Page 34 of Wrath of the Fae Queen
Huge flagstones pop from the ground around Dante, flying six feet into the air and shattering with the force. A dozen white tentacles erupt from the holes they leave, surrounding him.
With a flex of my hand and earth magic, they sway rapidly, racing out to wrap around him. The appendages move in a wildtorrent with Dante at their center, as he leaps, somersaults and dives away. A rain of starlight needles pierces the flesh of the tentacles, but I keep regenerating them.
Many people think mushrooms are just the small, edible fruiting bodies that grow above the ground, but they don’t realize that the majority of the organism is beneath the surface. The mycelium is a tightly branching rootlike network that covers miles of ground, with a hefty amount of mass. And those structures are working to my benefit.
One of my tentacles encircles Dante’s waist and slams him to the pavers, but half of his form dissipates to smoke, allowing him to slip through. I notice a curious thing: his armor evaporates and reforms along with his flesh.
I grind my teeth, sending more deadly limbs his way.
Three pin him in a web between them and another stabs him through the chest in the exact moment his armor and body are between solid and gas. He reforms, and I have a vine flick off his helmet, his hair tie snapping and dark locks cascading around him.
If I remove his head, that might kill him.
Or I could cut his heart-stone from his body and crush it.
I don’t want to inflict such pain upon someone who has shown me kindness, but the the image of Keira in a cage rises in my mind.
I have no choice.
I would go to any lengths to save her.
Even murder a friend.
My heart clenches painfully with regret as I stab Dante through the throat with a tentacle, but it is a terrible weapon for decapitation. I need to get closer to him. A gurgled grunt leaves his lips. Blood spills out of them, but they curl into his distinctive smirk. It makes no sense at all. Instead of trying to protecthimself, he sends a thick bolt of lightning in the shape of a sword my way, and I jump backward to avoid it.
He only manages the single attack.
I pour more magic into the mycelium and produce its fruiting bodies all over the tentacles near his face. Wraith mushrooms.
The moment the toxic spores pour from them, forming a thick cloud that should hinder even an experienced assassin, Dante winks out of existence.It isn’t the slow billowing of the body from solid to shadows like the ability of some other assassins, but instantaneous. He can clearly transport, but I have never heard of anyone doing it so fast.
In the next heartbeat, Dante appears multiple feet above me, sword raised over his head and swinging in a downward strike. Not only are his chest and throat wounds completely gone, without a single scratch on his armor, but there are no splatters of blood or dirt on him. His helmet is back on, even though I flicked it off. And he is wielding the curved sword I broke.
Low fae of the Starlight Court might be able to heal rapidly and shift their forms, but they cannot repair inanimate objects.
Dante has a time stutter.
I barely get the chance to find my footing and bring up my sword before he is on top of me again, in precisely the same position as our first clash. Somehow, he lined me up in the exact right spot on the arena floor and brought his past self from a specific instance of time to the present. Dante hits me with a series of attacks that I struggle to block in my shock. I lose ground as he backs me toward the wall. The tip of his curved blade slices open my cheek.
I drag the tentacles of mycelium under his feet, slide them up his body and completely capture him in them. Dante winks at me as he disappears, probably back to his correct time period. The fleshy branches constrict violently around the space he just occupied, missing him.
“Fuck,” I spit.
I am alone in the fighting ring for a heartbeat, then another. I glance nervously at the hourglass as the sand trickles through it. My time is already half gone. A shiver ripples through me, prickling my skin coated in cold sweat. Images flash in my mind of being torn apart by a horde that presses in on all sides, with talons, fangs and weapons of lightning.
Dread pumps through me. I can’t afford to lose any more time. Ineedto work out how to kill Dante. How to get my hands on him.
He is back!Keira’s voice is high-pitched in my mind.You need to get close to him. That heart-stone is the key. It always is with killing low fae.
I try not to focus on how that comment makes me cringe, or to think of the body count she must have, and take the advice for what it is.
When I swing around, there are two versions of Dante.
One is worse for wear, covered in blood, sweat and dirt, with shadows billowing into the holes in his throat and chest. As his flesh heals, the scales of his armor rearrange themselves over the top of it. The other Dante whistles and drags a battle axe across the ground. He is clean, and fully bearded, with shorter hair peeking through his helmet.
Which fucking time period did he drag this guy in from?
I need to kill whichever Dante is from earlier in the timeline, because that will destroy the later Dante. I just have to work out which one that is. Bearded Dante has more rune tattoos, which could indicate he is from the future, but those keep changing in pattern anyway. Then I see it. This version of him has a chip on one horn, a scar on the side of his throat and fine lines at the corners of his eyes. I’d bet my life he is older.
