Page 80 of The Blood Queen

“I like it when you run, girl.”

Desperately, I glance behind me. The woman grins, her teeth like fangs in the firelight.

She takes a step toward me, and I stumble back. She chuckles.

“Nowhere left to go.”

I stagger backward, the woman stalking me. A hunter and her prey.

My back hits the standing stone.

I’m so close! I have the High Blade’s blood on the needle, everything’s in place for me to just end it all, but I can’t get there.

If only it were still a portal. If only it could open up and swallow me whole and drop me into the fae realm.

But it’s nothing but rock now.

As dead as I will be soon.

Run, Samson told me.

“No,” I say, my voice cracking and hoarse.

The woman with the axe thinks I’m talking to her. She laughs. “No? You think you can talk your way out of this?”

I sink to my knees, blood leaking between my fingers into the earth below.

Old magic, the Damhan-Allaidh said. Raw and feral magic, built on sacrifice.

My hands clench in the cold earth.

“I have sacrificed enough,” I growl.

“What was that, little girl?” the woman says, swinging her axe. I see more Red Caps behind her, clustered around, letting her toy with me.

They all know there is no escape.

My hair falls around my face, and I look down at the land, at the earth of my home that I have spent my entire life protecting. Tears sting my eyes, droplets falling, hitting the puddle of blood from my injured arm, leaking down into the ground.

My fingers claw into the earth. My injured arm screams, needlelike pain lancing through burning nerves, my nails cracking in the cold, frozen ground, but I dig in, and I pull.

Not the dirt.

The magic.

I strain, reaching into the core of the world, but I do not call on the fae realm, What has it ever done for me? I do not ask the fae for help. I reach into Scotland itself, and I feel the threads of magic that link the two realms, and I pull.

My head tips back in an inhuman scream. Magic sizzles over and through me, and I know the Red Caps watching can see it, and I know they hesitate now, unsure of what I am unleashing.

I am unsure of what I am unleashing.

I do not add a voice to my plea for aid; I remain silent and desperate. I only know that I have sacrificed my entire life to protect this realm, and now I am demanding something—anything—in return.

My body becomes a conduit through which every bit of magic, that of the fae and that of humans, pours through, a flood that drowns me, maybe kills me.

I don’t know.

I only know that when I look up, the Red Caps are gone.