Page 140 of Devoured

The girl looks up at me, trembling all over. Completely and utterly terrified. “Are you out of your mind? I’m not telling you.”

I bristle at that. “I can help.”

“No, you can’t. You don’t even know the half of it—” She cuts herself off abruptly and glares at me. Petulant like a toddler. But, also like a toddler, she can be threatened. She can be manipulated.

I’m not leaving this dream until I hear the truth. I’ve done far worse for far less.

“Tell me.” A low and sinister growl reverberates through my chest. She slides away from me. Cowers against the corner of the imaginary room in her mind. But I control this room. In a brutal flash, the room yawns open into a fiery chasm of hell.

Arielle struggles against the ties that suddenly bind her limbs to a slab of stone, and I loom over her with a red-hot gaze. “Tell me, Arielle.”

She whimpers. “Please, Prince Sinclair. Please don’t hurt me.”

I growl again. “Tell me, or I’ll compel you to tell me everything you’ve ever heard. From the queen. From Calix. From Vanessa. From everyone.”

The threats work.

“They’re… they’re failing, okay? The Wolf Queen’s powers are failing.” She swears softly and stops fighting her binds. “Her Dreamweaver gifts started malfunctioning months ago. Some nights she couldn’t even dream herself, let alone slip into anyone’s mind. And when the Realm of Superiority began closing around Castle Severi, they stopped working. She was supposed to be boundless. She shed her humanity to become all-powerful. But her powers are gone.”

My pulse hammers painfully in my rib cage as the fire vanishes. Smoke curls gray through the air, and Arielle sits up, no longer tied to the stone. The gods must be punishing my mother. They must be—there’s no other explanation for the realm closing around us and no one else. There’s no other explanation for her powers flickering out.

“Are you sure?” I ask her. “Something like this is… unprecedented.”

She glares at me. “No, I’m lying. Yes! Of course I’m sure! Haven’t you wondered why she hasn’t used those powers yet? On you or Vanessa? They are gone, Sin. And she’s worried others might find out.”

Instinct seizes a cruel fist around my heart. Her gaze darts behind my head, and she licks her lips. Her forehead beads with anxious sweat.

I tilt my head, a predatory move. “You’re hiding something from me.”

Arielle recoils from the threat in my gaze. She doesn’t bother lying again. “I didn’t catch the full thoughts—I only heard the tail end of it—but… she thinks she’s found them.”

“What do you mean?”

She shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. I just heard her think… I heard…”

“What, Arielle?” I snarl, unable to contain the fear, the anger, the pain inside me.

“Faeries,” she says.

I stagger back. My mind reels. Faeries are extinct. Arielle must be wrong. “You’re not making sense.”

But Arielle stares at me, and her words have never sounded more confident. “Faeries have returned, and your mother found them. She is going to use them to seize control of the other six courts.”

Calix wrenches me off the bed the second I wake from the dream.

I wake—but Arielle doesn’t. She lies still, her eyes closed and hands folded like a princess in a storybook.

“What did you do?” Calix growls. “Why is she still asleep?”

I disentangle from his grasp, easily sliding around him as I smooth out my shirt. “I couldn’t pull her out.” My pulse races, but with each passing breath, I manage to calm it more and more. I feel my facade slip back into place. Arrogant boredom. It’s a mask that fits like a glove.

I offer Calix an apathetic shrug. “Sorry.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Cousin,” I lie.

He fumes as if he might breathe fire. Claws explode from his hands on a harsh breath. “Then why don’t I believe you?”