Taking another step back, I struggled to keep the panic down. “Can we walk for a little bit longer? I don’t—”
> “You’re delaying the inevitable.” Impatience rang throughout his tone.
Sweat dotted my palms. “I don’t have to . . . have to feed. You’ve made your point now. I get it. You can make me do whatever you want. I don’t need to do that. I don’t want to.”
“You obviously haven’t gotten the point since you keep referring to yourself as a human. It’s time for you to remember what you are,” he said. I knew there was no winning this argument with him.
I spun around quickly, prepared to run back to the house.
“Ivy. Stop.”
I stopped.
Just like that, my body was compelled to answer even though my brain was desperately yelling at me to get away, to move—to do anything to stop what was coming.
“Look at me.”
His voice slipped over my skin like silk. My ears buzzed as I felt my body slowly turning to face him. Against my will, my gaze lifted to his. I waited.
Drake’s eyes deepened. “You will do as I say.”
And I did.
It was strange. One minute I was outside, skin chilled from the cold air, and the next I was in that room. There were different people in here now. The woman was gone, and I wondered what had happened to her. Then I was sitting next to an older man I didn’t know. He had silver hair at his temples, and then after a few whispered words, I was . . . feeding, and then I was upstairs, slipping into a deep sleep.
I was shaken awake, a demanding hand biting into my shoulder. I woke to a dark room and a pale, silvery face.
Faye.
I leaned away from her, rolling onto my side. My thoughts were full of cobwebs, and I couldn’t quite recall the last several hours. All I knew was that I wasn’t supposed to be awake yet. I needed more time. My eyelids started to drift shut.
“You need to wake up,” she said, grabbing my arm and squeezing hard.
Confused, I resisted when she tugged on me. “I . . .”
“There’s no time to explain. You must get up now,” Faye said. “It’s your only chance if you want to escape.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“W-what?” I whispered.
Faye leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp. Soft light flooded the room. “You must get up, Ivy. The prince is not here and this will be your only chance.”
Her words tumbled through my brain like tumbleweeds rolling down a vacant street. I was slow to make sense of them, but I didn’t close my eyes again. I pushed myself up into a sitting position. Nausea hit me, clearing enough of the cobwebs for me to realize that was different from when I woke normally after . . . after feeding.
Feeding.
My gaze lifted to Faye’s. “I fed again.”
Frustration pinched her features as she reached toward me, unlocking the band around my neck. She tossed it onto the bed. “I know. And if you keep feeding, you’re going to get addicted. You probably already are.”
“Addicted?” I repeated dumbly. That was the first I’d ever heard of that. “What do you—?”
“Ivy.” She clutched my shoulders and shook me until my head snapped back. “You need to focus. We have to go now. Do you understand me? This will be your only chance before your time is up and the prince will be in this bed, creating a child that will open all the gates to the Otherworld.”
Creating a baby . . .
Holy shit. I tossed my hair back from my face as the remaining tendrils of sleep cleared and the fogginess left my thoughts. “The prince isn’t here?”
“No.” She pushed off the bed and stood. “He left about thirty minutes ago, taking three of the ancients with him. It was a planned trip, but we don’t have a lot of time. There’s only a small window of opportunity.”
Pushing off the bed, I moaned as a wave of dizziness hit me. I fought through it, straightening. “Sorry,” I gasped out. “I’m not feeling too well.”
“Of course not. You have to sleep off the more unpleasant effects until you get used to them.” She walked over to the door, pressing the side of her face against the wood. “Fae don’t necessarily experience the adverse reactions, and only the younglings, when they first start feeding, experience the euphoria and following sleepiness, but for halflings . . . it can be different. But that’s not important right now.”
I raised a brow as I tucked the bushy mass of hair behind my ears. I had a feeling what she was saying was going to be important later, but right now, it wasn’t a priority. Later, I was going to have so many questions for her. “So you’re going to help me escape?”
She nodded. “And before you ask why, all you need to know right now is that the Order is not the only ones who want to prevent the gates from opening.”
I stared at her carefully. Trusting her was risky, but then again, why would this be a trap? And if it was, could the consequences be any worse than what I was already facing?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”
“I couldn’t get a thorn stake.” She reached around to the back of her jeans and pulled out an iron dagger. She pressed the handle into my hand. “But this will do.”
My fingers curled around the handle of the weapon I was oh so familiar with. It felt like ages since I had held one, and I welcomed the weight in my hand. “It will do,” I said as she reached for the door. I thought about something. “Wait.”
She looked at me.
Grabbing a handful of the dress, I lifted the skirt part and used the dagger to cut a slit halfway up my leg to allow for more movement. “Ready,” I said.
Faye grabbed the doorknob but paused. “I won’t kill any of them,” she warned me. “I will incapacitate, but I will not kill.”
I thought about that for a second. “Okay. I’m probably going to kill them, though.”
She made an exasperated sound, but opened the door and peered out. “It’s clear.”
Knowing this could somehow blow up in my face, but willing to risk it for a chance to get out of this place, I took a deep breath and pushed everything aside. Now was not the time to think about what I’d been forced to do while being imprisoned here, or about Ren, or anything other than escaping.
I followed her out into the hall, and we made our way to the stairs. At the top, she said in a low voice, “There are three fae downstairs in the main room. There are more in the house, but I hope we can get out before they know what’s happening. Valor is . . . he is occupied at the moment in the back room.”
Knowing what the back room was used for, I couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Can you incapacitate quietly? Because I can kill quietly.”
“Yes.”
I looked down the stairs, not seeing anyone yet. “Let’s go.”
We crept down the stairs, and of course the steps creaked every couple of steps, sounding like cracks of thunder. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how quietly I could kill. I had never really attempted to do it without making noise.
Faye reached the landing first. We were about twenty feet from the front door, and we were so close, but the foyer opened into two rooms. There was a good chance we’d be seen. My pulse pounding, I stepped down into the foyer, pressing the dagger against my leg. I took two steps before a voice rang out from the adjoining room.
“Where are you two going?”
Cursing under my breath, I looked over to see a male fae walking toward us with another fae behind him. Faye didn’t answer, so I decided to go the “whole kill me some fae” route.
I stepped toward the male. A flicker of surprise scuttled across his features a second before I slammed the dagger into his chest. He did the poof-begone thing.