“The other path?”
“Well, one of them. Some of them are bad. You die forever sometimes, and the golden queen rejoices. But other times you become fae. Other times you become queen.” She tosses her lollipop to the side and a puffy pink ball of cotton candy appears in her hand.
“What kind of queen?”
She smiles. As if she’s been waiting for this question. “A different kind. A new kind.” She closes her eyes for a moment, and her face grows serious, as if she’s trying to concentrate on something. “And sometimes a bad kind. Sometimes the anger is too much and you let it make your insides ugly. Don’t do that. I don’t like you like that. Finn will explain if you let him.”
She talks in riddles, and I can’t make right or left of them. “What if I don’t want to be fae or a queen?” I ask.
“Why wouldn’t you want to be a faerie?” She frowns around a bite of cotton candy. “Would you rather be dead?”
I don’t know how to answer that question. “I don’t know anything about being a queen. I don’t like the idea of having so much when others have nothing.”
“I guess this is perfect then,” she says. “Because you’ll lose everything.” She plucks a chunk of cotton candy off the ball and offers it to me.
I decline with a shake of my head, and she happily pops the sugar into her mouth. “Are you always right about the future?” I ask.
“Not possible. Because sometimes the future is wrong about you.” She turns around. “I have to go. Don’t tell my mom I was here.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I’M IN A LARGE FOUR-POSTER BED in a room I don’t recognize. The curtains are drawn and the room is dark, but as my eyes adjust, I see Finn sitting in an upholstered chair on the opposite side of the room, his wolves on either side of him.
I draw a deep breath and painstakingly push myself up. “What happened?” My voice is hoarse. I remember the fire. Going after Jas. The old house that couldn’t have been there because it was burned down when I was eight. It had all looked so real. Judging by the rawness in my throat, the fire certainly had been.
I sweep aside blankets to look down at my legs, prepared to see bandages, burns, or worse, but there’s no sign of injury. I shake my head, trying to weed out illusion from reality.
“The Sluagh lured you into the woods by the Golden Military burial grounds.”
I swallow past the burn in my throat. “How?”
“Mind games. Illusions,” he says. He closes the book I hadn’t noticed on his lap and tucks it under an arm as he stands. “They tap into your worst memories and trap you inside them.” He lights a candle on the bedside table and studies me as I study him. His dark skin looks paler than I’ve ever seen it, and as he makes his way back to the chair, I notice that he’s limping.
Did he get hurt rescuing me? Somehow I know he wouldn’t want me to ask. “How long was I out?”
“A full day. Pretha healed you as best she could, and then we brought in a true healer to do the rest. Your leg was broken and you were covered in burns—mostly superficial, thank the gods. That level of magic is taxing for a human, so the healer put you into a deep sleep to help you recover.”
Pretha healed me, not him. Does he have no magic or does he just choose to let others do the work for him? For someone who seems to hold so much sway over the magical creatures around him, I can’t imagine him having no abilities of his own.
“How’d you find me?”
“Dara and Luna sensed you were in trouble. They led me to you.”
I nod, as if this all makes perfect sense. As if running into monsters who can recreate my worst memories is something that happens every day, as if it’s totally normal to have a pair of wolves acting as my guardian angels.
“You’re lucky. A few more minutes, and—”
“I know,” I blurt, cutting him off. I don’t want to hear the rest. I know what would have happened. Mom’s healer friend may have taken away the burns nine years ago, but he hadn’t erased the memory of the flames licking my skin or the smoke in my lungs. I know all too well how it feels to be dying in a fire. I shake my head again. “But . . . It wasn’t real? Or was it?”
“The Sluagh’s illusion becomes real when you engage with it. The fire was very real because the Sluagh became the fire when you believed it was. And you ran right into it.”
“I heard screaming.”
“Your sister?” he asks. “That’s why you ran into the flames?”