AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She buried the dagger into the open cavern of her chest. Blood had coated her neck, splashed up onto her face. It drenched the dagger completely and began to drip from the hem of her long dress, the entire front of it now dark and wet.
When her other hand reached in past her snapped sternum, she finally fell to her knees. Our eyes met as her arm shook, before she violently ripped her heart out of her chest. Then she slumped to the side before collapsing onto her front and going still, the dagger clattering to the bloody floor, her blood-coated hand still clutching her heart, long talons piercing the muscle.
I exhaled slowly when she stopped moving, my own heart beating hard. But on my next breath, the air grew icy cold. It carried the taste of blood, but it felt like frost was coating my mouth, my throat, all the way down to my insides. I clutched my neck, trying to stop the sensation of icicles stabbing through my skin, and for a few seconds it felt like I was going to be frozen solid. Like my very organs and bones were turning to ice.
Then it stopped.
I looked down at myself, not sure what to expect. I looked the same.
But when I looked at the Carlin’s lifeless body, I finally felt my emotions returning. Cold, vindictive fury made me step closer to her corpse. My gaze fixed on the exposed nape of her neck, the ends of her white hair already weighed down by the blood soaking into it from the floor.
Being careful not to step in the growing pool around her so I didn’t get it on my father’s boots, I reached down and pressed my fingertips to the base of her skull.
I didn’t fully know what I was doing. I wasn’t thinking. Some other instinct was guiding me, one fuelled by the years of torment and abuse, by the memories of what she had done to Ash, by the knowledge of what she had done to my father, and to Sloga, and to all the Folk she had forced me to kill for her.
Her hand twitched around her heart.
“A belsmith too, Unseelie King?”
I looked up to see Ankou standing there, arms crossed and face hidden under his wide-brimmed hat. His cusith stood beside him, braided tail wagging as he looked up at his owner excitedly. When Ankou gave a tiny nod, the hound lunged forward to begin lapping up the Carlin’s blood.
“I was just about to take her,” Ankou said, nodding at the Carlin when her head lifted an inch off the ground. “Do you plan to keep her here like this? Neither dead nor alive? I wouldn’t blame you.”
I lifted my hand and stepped away to stand beside him as the Carlin slowly pushed herself up with trembling limbs. Her eye was swivelling madly in its socket, but it was no longer a bright blue, now milky and pale. Her skin was grey. Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly like a suffocating fish.
We both watched her in silence. She couldn’t stand, only got as far as keeping one hand pressed to the floor, resting heavily on her hip. The gaping hole of her chest didn’t rise and fall with any breaths. Ankou’s death hound lifted his head and snapped his teeth at her, muzzle coated in blood, before he slunk back to his master’s side. A low growl vibrated in his throat as he kept his hackles raised.
“Not for long,” I told Ankou, then stepped forward to crouch in front of the Carlin, the toes of my boots just an inch from the pool of blood that surrounded her. I nodded at the heart still clasped in her shaking hand and saw her eye dart to it.
“Eat it,” I said quietly.
Her face was already dead, but I still saw a tiny spark of terror flare in her pale eye as she lifted the heart to her mouth, still unable to disobey. I stood and stepped back to rejoin Ankou, and we watched in silence as she consumed her own heart, bit by bit, bronze teeth sinking into blood-soaked muscle. She choked with every bite.
Once the last mouthful was gone, I finally turned to Ankou.
“Now you can take her,” I told him.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ash
Something woke me.
The room was still and dark as my eyes flew open, as I was ripped abruptly from sleep, seemingly by nothing.
Nothing moved, nothing happened, but it was like… a ripple in the air. And somehow, I instinctively knew that it was coming from far away. From the other side of the forest. From unseelie.
I was already scrambling out of bed, my heart pounding hard, when I felt a tingling sensation on my left shoulder. I tried to peer down at it, but the room was too dark for me to see clearly. Almost tripping over my own feet, I ran into the bathroom. The candles flared to life with a soft sound, illuminating the space.
I skidded to a stop in front of the sink and stared at my reflection in the mirror. The oath etched into my left shoulder—the one I’d made when I vowed to kill the Carlin—was fading before my eyes until it was just a pale cross like the one in the centre of my chest.
She’d died before I could fulfil it. She was dead.
The Carlin was dead.
My hands slipped off the sink as I stared at that faded mark. She was dead.
The person who had ordered my parents to be killed was dead. The person who’d abused and tormented Lonan for his entire life was dead.
