Page 47 of A Dark and Lovely Devastation

And she’d ensure every moment was excruciating.

He tried shove her off him, but even a faerie stabbed through the heart couldn’t muster the strength to fight back. King or no. She leaned against the sword and gave it the slightest of twists. Despite Dagda’s stony face, his body spasmed.

Morrigan still struggled inside, but Macha’s grip on their sister was firm.Please, Badb, please don’t do this,Morrigan pleaded.

Do you wish to know what your faerie king’s blood tastes like, dear sister?Badb thought.Let us find out.

She dragged her tongue over Dagda’s chest, lapping up the red slick blood. Crimson coated her lips. Filled her mouth. Coursed hot down her throat. A moan of pleasure escaped. How long had it been since she tasted the blood of her victims?

She sat back, wiping her lips before she gripped the sword’s dull handle and yanked. It sliced through flesh and bone with a lovely sucking and snapping. Dagda’s muscles gave an involuntary jolt and a strangled roar came through the cloth. Badb smiled. Though she worried that too many of such cries, no matter how muffled, might call too much attention. She tugged again, this time prepared by covering the agony that followed with a cry of her own. One of wild ecstasy. Like a lover bringing her to full peak.

Morrigan fought and pled helplessly.

Badb wrenched the sword further, crying out at the same time Dagda did, again and again. And as the blade shredded ever so gradually through layers of muscles and tendons, and his blood pooled, Badb’s cries of rapture became less and less feigned.

The floor beneath them lurched. She put a steadying hand on his blood soaked chest. Her head snapped up, her eyes growing wide. Dagda’s faerie guardian had heated the stone around them until it rippled in a pool of searing magma. It surrounded them and alarm speared through Badb right as the entire floor gave out.

They crashed down amid cracked stone and blackened beams to the floor a story below.

Chapter 17

Themetallictasteofblood in my mouth. Coating my throat, coating my face. Warm and sticky. Smothering me.

Pain pulsed through my body. Badb had retreated. The destruction Dagda’s faerie guardian caused would alert the entire palace.

Jagged wood had sliced my lower right arm, but that was secondary to the seared throbbing along my stomach and breasts. Every movement was agony, my skin red and even blackened in some spots. I lay among the debris, the gauzy lingerie burned and torn in so many places, I might as well have been naked.

Bile rose, and I heaved into the rubble. The contents of my abdomen were coated in a crimson liquid that only intensified the metallic sensation on my tongue.

Because Badb had forced me to drink Dagda’s blood.

I heaved again and again.

Dagda. Oh god, where was he? Badb had… had… But Dagda had interrupted the process.

In order for a faerie to fall, their enemy needed to completely remove their heart.

The sound of his body ripping, tearing under Badb’s sword resounded through me. Blood covered my hands. Not my own, but someone I was responsible for—their torture, their agony. Why had I thought it would be okay to let Macha loose? Tears streamed down my cheeks as a low keening started deep within.

No. I swallowed it back. I wouldn’t think about that, about any of it. Find Dagda. He lay helpless, gagged among the broken wood and stone, his heart half cut from his chest. He needed help. The movement it took to sit up drew an involuntary cry from my lips. I pressed against my searing skin, only to discover, to my horror, that the most blackened parts lacked any feeling. I braced against the remains, unable to gather the strength to stand.

“Dagda,” I rasped.

I saw the handle of the sword jutting out of his chest first. A marker standing above the rubble caging his body. I crawled forward, clawing through the debris. Every effort to climb over the remains of Dagda’s room brought me near collapse. I didn’t care. This is what I deserved. I deserved every second of this.

When I reached him, I stilled, staring in horror. Dagda was unconscious. The moon shaped path the sword had carved through the left side of his chest gaped like a chasm, overflowing with bubbling crimson that spread everywhere. I swayed, unsure what to do, how to help him. A sob ripped out of me, and I elbowed the debris aside, reaching for the gauzy fabric holding his gag in place. I drew it down with a crimson-covered finger and lifted the cloth Badb had shoved into his mouth. It was soaked in red, and a horror filled me at the thought of blood rising up his throat but with nowhere to go, stopped by that cloth, blocking up his airways, choking him.

The point of a sword pressed into my back, and I stiffened, the red-stained fabric slipping from my fingers to soak into Dagda’s pooled blood on the floor.

“Move away from him,” Keelin growled.

I raised my hands and turned. “It’s me,” I said. “It’s Chels.”

Keelin looked like he didn’t really care at the moment who I claimed to be.

“I said move away.”

I tried to rise, but my wounds sapped my strength. My vision blurred, and I collapsed against the rubble next to Dagda. Keelin hissed, but sheathed his sword. He picked me up off the block of stone. He saw the horrific burns on my body and his eyes widened. “By the goddess, what happened between you two?”

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