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I try not to stare. I thought I saw it all, between the pixie and the nix, the redcap and the trolls… Nope. There are creatures locked up in this prison that I can’t even try to figure out what they are. Some of them kind of look human—like the fae—but when I pass this childlike creature with triangle ears and a fox tail, I actually stop to get a better look.
It’s so cute—until it snaps its teeth at me and I jump so high, I nearly impale myself on Dusk’s sword when I land again.
He doesn’t reach to steady me. Since it would burn the crap out of his hand if he did, Dusk steps back, lowering his sword while I try to calm myself down.
“Be grateful that I’m assigning you to another wing,” he says. “I could’ve left you with the other lower races. Remember my generosity, human. You won’t be getting much of it from anyone else.”
A chill runs up and down my spine. He means it, too. No one from Faerie can lie, which is the single advantage that I have as a human.
“Where am I going?” I ask. “Is it much further?”
The prison is huge. I only saw a glimpse of it as Bram let me out of the caravan, but it looks like a stadium from the outside surrounded by a looming gate. There must be room for hundreds of cells in here and I feel like I’ve passed most of them already.
“The queen keeps traitors and betrayers in their own wing when she doesn’t prefer them for her statues. She loves her gardens so the cells are usually empty. There’s only one other prisoner along that row. It’s perfect to tuck away an errant human. Saxon was right. This is brilliant.”
He thinks so. I think I’m pretty much screwed.
“Keep moving. Three more wings until we reach yours.”
Each section of the prison is separated by some kind of glass partition that only disappears when Dusk murmurs a foreign world. It kind of sounds like he’s saying pad-something, but even in my head, I can’t mimic his accent right. The clear door dissipates in a shower of silver sparkles, reforming the instant we step through.
More magic.
I count the doors from that point on. Not because I have any hope of escaping, but because I just want this part of the nightmare to be over with. I’m going to jail. No way around it right now. I thought I could maybe get away from Bram while we traveled here, but I didn’t. Now I’m stuck.
Once we pass through four more sections, we arrive in an empty wing. And I mean empty. None of the cells are full.
Wasn’t there supposed to be another prisoner here? At least one more?
I didn’t want to be stuck with the catcalling inmates, but I don’t want to be all on my own, either. Not with the guard’s threat—You’ll change your mind. I’ll enjoy ensuring that you do...—bouncing around my brain.
“This one will be yours.” Dusk moves in front of the first cell on the left. He waves his hand in front of the closed door with its narrow bars. It springs open. “Get in.”
I don’t have a choice. Before he can tell me again, I step inside the cell—and gasp when the heavy cuffs just fall away from my wrists, landing on the floor with a clank an instant before my cell door slams shut behind me.
2
Once I’m locked inside my cell, Dusk leaves me with a promise that he’ll see me again. I purposely kept my back to him, hoping he would go away. As soon as he’s gone, I rub my wrists and marvel at what just happened.
My hands are finally free again.
Okay. So that was weird. The iron cuffs had been locked in place for three days, ever since the fae captain ordered me to put them on. I was beginning to think that I’d be stuck wearing them forever. One step inside of my cell, though, and they’re off.
Not only that, but they’re gone.
I tap the cement-colored floor of my cell. My boot echoes against it. Tap, tap, tap. I think it’s stone. It’s definitely not quicksand or anything like that, but as soon as the handcuffs hit the floor, they seemed to just melt into it.
Super weird.
I turn around. Just because I’d be an idiot not to, I reach for my cell bars and give them a jingle. The door is locked—of course it is—and I pull back, observing them closely. When the pair of dwarves sold me to the redcap at the Faerie market, I was tossed into a cage before I was put up on the auction block. It was small and cramped and made completely of iron.
My cell… is different.
It’s bigger, for one thing. All of them are. And while it’s obvious that the bars are made of iron, it’s only a narrow sliver of the metal encased in… glass? Crystal? I’m not sure. It’s hard and it’s cool and it has to be some kind of protection for the fae guards from the iron that traps the prisoners behind the bars.
Inside, the cell has a small cot with a blanket and a pillow on it. The only other thing in the room is a rectangle that’s about three feet wide and seven feet high. It looks like it’s made of the same kind of glass or crystals as the bars except they’re frosted instead of clear.
Veron had something like that in the room he gave me in his palace. It’s part toilet, part sink, part shower. You step inside and it… it knows what you want. I don’t know how. Magic? That seems to be the answer for everything in this place. I’m so relieved my cell has one. I can get clean, at least, and if I never have to drop my pants and squat outside in the grass again, it might not be so bad.
