Page 21 of Curse the Fae

His mouth quirks, neither confirming nor denying it.

Bile washes up my throat as I reconsider the resident serpents. “Are you using them for venom? Are they trapped here?”

Elixir’s face creases with anger. “You are trapped here,” he grits out. “Not them.”

Faeries don’t abuse their fauna. Not like humans do.

That’s what his glower says. That’s what it assumes.

I sense this unspoken accusation, which strikes as quickly as a jab to the chest. He hates my kind for what happened during The Trapping. Moreover, he loathes me for my part in it. And beyond that lingers some other wound, one that’s still fresh.

Elixir’s voice cuts into my thoughts. “This is the vipers’ territory,” he tells me. “They may go and leave from here as they wish.”

“Not all mortals harm animals,” I say, thinking about my family’s sanctuary and the water snake in my chamber. “The grotto told me why I’m really here and why this game is important. I’m sorry about what’s happening, but—”

“You are sorry,” Elixir repeats with a frown, as if apologies are foreign and, what’s more, distasteful to him.

“It was horrific what my people did,” I say. “Truly, I’m sorry. But as much as I wish it hadn’t happened, and as much as your fauna deserve to be restored, I won’t be a sacrifice. Neither me, nor my sisters.”

As I’d dreaded, Elixir is unmoved by my speech, which is why I haven’t explained about my family rescuing animals, a fact he wouldn’t believe in the slightest. So instead, he draws out, “Then win.”

“Against whom?”

“Against me.”

My heart dives to my stomach. That’s why he brought me to this den, to reveal my game: a one-on-one challenge against the lord of the water Fae.

I muster the courage to ask, “What’s the game? When do we begin?”

His golden eyes blaze with ambition. “We already have.”

8

His gaze reflects off the glass bottles, the likeness multiplying a hundred times over. I retreat a step, evicting myself from that glaring light. “What do you mean, we already have?”

Surrounded by countless poisons, Elixir absorbs the signs of my distress, his eyes slitting with concentration. “Based on what I’m sensing, you know what I mean.”

“I can assure you, I don’t,” I argue.

“Your body knows. I see it.”

Would it be terribly rude to remind him how that’s impossible? Though, I hardly need to because he translates my silent gape. “I hear every swallow, scent every shift in your blood, and feel the tempo of your heartbeat. That is how I see.”

Mortification pours into my face. In my world, and with someone different, I would have glanced away. Violated, I stomp back into the glints of light, my height nearly matching his, minus about five inches. “But who sees you? And how do you see yourself?”

Those golden orbs flap in consternation, then in aggravation. “I will ask the questions from now on.”

“Can you handle stringing together that many words?”

In my defense, I don’t know where this pluck is coming from. No matter how petrified I am, there’s this persistent urge to spar with him, if only to pry his lips open.

Elixir bears down on me. After a moment’s consideration, he reaches for one of the hanging bottles containing an orange fluid. The Fae strokes the glass, the point of his fingercap scraping lightly. “This one melts the scales from your body.” He touches it with relish, then chooses an inky vessel. “Drink the essence of a midnight spring, mixed with the trapped vapors from smoked fish, and the victim shall experience perpetual hunger until they stuff themselves to death.”

The monster continues by pointing out an opiate that will never wear off, thus perpetually distorting reality, and a drug that forces its drinker to feel the physical suffering of the next prey caught by a predator of The Deep.

He taps one more dangling vessel replete with rose gold swirls. “An infusion of siren’s blood and the extract of berries from The Solitary Forest causes an addiction to pleasure, to the point where one shall not recognize pain from ecstasy,” he says, twisting his nefarious gaze my way. “You shall moan with every lash of a whip, for instance. The rapture shall be your downfall.”

Not just poisons.

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