Rachel realizes this must be Mary Wentworth, the girl who set herself on fire in the 1950s.
“I don’t want to die.” She throws the can aside and falls to her knees, shivering and crying and begging.
Golvath’s voice enters the memory. “Then you should have loved me.”
He looks down at his hands as he strikes a match. The phosphorous tip sizzles to life, the orange flame growing stronger.
The abject horror Rachel feels at having to watch this scene play out is nothing compared to this girl’s suffering.
Without another word, Golvath tosses the match toward the helpless girl, setting her ablaze.
Unable to look away, powerless to help, the most Rachel can do is mentally scream while flames lick at the girl’s body. The smell of rotten eggs, sulfur, wafts through the sky as her golden locks burn away, replaced by the pronounced, sickening sweet stench of cooking fat.
The scene changes abruptly as another memory takes shape.
This time the girl is facing away, as if she’s staring at the beautiful horizon beyond. Her long, raven-colored hair cascades down her shoulders like a silky curtain. She glances back, her dark eyes red and bronze skin blotchy. There’s something exotic about her, something that’s not entirely human shines through.
The breathtakingly beautiful girl walks forward, pleading without words for some type of release from the spell she’s under.
“Fly away little bird,” Golvath says, unable to keep the amusement from his tone.
He watches as she swan-dives off an unrecognizable cliff, so graceful, so elegant.
A telling thump rings across the plains, the sound reverberating in Rachel’s heart until she shatters.
Golvath peers over the edge at the girl’s broken body where she lies cradled in a cluster of sharp rocks. Blood already pools around her, staining the boulders.
Gone. Just like that.
The memories flit through her mind of all the girls he’s loved and the various ways he essentially murdered them. He stabbed one girl to death—over and over until his muscles ached from exertion. The act was done with such brutality that even Golvath had been disgusted with the end result.
“Too messy,” Golvath says into her mind. “I won’t do that again.”
Another girl walked into the ocean on his command and never resurfaced after a wave went over her head. Then there was the girl who ran out in front of a horse-drawn carriage, a death by trampling.
The most horrifying of all his kills, however, was when he’d forced a girl to starve herself to death. He’d enjoyed seeing her wither away, enjoyed her suffering as she tried explaining that yes, she wanted to eat, but she literally couldn’t swallow a morsel without his say-so. They’d thought her mad and sent her off to—what Rachel believes may have been—a convent, while Golvath had continued tormenting her with food for almost a year.
Dozens of teenage girls of all races, from completely different worlds, had died because of his infatuation and cruelty.
“You’ll be my first strangulation.” There’s smugness in his almost-victorious thought.
Her limbs go numb. Parts of her brain shut down, due to the lack of oxygen. The sensation of needles and pins pricking her fingers and toes comes next. Her lips tingle, her tongue feels swollen. Is her heart slowing? She can’t tell.
Ziggy flits into her line of sight, hovering for a few crucial seconds behind Golvath’s head before torpedoing straight for the unsuspecting Fae. The golden sphere smashes into the side of his face, throwing him off-kilter. Flesh burns under Ziggy’s touch, bubbles and sears to the bone.
Golvath stumbles to the side. It’s enough for him to loosen his hands from around her neck.
Rachel sucks precious oxygen into her lungs, inhaling and exhaling rapidly, replenishing what Golvath denied her. She twists to take some pressure off her back, dizzy from the rush of blood to her brain. Rachel hangs onto the sidewall, mostly to keep herself on her feet.
She looks back.
Golvath is uselessly swatting at Ziggy as he hurls crass insults at the Fae light. More importantly, she notices the disfigured, gray-toned face on the other side of the bell tower. Tufts of oily hair are plastered against its skull, his nose is missing, and one ear hangs on by a piece of skin. One half-decomposed hand presses onto the sidewall, finger bones on display wherever the skin has withered away.
The Sluagh’s milky eyes survey the situation on the bell tower, then turns his full attention on Golvath.
He throws his leg over the sidewall, torn pants flapping in the wind, entire patches of skin missing from his limb. The second hand appears, holding a rusty broadsword. The Sluagh flops over the sidewall, onto the walkway, and slowly gets back to his feet.
Rachel looks around until she finds Orion hovering in the sky near her. His large flaming wings drip molten lava, supernova eyes gazes back at her. Although his mouth is moving, his voice is lost through the spell.
An unholy cry fills the air. Rachel shoots her attention to Golvath, who’s finally noticed the approaching Sluagh. The sword rises above the Fae’s head. Ziggy flies off then, just in time to avoid the blade slicing down into Golvath’s shoulder, past his collarbone, and stops somewhere near the top of his ribcage. Blood spurts across the bell tower, staining the stone and covering the rusty bell.
“Jump,” Mercia’s scream suddenly finds its way to Rachel, the spell broken with Golvath’s far too quick death.
The Sluagh uses an inhuman amount of strength to lift Golvath’s limp corpse off the floor. He shakes the body like a rag doll, struggling to release his blade. Golvath’s corpse strikes the bell—a deafening clangor rolls through the town. Rachel’s molars vibrate from the knell and her skull pounds. The Sluagh tries to loosen his broadsword by tugging at his weapon. He lifts Golvath into the air again.
Shake, shake, shake. Dong!
Rachel throws her leg over the sidewall, gritting her teeth as she battles her own body, the exhaustion and
