Piercing, burning agony sliced my skin, slashed my sinew, shattered my ribs, and skewered into my heart. A scream tore from my soul, and the dreamworld—plants and water and stone, crashed onto my fallen body like an avalanche.
A loud gasp escaped my lips, and I jerked forward, my eyes flying open. Something undulated around my thighs, a tightening and loosening ripple that stilled the moment I tried to move. A tight, silky fabric cocooned my body to the neck. Light from the fallen torches illuminated the thick curtain of webs hanging overhead and to the walls on my left and right. I inhaled a breath of dusty air and sneezed. Melusina hadn’t lied about the spider causing us to sleep. This was the upstairs hallway, not far from the room where we had entered the palace.
Pressure tightened around my hips. I raised my head and stared into a pale face of quicksilver eyes stretched around my body like a—
I inhaled a hissing breath through my teeth and jerked forward. Melusina was swallowing me from the bottom-up like a serpent.
“What are you?” I twisted from side to side, trying to throw her off.
The eyes staring back at me trembled. If she wasn’t halfway devouring my body, I would say the expression was fear, her face was so distorted that I barely recognized the monster.
Her digestive muscles tightened, and her arms thrashed at her side, trying to keep us steady, but blind terror powered my movements. I bucked and bent and slammed my lower half into the wall, into doorways and around a floor strewn with torches of molten gold.
Melusina’s groans reverberated through my body, which only drove me to thrash harder. A splinter on the ground caught on my silken casing, and hope surged through my chest. I twisted from side to side, using the broken floor as a saw, until the pressure around my torso loosened, and my arms broke free.
I delved beneath the silk encasing my front and tore through the layers to reach my sword belt. Without thinking, without feeling the pain or the burn or the chill of the iron, I snatched it from my belt and plunged it into her right eye. Her scream reverberated through my hips and thighs and lower legs before her powerful muscles slackened.
With a low groan, Melusina’s body went still.
It was only when the dagger slipped from my fingers that I felt the burn, felt the ache in my leg muscles, the compression of my bones.
Panting breaths heaved through my lungs, and my stomach heaved with disgust. I shoved at her stretched face with the heel of my hands and kicked myself free. Blood and slime soaked the silk encasing my lower half. I slipped it off and scrambled to my hands and knees.
Melusina lay face-down on the ground, an empty, wheezing husk. She was naked, with rib bones that lay flat against the floor like the rungs of a ladder covered in flesh.
I reached for the dagger again but paused. The only way to kill a nathair was at the hands of her parent or child. As she had hidden Queen Pressyne’s skeleton, I had to do it. The last time I used the Sword of Tethra on her, it only opened a rift and swallowed her into another location. This time, I had to make sure she was dead.
A pained voice from behind pierced through my thoughts.
Drayce.
He was out there somewhere and hurt. Hissing through the burn, I picked up the iron dagger and stabbed it through Melusina’s back. She rasped out a cry and stilled.
The moan sounded again, making my heart shudder. Drayce was difficult to kill, but I couldn’t let him suffer. Leaving the dagger embedded in Melusina’s hollow chest, I pulled myself to my feet, snatched a fallen torch, and ran in the direction of the sound.
Batting away cobwebs drifting from the wall, I passed bodies on the ground cocooned in silk. The first was a large figure who could only be Aengus, another that was probably Cathbad, and a slender one that I guessed was Rosalind. Where was Drayce? Melusina had gloated about wanting to keep him alive.
I stumbled over splintered wood lying among the cobwebs. On my left, light glowed from beyond a doorway. It was the room of spider webs cleaved by Drayce’s shadow. One side still glowed with the light of Rosalind’s torch, and a dark shadow moved from inside.
“Where are you?” I snarled.
The spider poked its head out of the silk. “Your Majesty?”
My mouth dried. It probably thought Melusina had finished assimilating my body. “Yes,” I said in her throaty voice. “It is I. Where is King Drayce Salamander? I still have use of him.”
“Oh.” The spider poked its head back into the web.
“What does that mean?” I snapped.
“I already took a bite out of his middle,” the spider said in a small voice. “Don’t be angry.”
Its words hit like a punch to the gut. I jerked forward and held my face in a mask of fury. “You knew I needed him,” I said through clenched teeth. “Bring him out, now!”
Nothing happened for the next few heartbeats, and I wondered if I’d said something wrong. What if the spider decided Drayce was too powerful and delicious to relinquish and dragged him through a hole? If it consumed him, would it become the King of Death?
Anxiety skittered down my spine, tightened my muscles, and made my insides churn. I clenched the Sword of Tethra and readied myself to slash through the curtain of white, when an unconscious Drayce rolled out from the webs. Blood soaked the front of his jacket, and his face took on the shade of diluted milk.
Slow clicks emerged from deep the other side of the room, “It wasn’t my fault. The Fear Dorcha said—”
“Get out
