Page 82 of The Blood Queen

I…did?

I don’t remember calling anyone. All I did was scream in fury.

And they answered.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “What the feck is going on?”

“Also,” Samson adds, “there were Red Caps. A lot of them, pretty intent on killing us.”

“Oh, they still are,” the young one offers.

Great.

“Bloodthirsty little monsters,” the middle-aged one says, not taking her eyes off Samson.

“But you don’t have to worry about them,” the crone says.

“No,” Samson says, “I am still very much concerned about the fae trying to murder us.”

“Well, they can’t right now,” says the youngest. “On account of how we stopped time.”

I suck in a breath. There is no fae I know of that can control time. Not even Beira has that power. This is something well past anything I’ve ever encountered before. But it also feels strangely familiar. Didn’t Moyra, the bog witch, talk about triple goddesses, more powerful when they were united?

The middle-aged woman leans in closer to me. “You stink,” she says bluntly. “Like blood and dirt and—”

“We were in a battle,” I protest.

She seems unimpressed. “That’s no excuse.”

I look to Samson, who’s as agog as I am.

The older one huffs, clearly impatient. “We weave, girl,” she says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “And our work has been too long superseded by presumptuous fae.”

“The loom,” I whisper. If these three are, as I suspect, the old goddesses who spin the threads of life, weave them into the loom, and snip the threads of the dead.

The Faerie Queen’s loom was a fae toy, really, a mere echo of what these women do.

The old woman knocks her cane on the ground. “That queen of yours knew better than to meddle, and she did it anyway.”

“And now she no longer exists,” the middle-aged one says.

“Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t use it, dear,” the youngest adds, leaning forward, staring into my eyes with such intensity that I shiver.

They’re talking so fast, and I’m still recovering from nearly dying, but I cling to their words, trying to sort my way through them. “What will happen to me if I use the Faerie Queen’s loom?” I ask.

“You might die,” the old one says.

“No!” Samson roars.

I jump, but the sisters seem unsurprised by his outburst.

The youngest woman smiles at him. “You remind me of someone I haven’t met yet,” she says genially.

Well, that makes no sense.

“I only said she might die,” the crone continues. “For what it’s worth, so might you.”

I don’t like the way that Samson doesn’t seem as bothered by that.