I ball it up and throw it across the cell. I drop to the ground, covering my head as I throw my body against the wall nearest to me right as the guards rush the cell.
They put the fire out. Because it’s a Seelie power, it takes three different Light Fae to corral the flames before they can extinguish them completely. As soon as the last flicker dies, Dusk drops to the floor.
His face looks like putty. His hair has been burned to his scalp, a few stray fringes still red with embers along the edge. The fire burned his clothes right off, destroying all of his pale flesh. He’s covered in ash.
And he’s still alive.
As the Unseelie guards trade places with the Seelie, wrapping him in a cocoon of shadows to stabilize him, I hear one of the guards shout that he’s calling for the healer. Another says to prepare a portal.
I begin to tremble in relief.
It didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill him.
He survived the fire, but based on the damage it did to him, he probably wished he hadn’t. The glimpse I caught of Dusk will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The promise of retribution is clear. Every guard who throws angry looks my way warns me that I might not really have that much of a long one left.
I expect immediate retaliation. I’m a prisoner who just set a guard on fire. It doesn’t matter that it was self-defense. I’m human. Dusk is fae.
I’m dead.
To my surprise, no one lays a hand on me. And I know it probably has everything to do with the fact that they don’t want to be burned next—not even from the faerie fire, but because that’s what happens when a human doesn’t give permission—but as soon as they whisk Dusk away to the healers, two Seelie guards stay behind to watch me while the rest leave my wing.
I don’t recognize them. They look at me with murder in their eyes, but they stay on the other side of the cell bars. I don’t even care. I curl up in a ball in the corner, too shaken to get up and sit on my cot.
We’re waiting for something. I don’t know what, but it all makes sense when the doors whoosh open again much later and another two Seelie come striding toward my cell.
One of them is Vale. The other?
Captain Helix.
Yeah. I’m dead dead.
With a slash of his hand, Helix springs my cell open. There’s a scorch mark in the middle of the floor, a perfect ring where the fire kept Dusk its prisoner. It’s the only remainder of the blaze that I set loose from Rys’s lantern. Even the tiny metal cage is gone.
Helix’s gaze could bore holes into the stone floor where he takes in the scorch mark. He blows air through his nose before lifting his head, his golden eyes zeroing straight on me next.
“Explain yourself, human.”
How?
“It was an accident—” I try.
“It was faerie fire,” he says, interrupting me with a harsh huff. “Where did you get faerie fire from?”
