Page 38 of Night Fae

Then Malik was falling, tumbling through nothing, feeling pieces of himself being stripped away with each moment of contact. Names, faces, memories?—

The connection broke.

Malik slammed back into his body. His knees buckled, and he collapsed to the muddy ground at the bottom of the pit. He should have felt pain from the impact, but he felt... nothing.

No pain, no panic… nothing.

"Get him up," someone said. The voice sounded distant, muffled, as if reaching him through water.

Hands gripped his arms, pulling him to his feet. Malik didn't resist. Why would he? What did it matter?

"Fascinating." Lady Morvena stood at the edge of the pit, watching closely. "What did you see?"

Malik looked up at her. Words formed slowly in his mind, struggling to connect to the part of him that should feel something—anything—about what he'd witnessed.

He'd seen his friends.

He'd seen Zev after a kill.

Zev had looked about as drained as Malik felt now.

"Speak," Lady Morvena demanded.

Malik saw no reason to.

"That's the way of the shadow paths," Darius said, studying Malik's vacant expression. "They take more than they show. Feed on emotion."

"How long will he be like this?" Lady Morvena asked.

Darius shrugged. "It depends on how much they took."

Malik heard them discussing him as if he were an object, but couldn't summon indignation. He knew, intellectually, that he should be afraid, angry, scared, but those emotions remained out of reach, like a memory of feelings rather than the feelings themselves.

Actually, it was kind of nice.

When the fae couldn't scare him, they had no power over him.

Except that they could still order him around, of course.

"Take him back to the carriage," Lady Morvena instructed the guards.

They half-carried, half-dragged him through the forest. Malik watched his feet moving beneath him with detached curiosity. Left, right, left, right.

In the carriage, he slumped against the cushioned seat, staring at nothing. Lady Morvena watched him with unblinking interest, like a scientist observing a particularly promising experiment.

"We'll need to question him again tomorrow," she told Darius. "I need to know what he saw."

Their words washed over Malik without sticking. Only the image of Zev remained clear in his mind—Zev standing over the dead werewolves, gaze empty.

Hollow.

Just like Malik.

CHAPTER 9

Zev sat on the edge of his bed, examining his hands in the pale moonlight that filtered through the curtains. Clean, yet not clean. The pattern of his existence since returning to the Court.

The werewolves' faces haunted him. Not just today's kills—the lean one with dark hair covering his arms even in human form, the taller one who'd favored his left side—but all of them. A parade of the dead.