Page 92 of A Song of Air
“Mana save her,” Corvina whispered.
Shula closed her eyes then opened them once again. “Bryson is in the Unseelie Court.”
The human whimpered and cried, louder now. “I didn’t mean to! Bryson, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
Beside Valerio, Uric sighed and looked at the human with a curled lip. “Pathetic,” he whispered.
“The Unseelie Court,” Valerio echoed. He shook his head back and forth, as though his brain were filled with cobwebs he was trying to dispel.
He tried to think past the panic. Past the looming doom of what would come if he failed to get both Bryson and Weylyn out safely. The things his father would say. The venom he’d spew Valerio’s way. He could hear him now. He could feel the pain of the punishment down his back. A phantom agony both physical and mental.
He would make it hurt, and he would not cease to tell Valerio of how he’d failed. Again.
Yet above all that there was a more harrowing worry. For Bryson and though he hated the Fae, for Weylyn as well.
They’d crossed the Ley Line before. They knew what laid south of the human border.
Iron. Iron monsters.
And death.
And as he stared at the little rock placed carefully along that spot on the map, Valerio despaired and feared.
And he wondered if he’d find them alive... or if it would be too late.
Iron Gaze
It was like fallingthrough a void. Falling through black emptiness, suspended in the air with nothing in sight while her insides rearranged themselves, twisting into knots as she fell... and fell... and fell...
An endless amount of darkness cradled her from all sides, the shadows like claws that reached for her body through the void. She was sure she screamed, but the sound itself was lost to her ears. It was emptiness. It was loneliness.
And when Bryson finally landed, it was face-first in the dirt. Her teeth scraped against the ground and she choked on grass and mud and the tinny taste of something that burned and scraped down her throat. Pushing herself up by her palms, Bryson coughed, hacking out the taste of whatever she’d swallowed, though it coated her tongue like a thick honey she couldn’t dispel.
She blinked the grime from her eyes, every rapid rush of her eyelids a mirror of the pounding of her heart. Her eyes began to sting, and every blink felt like scraping rocks from her eyeballs. It was a sensation that was familiar to her, though one she had tried so hard to forget.
The burn came immediately, and Bryson cried out, swiping her muddy hands across her lids, rubbing them furiously despite the fact that they were dirty. But it didn’t matter. The sting persisted. Like acid had been tossed straight into her eyes. She blinked and blinked and blinked. And every time an image of the strange forest surrounding her appeared, just like that, her vision faded slowly to blackness.
