Page 133 of Hunted By Fae

We don’t stand a chance against him.

“You don’t think he drowned?” Tesni asks, her voice a hoarse, stretched sound, ebbed with inflamed lungs.

The look I lift to her is guilty. “You did good. It bought us time.” The slight shake of my head is grim. “But it didn’t kill him.”

“What makes you think that?” Emily’s boot is soft on the slushy lane, a mere step closer. “He went under the ice. How’s he getting out to the surface before he drowns? That doesn’t happen.”

“You need to stop thinking of them as humans, or a derivate of them.” I turn a stern look on her. “You need to see them as the originals, the first, the strongest—and we are the weaker replicas, not the blueprint. Any human would drown in that lake. But a fae? It would take them longer than minutes to drown, and that’s forgetting their strength to swim back to the surface and blow another hole through the ice.”

I am as sure of it as I am the darkness around me. There is no way the waters beneath the ice killed Dare.

I glance around the darkness, the walls entombing us, the slushy stone lane beneath our boots, and… I double take on a grate.

A metal lid leading underground…

“How do you know—” Emily starts, but Tesni is quick to cut her off.

She pushes from the wall. “Shut up, Em,” she sighs. “We don’t have the time, and I can’t be fucking bothered with it anymore.”

The look Emily throws at her glares like a drawn sword.

Tesni meets it with a dark look of her own. “I’m the one who shot that warrior into the lake. Fuck me for not wanting to hang around and let him find us. At least you’ll go quick. I doubt I can say the same about me.”

My smile is small, and I bite down on it.

Tesni’s deflection comes smooth. I know that’s not the reason she interrupted Emily’s questions.

Predictable, Tesni always calls her.

She sure predicted the direction of her line of questioning, and she spared me from it, from the incoming interrogation.

But she is also right.

Tesni won’t go softly, quickly, kindly if Dare finds us.

Emily might be in the way. A quick death on his dagger, a snap of the neck.

But after seeing Carlos’s head rolling over the floorboards at my boots, an image seared into my mind, I have a new layer of fear creeping through me for Tesni.

Before they can start down the lane, I tap my boot into the slush. “Look.”

They do. Both gazes land on the drain lid.

“Manhole,” Emily says with a shrug, awhat-about-it.

Tesni frowns. “Does that lead to water… or a sewer?”

So she’s following my line of thought.

And the dread is blatant in those hollow eyes she lifts to me.

I smile. “Guess we’ll find out.”

TWENTY-NINE

DARE

Dare’s hand has only just come down on Samick’s shoulder when they are severed, as though a sword has cut down between them.