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But I’m already turning away, stumbling, my sodden skirts clinging to my legs, tripping me up.
“Selina!” he shouts, “Selina, come back!”
“Never!” I shout as I start to run through the woods, my hand closing around the pendant, my steps echoing inside my head. “You can go to the hells for all I care.”
He’s Fae, I repeat to myself as I make my way back to the palace.Good riddance.
5
ADAR
What inMaab’s cold tits. She tricked me.
The little human tricked the trickster.
After my ire fades into a dull throb of despair, I laugh. And laugh and laugh.
You’re a fool, I think as I painfully drag myself back to the water.You trusted her. A human. You’ve learned nothing in all your years on this earth, letting yourself be beguiled by a pretty face, a soft voice whispering kind words. You deserve this.
Diving back into the cold water provides at least some relief from the burning pain. Swimming is difficult when half your body, the one normally propelling you forward, is stiff and bleeding. Using my arms, I dive deep, where the waters are dark and opaque, and welcome the quiet, the lack of solid surface.
Don’t despair, I tell myself, as I have done for years. Getting trapped in a lake of the human world is only the last of my trials. I thought crossing over might help my cause but as it turned out, it became my prison.
And now this.
What do you do with a half-cure? Half a cure is worse than death, I’m starting to realize. My tail is agony, the fever consuming my thoughts, but there is no shift. No way to regain my legs, no way to get out of this lake.
“Are you dying?”
If the curse is not lifted, the shift not completed, yeah. Yeah, I’m dying right now.
And what is even worse is that I can’t stop thinking about her—the softness of her skin, her lips, her voice. That kiss… it started as a bargain but has ended up as something else.
Something that has consumed my thoughts, turned the cold blood running through my veins into lava. Made my imprisonment smart all the more. Made my escape all the more imperative.
But that is over. She’s gone, and I have no more leverage. What human princess in their right mind would kiss someone like me? Especially now, with the gruesome wound on my tail.
No wonder she ran.
Don’t fool yourself any longer. Closing my eyes in the murky depths of the lake, I open my arms, let myself sink deeper, into the mud.She never wanted you, never cared for you. It wasn’t the wound that sent her running. It’s who you are. What you are.
Half-man and half-fish. No, not even that. Fae. You’re Fae and she hates your kind. You’re too strange for her, would have been, even without the fishtail. Your ears may not be too much, but you’re magical, steeped in fearsome legends.
My kind has hurt her kind over and over, and though the Sundering made sure we live apart—perhaps for the best, seeing how we butchered each other during the Great War—whenever we meet, we manage to hurt each other.
We’re too similar.
Too violent.
Too passionate.
Too emotional.
Which is why I’m here, floating at the bottom of the lake, hitting the end of my luck, the end of the rope, not sure anymore which way is up.
If only I could drown… but I can’t do even that, gills behind my ears ensuring that I breathe underwater just fine.
Such irony.
