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Iopenedmyeyesto total darkness. Where was I? Instead of lying on the ground, I was on my feet, swaying with disorientation.
Stretching out both arms in front of me, I took a tentative step. And another. Then I stopped. The ground below me was uneven and soft, as if I was walking on a grassy surface that hid bumps and holes. I didn’t want to hurt myself while I figured out how to get out of this place.
“Daeary? Dyf?” I whispered. Then I listened.
Something rustled. I closed my eyes and sent my magic into the ground. Maybe that might give me a clue to where I was.
My eyes flew open, and I whimpered in abject terror. What I was sensing was so bizarre, so terrifying, I clutched my head, wondering if I was losing my mind.
Because what my power told me was that I stood on dead bodies, thousands of cadavers a hundred feet deep.
“WE MEET AT LAST.”
I whirled around, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. It echoed, seeming to dance around me, never allowing me to determine the origin.
“Who are you?” I hated how my voice trembled.
“I AM CEGID Y BWLCH. THE FAE CALL ME THE GAPING MAW, THE DEVOURER, THE END OF TIMES.”
Why did the guy sound like some kind of super villain? His words were so bizarre, so over the top, that I stifled a snicker. “How do you want me to call you? The Devourer? Or do you have a first name like, I don’t know, Steve? Steve, the Devourer?”
I didn’t expect a response, and my dose of courage drained away as quickly as it had arrived. “What do you want from me?”
There was no answer. My breathing sped up and my heart fluttered in my chest as the silence reminded me of what I was standing on. Hugging myself, I rocked on my heels, but my attempts to distract myself didn’t work.
I was so far inside my head that I didn’t notice at first how the darkness lightened. One moment I couldn’t see my hand in front of my eyes, the next I distinguished shapes as the blackness faded to gray.
“You still there, Steve?”
The silence pressed on my eardrums until I wanted to cover them and rub. Instead, I hummed a few notes of a pop song. I didn’t even know what it was—fragments of my old life, before the weirdness had caught up with me and left me all stranded in the Fae realm.
“I HAVE SLEPT FOR A THOUSAND YEARS. NOW MY TIME HAS COME.”
The voice hit me with such force that I stumbled back and lost my balance. I fell on my butt, my hand reaching down.
The darkness had lifted so much I saw what I was touching, and then I wished it was still pitch dark. My hand had landed on a dead man’s face. His eyes stared at me accusingly as my fingers slipped past his lips and entered his mouth, feeling his hard teeth and soft tongue. It was the grossest thing I could ever imagine.
I screamed and whipped my hand back, wiping it against my pants. Then I scooted away, struggling to get up, but I couldn’t find my balance. Tearing my eyes away from the awful sight, I rolled to my other side, hoping to find my feet.
Next to me, a man with white skin and long, tangled black hair lay without moving. The fire in Daeary’s eyes was long extinguished, and his mouth gaped open, showing his incisors. My hand flew to my mouth as I stifled a sob.
I didn’t want to look any further, but my gaze was drawn to the next corpse. I only recognized him by his familiar white-blond hair and the rotten fish tail below his waist. There was nothing left of Dyf’s handsome features.
Bleddyn was curled up, clutching Dyf’s fingers, his head twisted against the merman’s shoulder as if he was asleep. Next to him was Than. I’d imagined his death in my darkest moments, the agony he’d suffered as the hounds tore him to pieces. His huge chest was mangled, his ribs showing, and his face contorted with pain.
None of this was true. Only a short time ago, I’d walked between Dyf and Daeary. These corpses had been here longer than a few days, judging by the level of decomposition. I was dreaming, or maybe I’d hit my head and I was hallucinating.
But no matter how I tried to reason with myself, it felt so damn real. My hand moved forward of its own accord, as if my body needed to touch the men next to me to confirm whether they were real or not.
But before I could make contact, the booming voice started up again. It echoed inside my head, whirling like a physical force around me, enveloping me in a shroud of carnage and decay.
“THE SUN’S FLAME WANES AS A BEAST STIRS IN THE ABYSS, THREATENING ETERNAL SHADOW UPON HUMAN AND FAE ALIKE. NO WOMAN, NEITHER FAE-BORN NOR HUMAN, CARRIES WITHIN HER THE KEY TO THE REALMS’ SURVIVAL OR THEIR DOOM.”
Pressing my hands against my ears, I screamed, “Stop! I don’t want to hear it! Go away!”
But the words kept repeating over and over until my brain felt like it would ooze out of my ears. As I sank back into darkness, the devourer’s final words followed me.
“THOU WILL NOT STOP ME, WENCH.”
