Page 217 of Flirting with Darkness

A picture where his fur was glossy and thick, not ragged and dull as it had been earlier.

And… if I couldn’t fend him off in a fight, despite all the times I’d tried in our training sessions, how the hells was Granny with her skin-and-bone arms keeping him from tearing out her throat?

My gaze settled on the dark metallic grey of my knife in the air between us.

Iron cuts through flesh. Iron cuts through fae. Iron cuts through lies.

Maybe…

I slid my thumb from the leather-wrapped hilt, over the smooth brass of the guard, and onto the cold, pitted iron of the blade.

In a snap, everything changed.

Granny had hold of wolf-Faolán by the throat. He sagged in her grasp, eyes staring, glassy and unseeing, fur dull once more. A pale glowing stream flowed from his mouth into hers. Dim light surrounded him, growing dimmer by the second, while she glowed brighter and brighter.

Not only weren’t her knuckles bent by arthritis anymore, but as I stared, frozen, and she took more of that glow from Faolán, I saw the wrinkles on the backs of her hands fading. The muscles of her arms filled out. The grey of her hair deepened to blue-black like someone coloured it in with a rich ink.

My heart lurched when I realised her face was no longer the elder lady’s who’d invited us to her home, but smoother, younger, beautiful.

And one I recognised.

Because as the rheumy glaze over her eyes faded, beaten back by the power she sucked from Faolán, it revealed the deepest, richest sapphire blue.

The woman from House’s dreams.

I couldn’t breathe. A low roar pressed upon my ears, as though away in the distance everyone else in the world was screaming.

It couldn’t…

I lifted my thumb from the iron blade and everything snapped back into place.

Granny on her back, desperate and afraid. Faolán over her, vicious and monstrous.

Thumb on iron.

The sapphire eyed woman sucking the life out of him. Faolán powerless and wilting.

She smiled up at him, mouth too wide, teeth too sharp.

She had sacrificed humans, feasted on hearts, and made misshapen abominations to be her failed servants.

Faolán wasn’t the monster here.

We’d been living with one all along, my wolf and I, like a twisted version of the story Ari’s pa had told us.

“What big eyes you have.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud, but maybe some part of me needed those words to be able to take a step closer to that creature.

“All the better to hunt us with, Rose, dear.” Her chest heaved as though she was afraid, and she glanced my way like she didn’t dare take her eyes off him for too long. “Quickly now. He’s going to kill me.”

I took another step. “What big ears you have.”

“All the better to find us with, even when we hide.” She shifted on the floor and with my thumb against cool iron, I could see the impatience seeping into her movements.

I lifted the blade in both hands, tip pointed down, right above his spine.

“What big teeth you have.”

The sapphire-eyed woman smiled, revealing more and more of them as she saw victory was only a thrust away. “All the better to eat us with.”

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