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They spin us around to face each other, with only the tall pole separating us. Our gazes cling as they hook the chains shackling my brother’s wrists with mine overhead, then slice the clothes from our backs. Two humans stand behind each of us, the rods primed in their hands.

My brother’s blue eyes glitter, not with fear but relief. Lark is safe. That’s why.

I know that feeling well. Juniper will get her cure. She’ll live, and so will that little sapling inside her. That’s all I give a shit about.

If I never see her again…touch her again…

Cerulean stares at me with a somber grin, one loaded with trust.

Like a brother. Like family.

My throat swells as I bunch our fingers into a fist, lean sideways past the pole, and press my forehead to his.

The first combined iron lash jolts us toward one another, but we keep staring, keep watching each other.

The second lash sends fire across my back. My teeth grind, and my flesh singes, and my fingers strain with Cerulean’s as we hold on.

The third lash cleaves through, shredding my skin. Cerulean bites his blue lip until it bleeds. I imagine our bodies torn to ribbons, because this is The Dark Fables, and it’s a vicious world. Things rip easily here. And some of those things can’t be mended.

The tenth lash makes it impossible to hold back. Skin and sinew go up in flames. I can’t tell if Cerulean screams first, or if it’s me.

Then I think about a face I’ve never seen, a small figure I’ve never met.

Juniper’s green hair and my brown eyes. Juniper’s intelligence and my smirk. Juniper’s voice and my antlers.

And by the thirteenth lash, I know. It will be a girl.

20

My eyes crack open, crud sticking to the grooves. A cold, hard surface is mashed against my face. Rancidness gushes into my nostrils, the odor of barbecued skin so potent it slaps me awake.

I’m slumped on my side, lying in a heap on a steel floor. Reflexively, I flop onto my back.

The second I do, fire scalds my flesh, incinerating me from the outside in. My back screeches as though it’s been used as a whetstone for blades. Agony sucks the oxygen from my lungs one second before I’m seething and cursing the universe.

I roll to my side again, dry heaving onto the floor. Every movement scalds like fuck. Every inhale tugs on that pain. My skin feels as if it’s been poached like an egg, and my shoulder throbs as though it’s been mauled by a grizzly mama bear, clawed and gnawed to a bloody pulp.

Between the snare and the whipping, the humans had done an expert job on the husk I’d once called a body. Lucky for me, I hadn’t rotated onto the wrong side and killed my bad shoulder. Red craters pit into that area, the sight resurrecting the memory of that trap I’d fallen into.

For a while, I stay put. The lash marks blister, and the iron teeth marks throb. Then like a miracle, a chilled breeze sweeps across my skin, icing what’s left of my carcass and dulling the burn. The wind’s presence reminds me I wasn’t alone in that market square.

Groaning, I haul my upper body off the ground. My gaze stumbles across the tattered blue wings splayed a few feet away, the plumes sagging over a crumpled form. A tapered ear peeks from Cerulean’s midnight hair, he’s as bare-chested as I am, and his face is twisted in the opposite direction.

Panic hits me until I see his chest rising and falling. He’s alive.

On the flip side, we might as well be sealed in a catacomb. Darkness pours around us, the ebony sky spanning my vision and shrouding chunks of the scenery.

The faint slopes of a vale rise on either side, with briers coiling up the inclines and a small creek trickling nearby. From what I can make out, I’ve never seen this part of Reverie Hollow. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time here since The Trapping. Over the years, I’ve usually lured humans by playing my cello from inside The Solitary Forest.

If I had to guess, this is an unfamiliar section of the woods where I’d gotten snared as a stripling. That’s about all I can tell. Where we are in relation to the place I’d met Juniper, the market square where I’d lost half my hide, and the fields stretching between our world and the mortal realm is unclear.

How long have we been here?

My eyes stray over the rail of bars enclosing us, each one giving off the corrosive smell of iron. Four walls. Bolted door. Seems history is repeating itself, though nine years ago, it had been a set of jowls for me.

My brother was the one they’d locked up. He’s been terrified of cages ever since.

Wincing, I sit up and glance his way. The quarter moon hovering beyond the cage illuminates one high cheekbone. For a minute, I’d thought the cool wind blowing onto my skin had been my brother’s doing, but I’m wrong.