Grave Visions (Alex Craft, #4)(97)

“What is the meaning of this, planeweaver?” the queen bellowed, but she wasn’t doing much better at regaining her feet than I had.

I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t even get close. “Ryese,” I managed to get out between wheezes. “Iron.”

“Impossible. I killed my nephew with my own hands.”

I shook my head. “Glitter,” I said, not sure she’d understand. But Falin would. Then I turned, trying to touch the burning line radiating across my shoulder blades. My gloves came away with a thin band of blood. My blood.

The dart had grazed me, nothing more, but the pain clawed at my back, the burn much more than was warranted by the grazing cut.

A cut made by an iron dart.

Shit.

Iron disrupted Faerie’s magic. It could kill a fae exposed to it for too long. In the mortal realm, touching it cut off a fae’s connection to Faerie, and drained the life-sustaining magic from their body. What happened to an already fading fae?

I had the feeling I already knew. I was so exhausted. So cold. I hurt, and not just my back. As if the iron had poisoned my very blood, the pain traveled through me like daggers dragged against my skin. And the two Deaths kept yelling at me. Or were there three now? Yes, a new one had appeared, telling me it was time for him to take my soul. At least he didn’t scream.

I could curl up in a ball in the snow and let go. Give in to the fuzzy feeling in my head, close my eyes, and sleep.

But no, if I did that, what would happen to Rianna? To Ms. B? The garden gnome? No, I had to get up. To do . . . something.

Thoughts were getting harder to string into coherent ideas. I needed to stop Ryese. I needed the queen to grant me a tie to Faerie. I needed to protect Falin. I needed to make Faerie stop screaming. . . .

That last one made me stop. The Deaths were screaming. Some of the gathered fae—those not frozen in shock—were screaming. But Faerie itself wasn’t, was it?

Not exactly, but it was in pain. I could feel it, sense the pain in unraveling layers of reality.

The dart.

I could feel the trail it had sliced through Faerie. More than that, I could feel the disturbance it still made, like a festering wound, blistering reality around it. The blowgun Ryese had smuggled the iron into Faerie in must have had some hard-core spells on it, because the iron hadn’t been doing this much damage before. Now the layers of reality felt like they were withering.

I twisted, looking for the projectile, and beside me, the queen sucked in a breath.

“Planeweaver, what? No. Someone send for a healer.” She reached for me, but her hand stopped before she touched the bare skin on my shoulder.

Falin stepped closer, his eyes wide, fear reflecting in his gaze. Then his jaw clenched and he whirled around, marching through the huddled fae and shoving them aside.

I couldn’t see the graze the dart had cut across my back, but it was barely bleeding, and couldn’t have been much more than a scratch. Still, I twisted, trying see what they saw. Unfortunately, I could. Gray tendrils spread under my skin, crawling over my shoulder.

Iron poisoning.

I stared at the graying skin. The third Death, the one that wasn’t yelling, knelt beside me.

“It’s time, Alex,” he said, holding out his hand.

I looked from him to my shoulder and then back. “You’re still not real.”

With that, I concentrated on searching for the dart again. The blisters in reality were right in front of me. It had to be in that snowdrift.

Behind me, I heard a loud yelp, and I twisted around in time to see Falin’s hand clasp around the throat of a fae. He hauled the fae off the ground, one-handed, and the fae’s hood fall back to reveal Ryese’s crystalline hair.

“Don’t kill him, my knight,” the queen said, an edge of panic in her voice as she pushed herself out of the snow. “I killed him once already today. I can’t see it again.”

Rational or not, desperate or not, a command was a command, and Falin’s killing dagger thrust stopped, inches from Ryese’s chest. The man in his arms sagged, a smug smile slithering across Ryese’s face. Oh no, he wasn’t just walking away from this.

I thrust my hand into the snowdrift, searching. More than the feel of something harder than snow, it was the sudden stabbing pain that rushed down my fingers, even through my gloves, that told me I’d found the dart. Trying to insulate it with inches of snow, I scooped it out.

The dart looked innocuous enough. Just a bit of thin, dull metal no longer than my pinkie nail. But it was far from harmless. If Ryese had managed a clean shot at the queen, and she had died, the small dart could have easily been missed, the blame for her unknown cause of death easily falling on her feared bloody hands.

Patting it into the center of a small snowball like a deadly core, I climbed to my feet. Then I had to wait a moment as my vision swam. I braced my feet, trying to avoid crashing back to my butt in the snow. Deep breath. Two.

“Falin,” I yelled.

He stopped, looking up from where he was in the process of dragging Ryese in front of the queen. The slighter man thrashed in Falin’s grasp, the smugness now absent from his face as more and more bloody, dead versions of himself appeared around the queen. For her part, the queen seemed to have forgotten everything but the multiplying bodies, her distress feeding the drug and hallucinations.

“Catch,” I yelled, tossing the snowball to Falin as gently as I could. It still crumbled as he caught it, but the dart remained cushioned in a small layer of snow.