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“I got it.”
My arm feels like it weighs a hundred pounds. My eyes still closed, I reach out blindly, a cold sweat breaking out on my brow as I search for Nine’s vial. He murmurs directions that filter in like white noise. I tune him out. When the back of my hand knocks into something that feels like glass against my leather glove, I fumble around until I’ve got it in my grasp.
There’s no lid. I try not to spill any of the precious water as I drag it to my lips and tip the contents back. A tiny stream dribbles out of the corner of my mouth where I missed. At least I get some.
It’s the cleanest, most crisp water that I’ve ever tasted—and I’m not just saying that because I feel like garbage. It’s a mouthful, if that, but it’s enough. It rinses the horrible taste away from my mouth, moistening my dry tongue, and getting rid of the pointy, pinchy pain at the back of my throat.
The pounding in my head subsides a little, too. The headache is still there, my stomach still angry and empty, but at least I can finally open my eyes—barely. Just a sliver in my face, enough to look up and see the dark expression on Nine’s face.
“Why did you do this to me?”
“What do you think I have done?”
Pulling myself into a sitting position, cracking my eyes open a little wider in time to watch Nine as he pointedly avoids Rys’s lantern, I point across the narrow sewer.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. It was your stupid peach that made me puke up my guts,” I say accusingly. “Were you trying to poison me, or was that just a lucky side effect?”
“Peach?” echoes Nine. “I didn’t give you any peach.”
“Someone did. It was under the blanket you left behind.”
“I left nothing. It wasn’t possible for me to. The shadows have kept you hidden and, after the cemetery, I thought I should give you your space. It took me until just now to find you.”
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. It had to be Nine. Because, if it wasn’t, where the hell did that demon peach come from? As sick as it made me, I decided it had to be a terrible coincidence because Nine would never knowingly hurt me. But if he didn’t leave it—
“Where is the peach?” he asks roughly.
“It’s over there,” I tell him. I try to push myself up off the ground and fail miserably. My legs are wobbly, my arms too weak, and I collapse in a heap before I’ve climbed a few inches off of the ground. I gesture at the flickering flames in the lantern. “Take that if you need help.”
Nine throws a dark look at the lantern. “I recognize the fire. Let me guess. It’s another gift from Rys?” A muscle tics along the edge of his smooth alabaster jaw as he clenches his teeth. “He found you first.”
Yeah, well, that much is obvious.
A second later, I pick up on what Nine said and I have to swallow again to keep the bile from rising up in my raw and aching throat.
“Another?” I say. The word comes out like a croak. I swallow one more time, pushing back the taste of spoiled fruit that returned with a vengeance. “Do you think he’s the one who left the peach for me? Why would he want to poison me?”
Nine doesn’t answer me right away. Neither does he grab the lantern or take it with him as he starts to search along the dark edge of the sewer wall. He doesn’t need it. After a few seconds, he bends down. When he straightens, I see the half-eaten peach grasped loosely between his long, slender fingers.
He holds it up, his silver eyes dimming to a dark, gun-metal gray as he glares at it. “I’m not so sure he did.”
I don’t like the way he said that. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That he—” Nine stops there, shakes his head, then starts again. “It’s a very old faerie trick. Think of Hades and Persephone, the story of the pomegranate. Feeding a human faerie food is a sure way to force them into Faerie.”
My stomach—already so messed up—drops. “What?”
“If a human tastes faerie food, they won’t be able to survive without it. Human food won’t satisfy you ever again. If you want to keep from starving, you’ll have to go to Faerie and stay there.”
“What?”
I can feel the niggle of panic as it begins to come to life. One positive to being this freaking sick is that I don’t have the strength to fall into another attack. It still sucks. All around me, the air grows heavy. It’s hard to breathe.
I want to scream.
And I thought it was bad when I saw the wriggly little worm and had a freak-out that I almost ate it. Now he’s saying I’m gonna have to go to Faerie because I was too hungry to resist the gift of the peach?
Oh, hell no.
