Page 61 of Evil Eyed
Rounded stone walls surrounded me like a wide, massive well. I tipped my head back but I couldn’t see the top. Just darkness. Whether a night sky above or endless depths, I couldn’t tell.
A wobble beneath my feet drew my attention back down to the medallion.
Theshrinkingmedallion, because of fucking course it was getting smaller by the second.
“What do you want?” I yelled, trying to get Boss Man to expose his plan to me. Or at least delay whatever he had planned. If my finger was stained by the black stuff after a simple dip, what would sinking into that mess do to me? “What am I supposed to do?”
He didn’t answer, so I needed to up my game. He might be a High Court fae but he was still a man with an inflated ego who’d had legends and stories told about him for thousands of years. He wanted to brag about how brilliant he was. I just needed to get him talking.
“Some fucking Evil Eye you have here. Wait until I tell Doran it’s just a well full of shitty tar. Actually I’ll just tell him now.” I waited a minute, pretending that I could still hear him in my head. Then I laughed. “Yeah, I know. What a moron.”
“So confident,” Boss Man drawled, his voice echoing around me. “So naive. Do you think you’ll see Stoneheart again?”
I opened my mouth to say,“I see him now,”but I couldn’t get the words out.
“I…” I choked. Swallowed. Tried again. “I see…”
“Ahhhhhh,” Boss Man drew out the sigh with light lilt of pleasure at the end. “So sad.”
A fae can’t lie.
Boss Man didn’t knowwhichlie, though. I absolutely would see Doran again. I had no doubt of that at all. I wanted to feel my men’s arms squeezing the life out of me. I wanted Aidan to growl and grumble. I wanted the warmth of Ivarr’s light, the sultry heat of Keane’s smile, the sparkle of Warwick’s grin, and the indomitable heart of stone thumping beneath my cheek.
Keeping up the illusion, I let a ragged cry escape my throat, but I didn’t try to say anything else. Aidan had said that Evil Eye loved this kind of broken pain the most, so if I could draw out this moment, I might buy myself time to come up with another plan.
The wheel still spun arcs of sparkling magic in my head. I couldn’t see the guys but I had to trust they were still alive. Still fighting. As long as the wheel was balanced, they were okay.
“Do you know why the treaurekeeper was always mortal?” Boss Man crooned in his sly, silky voice. “Even then, we were afraid a fae conduit would be too powerful.”
“We?” I asked hoarsely. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself and kept a wary eye on the shrinking medallion. I still had plenty of room to stand. Maybe if I kept him talking… Though I didn’t want to listen to this blowhard covering all the many ways he’d tortured my men through thousands of years.
“All High Court fae in my day and age agreed. Lug wanted to bring his weapons back time and time again, allowing them to re-live their—and his, of course—glory days. It was a fine and dandy idea until it became apparent that they were going to die in increasingly excruciatingly horrific ways.”
“At your hands.”
Boss Man chuckled, so close that it sounded like he hovered behind me. I whirled, scrunching my shoulders tight. I couldn’t see him, but he had to be there, cloaked in glamor.
“They didn’t know that each time a treasure died that he would release some of the fae magic that sustained them back into the mortal plane, making it easier each time for them to die.”
“Magic that you stole.”
“I preferdistilled. Look at all this power they helped me generate. Most of it was spawned in their early days of legend. They’re weakening, now, so I’ve turned my attention to other realms and worlds. Treasure magic is thin and weak. Soon they won’t be reborn at all. Lug of the Longarm can’t have that, now, can he? I knew he would have to take the risk eventually and refill the well, so to speak. He couldn’t leave his mighty treasures to wither forever.”
Talk about playing the long game. “So you’ve been killing them for thousands of years, draining more of their magic each time, all so a fae conduit mightsomedaybe born? You’re even crazier than I thought. Why do you…” My words fell off into silence, my brain tumbling faster with the spinning wheel.
Why did he want afaeconduit? Not a mortal one.
When he’d been distilling magic from the treasures on the mortal plane. Using their mortal conduit…
“You want me to help you drain Faerie magic,” I whispered, shaken. “Tír na nÓg.”
Something tightened around my throat and slithered down my body, a tight chokehold from neck to below my knees. “I knew you’d figure it out eventually.”
34
At least I still had the hag stone pressed to my eye so I could see through the glamor, though seeing exactly what pinned me wasn’t a blessing at all. A thick purplish-black snake wrapped around me, only it had spiky hairs instead of scales. Its tail snaked across the medallion and disappeared into the inky black pool.
More hairy worms arched up out of the lake. Reaching for me. Surrounding me. Bristle-like hairs rasped along my skin, digging through my clothing. My ears hurt. My throat burned. Only then did I realize that I was screaming.
