Page 55 of A Dance with the Fae (Mistress of Magic #1)

‘You can’t stop me,’ he replied, smiling, and swept Aisha into his arms so that she lay in them like a child, bewitched.

‘I will have my lovers, human or half human; it is no matter to me. We need human blood to keep us strong. Worry not, Faye. I will keep your friend safe in my bed.’ He cast a wry glance over the half-naked, cavorting crowd.

‘Perhaps with some of these others, too. A faerie king does not like to be bored. And Murias needs stock and women ripe to nurse them when I am done with their mothers…’

Finn was no longer singing and so the drumming reached fever pitch; everyone in the crowd was leaping and screaming. Their faces were masks, and the sheen of humanity was slipping from them. They were becoming more and more bestial with every passing second.

Faye felt horrified that she had ever desired Finn so deeply.

She took out the hagstone charm from her pocket and tried to push through the energy barrier towards him.

‘You will not take her!’ Faye screamed, holding it up like a lamp in the darkness, but his power was too great and the barrier, whatever it was made of, choked her as if she was drowning.

In desperation, she threw it at him, but he caught it and jumped into the middle of the crowd, which ran to him like rivulets into a stream. He laughed.

‘Your charm cannot stop me,’ he called as he jumped.

‘It protects you from my kind like it always has, sidhe-leth . But none of these others are so protected.’ Aisha clung to him, her arms around his neck, burying her face into his chest, kissing him.

Finn threw the hagstone charm away to the far side of the stage.

‘Aisha! Don’t go!’ Faye screamed, but she could see the enchantment in her friend’s eyes; Aisha didn’t even hear Faye.

She knew what Aisha was feeling, and she felt a stab of shame at her own hypocrisy; no one would have been able to call her back from Finn’s arms when she had been the one in his favour.

Aisha was at Finn’s mercy now. If she displeased him, she would have no defence against his power.

She didn’t have the magic that Levantiana had taught Faye and she was not half faerie.

Aisha might not survive the savage faerie reel if she was thrust into it by a faerie king who had grown tired of her.

Faye watched as others in the crowd grabbed him and went to him willingly, for they all wanted him; they had all been enchanted in exactly the same way as she had.

‘Farewell, sidhe-leth .’ Finn’s stormy eyes met hers and she felt grief pass through her. There was a part of her that still wanted him. She knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t help it. She steeled herself against the power in his gaze. ‘Until our lips meet again.’

‘You will never have me again!’ she screamed, making her eyes meet his with as much power in them as she could muster. Resist him, resist , she told herself, but his power was strong.

Finn laughed cruelly. ‘As you will. Go back to your mortal man. But you will always yearn for me.’ He smiled, and there was no kindness in his expression, but instead the calculating look of an eagle weighing up its prey.

‘And since you have betrayed me three times now – by loving the mortal, by rescuing him from my realm, and for trying to thwart me tonight – I will bar you from entering Murias by any means from now on.’

‘I am half faerie. It’s my right to be there if I choose,’ Faye retorted, but dread twisted her stomach. Murias was Finn’s world, and she didn’t know if even Levantiana could admit her if Finn had forbidden it. There was no way to stop him, no way she could help Aisha if he took her there.

Finn called out something in Gaelic to the band, still playing on stage; as if following an order, they finished the song, dropped their instruments and jumped into the crowd, grabbing people at random.

It had to be now.

Faye pulled the wand out from her bag, picked up a bottle of water from where it lay at the edge of the stage and splashed some of it onto the end. Standing, she traced the shape of the water-summoning sigil in the air and chanted the Gaelic words:

‘ A rèir an tròcair mhòir, Glòir agus cumhachd do Rìgh agus do Bhanrigh Mhurias, mar a bha e aig an toiseach, agus a-nis, agus gu bràth! ’

Now, Faye closed her eyes and tried to focus.

She had practised before with rain and streams, but now she knew that she had to summon something big. Something that could overpower Finn and the rest of the band. They were fae; they were powerful.

Yet, it was their element: would water even stop them? She didn’t know. But she had to try.

Faye thought of Grainne Morgan, tied to the stake, and the way that the water in the bay at North Berwick that day, hundreds of years ago, had risen up and flooded everything and everyone.

She turned to face the sea, and repeated the charm. She imagined the waves growing bigger, but she didn’t want the sea to flood the stage and kill everyone. She needed something else.

Faye imagined the sea growing tentacles; with a shiver, she remembered the fae in the white dress who had wrapped her tentacles around Rav and taken him inside her. Screwing her eyes shut, she imagined the tentacles growing longer, thicker, sinuous with seawater, and reaching to the headland.

One by one, she imagined the tentacles picking up Finn and his bandmates and throwing them back into the sea.

She opened her eyes to screams.

Above her, four vast, snaking tentacles made completely of water searched blindly for Finn and the members of Dal Riada. Finn stared in shock at the one coming for him, and then glared at her up on the stage. She saw realisation in his eyes: the knowledge that his own sister had betrayed him.

‘You worthless bitch!’ he cried out, as tentacles gripped the singer and the guitar player of the band and flung them into the sea. ‘How dare you use the faerie magic!’

‘I dare because I am half faerie, and it is my right!’ Faye shouted back, furious.

Finn pointed his hand at her, and Faye felt a wave of energy emanate from him and pulsate across the whole crowd.

‘You have no power, and no rights. I am taking what I want, and you will not get in my way any longer!’ he screamed.

Faye fell to her knees as Finn’s power knocked her off her feet.

She dropped the wand, and the water tentacles disappeared.

An unnatural golden light flashed in the crowd for a moment, on and off.

The sudden darkness interspersed with light caught the jerking and flailing movements of the crowd in strange, monstrous angles and shadows.

Faye blinked, shielding her eyes as bodies writhed and thrusted.

‘Too late, Faye Morgan,’ Finn smiled.

The golden light lit the whole crowd for one brief moment. A many-voiced scream, a chorus of the crowd’s violent, insane lust ripped through Abercolme, and then, just as suddenly, a dark and dead hush followed it, which was far, far worse.