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I couldn’t breathe. Ari wanted me to run, but I couldn’t run. My recovering legs would not get me far.
Pain fissured down my chest. Kase would hate me for it, but it was the only logical step with the fewest deaths. Taking my dagger in hand, I stepped in front of Ari. “I cannot run. But you can. Take your queen and go.”
“You must think me mad.” Ari cursed under his breath. “Run as fast as you can. I will hold them off.”
The lead sluagh laughed in a wet sound, like it had its jaws open to a rainstorm and tried to sing.
Ari flipped his sword in his grip and took out a slender dagger, aiming the point to the ground. “Be ready, and—”
A screech at our backs upended our world. More of the monsters sprinted into the clearing from the back. We were surrounded in another breath.
“We’re staying. I wouldn’t bleeding leave you anyway, you bastard,” Elise said. She withdrew a dagger from its sheath on her waist and glared at the creatures.
“The back of the skulls,” Ari shouted as two skeletal sluagh lunged for him. “Aim for the back of the head, it is how they’re killed.”
There was no choice but to slash and jab. Weak limbs be damned. My dagger struck the jutting ribs of a short sluagh. A female, perhaps. Its movements were like an underwater dance and the pitch of its cry was shrill and wretched.
The clearing became a frenzy. The sluagh swiped their rotted claws, their fangs elongated the more they unhinged their massive jaws. One sluagh slashed the skin on my shoulder. I roared in pain and rammed the point of my knife through its eyes.
Blood like rusted iron spilled down its face. The sluagh fell back and let out a few shallow breaths. No time to think, I kicked its bony hips until the body rolled face down in the soil, then I thrust my blade through the back of the skull.
A harsh wheeze slipped from the creature’s throat until the beast stilled.
I had no time to catch my breath before my body was tossed forward. Knotted branches littering the ground smashed against my nose and forehead. Sickly sweet blood soaked my tongue and my weakened limbs screamed from the blow. A sharp ache bloomed down the back of my neck, and I suspected more than one rib had cracked.
Needlelike claws tangled in my hair, pricking my skull and matting my hair in small drops of blood. With a tug, a sluagh fae wrenched my head back, and hovered its bloodless face over mine.
“Malin!” Elise screamed, but in the next moment a sluagh knocked her off her feet.
Ari went for his queen, but two creatures wrapped their arms around his legs, wrestling him to the ground. He thrashed and kicked. “Fight!” Ari roared. “Fight them!”
The sluagh gurgled another laugh in front of my face, its hot, rank breath spread over my skin like a putrid wash. My heart stuttered when the creature slid its lower jaw side to side. In a pop and crack, the hinges dropped, widening its mouth large enough it could devour the whole of my face.
I tried to scream, but the moment I opened my mouth, the sluagh inhaled. Much the same as I’d always done to steal memories.
A glimmer of something white, as if the frosts drew out smoky breaths from my mouth, slipped between us. My body shivered. My head spun in delirious thoughts. Moments of pain, of love, mostly thoughts of Kase took hold like a candle’s flame in the dark. Thoughts flickered, then began to dim the more the sluagh breathed.
I was vaguely aware of Elise gasping, of Ari shouting curses, still thrashing, and kicking against the fae.
Would it hurt to go to the Otherworld?
What are you doing, Malin?
Kase? What strength I had, I used to look to the side. An image of skinny Kase as a boy stared at me, frowning.
“What are you doing? Not even gonna fight? Thought you said you could do it.” Kase scoffed and thrust a honey stick in his mouth, his words messier when he spoke with the sweet in his teeth. “I’m not gonna drag you outta there, and I don’t wanna sleep alone. It’s bleeding cold tonight. Now get out like you said you would.”
Tears blurred my sight. This wasn’t real. This was . . . amemory.
Right before that fateful Masque av Aska, we’d gone into the townships. I swore up and down to all the waif littles in Mörplatts that I could scale the old abandoned well near the docks. Kase told me I’d get too tired and wouldn’t be able to get out.
I told him I was stronger than he thought. I was as much a fighter as him.
When the other children abandoned me, thinking I was lost in the well and Jens would need to come get me out, Kase stayed. He’d stayed until well after midnight, urging me to keep going until he could reach out his hand and pull me the rest of the way out.
I’d fought my way out of the well that night.
I’d fought my way back to Kase Eriksson.
