Page 126 of By the Orchid and the Owl
I closed my eyes and let the song of the jungle dance along my bruised and broken skin. I sunk into the hums and warbles and croons of story after story, pretending this was just another test with Mrs. Wildenberg. That I just had to pass.
But no, the jungle wasn’t some test to pass. It wasalive. It wasaware.
And it wanted me to look back at it.
I know you, I thought.My mother was a faerie, and I know you. Half of me may have been made from passing dust, but the other half was made from the loam between your roots, and I know you. I know the colors you don and shed. I know the animals you house. I know the way you mourn a fallen tree, how you plant seeds around its grave. Your breath gives life to me, and mine gives life to you. I know you, I know you, I know you.
The jungle’s song increased in tempo, breathy and wild and free.
Moments before my knee thumped against the upward slope, I sang back.
Fergus snatched me with his dagger-free hand and yanked me forward.
Just as a vine shot out from the trees where the monkeys had converged, noosing Fergus’s throat and pulling tight.
He flailed. Dropped his dagger and groped at the vine.
But another one joined the first, and another and another, until Fergus Bilderas was firmly contained within their combined embrace.
Do you want us to end him? the jungle whispered in my ear… like a caress.
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Fergus kept jerking and writhing, and I couldn’t say the words to make him go still. I didn’t want that kind of blood on my hands.
A movement behind Fergus gripped all my attention.
Someone was coming.
A whimper escaped my mouth, and I backed up a step, but—
“It’s okay, Rayna. I’ll be the bad guy so you don’t have to.”
Coen stalked from the trees, positivelydrenchedin barely-contained wrath. I saw it in the harsh angle of his mouth, from the veins throbbing in his biceps, from the way his eyebrows slashed downward and met his snarling expression.
“Bad guy?” I got out.
Coen washere. He must have followed the sound of my mind and found me.
I could almost faint from the relief. Not just because I was happy to see him after so many weeks of cold emptiness, but because together, the two of us could easily carry Fergus back to the Institute to turn him in. Or Coen could command him to turn himself in.
But in one fluid motion, Coen scooped up Fergus’s fallen dagger and hissed into the boy’s ear, “I told you to never touch my woman again. Yet here you are, trying to touch her. I won’t make the mistake of letting you go twice.”
Fergus widened his eyes among the strangling vines.
And Coen swiped the dagger through the vines.
Then plunged it into Fergus’s throat.
CHAPTER
48
Jets of blood squirted from that wound, spraying Coen’s wrist with speckled dots of bright red.
Fergus fell forward, like a broken puppet, smashing his face into the floor of the jungle and only twitching once before he went still.
Yet movement still blossomed from beneath him—pools of blood spreading from under his neck before sinking into the spongy, thirsty ground.
A scream had twisted into a knot in my throat, stuck somewhere between horror and relief and even more horror as I watched Coen, his face still tight with wrath, grab one of Fergus’s lifeless wrists and drag him to the marsh.
