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"Please? No, Fahad. No begging will save you. I offer you this..."
I reach down and pick up the pistol he dropped.
"You can't shoot me. But it’ll work on you."
He looks at it for a long while, and then he shakes his head.
"I can't go back to hell. Iwon't."
I shrug.
"It's one hell or another."
Fahad spits putrid saliva at my feet.
"Do your worst, you fucking monster.”
"My worst? No, Fahad. Even you don't deserve that. I'll give you nightmares ofboredom.”
Fahad shies away from my touch, but my tentacles take hold of his head. The dreams pour from me into him. His eyes glaze over and roll back into his skull. Then he falls to the ground and twitches for a while.
I take a moment and shiver. Bile rises in my throat.
“Oh, gods. I got them all over me. You two! Water!”
My tentacles also taste what they touch. The Sluagh don’t taste good. There’s weird old corpse slime all over me.
Kyran shudders and looks away.
“It’s been awhile,” he says. “Old Fahad looked shocked when he saw what was under your coat.”
“Most people assume I have legs,” I tell him. “The other tentacles I always keep up my sleeves. People see the green hands, and my green face, and they assume I’m more or less human. It’s insulting.”
"Where’d you send him?" he asks, unable to stop his curiosity.
"To an empty room, where he waits and waits. He'll sleep for days, but it’ll feel like years. Once he wakes, he’ll always fear sleep. And of course, the dreams will never leave him."
“That’s awful. Ihatewaiting.”
“Everyone does.”
Soren and the other soldiers rush forward with bottles of water to rinse my soiled tentacles off.
We go home with no new guns tonight.
My father won’t be happy.
“My strongest son,and somehow the least valuable,” my father says. “You have returned without the guns we need to keep us alive.”
His voice is cold and imperious. He sits on his gleaming silver throne and glares at me. His head is that of a lion, and his arms end with long, sharp claws on his furry fingertips. Wings fold neatly behind him. His throne is made to hold him comfortably, as most chairs are not. “Weneededthose guns. Jarrad never returned empty handed. Not once."
Here we go. Jarrad, the savior. Jarrad, the popular and charming and handsome. Jarrad, the perfect son. I've heard it before. I'm tired of hearing it.
Damn, Fahad.I’d give anything to know what the Oleanders promised him. It couldn’t just be money.
But my father didn't have a throne of silver brought over from our demesnes in Faerie so he could sit and behappyabout things. That's not what thrones are for. Thrones are for shitting on people.
And there's no one he loves to shit on more than me.
