Until another thread of energy—of fright—makes me pause. Derrick. He’s afraid of me. Just the sick, rancid taste of it makes me lose my concentration. I brush against the tree with an audible scratch, and the nearest fae turns with a blade in his hand.
He strikes high and I barely move in time. He slices me across the shoulder.
That’s all it takes. I throw back my head with a rough, savage hiss. My blade is in my hands before he can move again. I lash out, catch his throat. I feel the eyes of the others on me, taking in the sight of my dripping blade, shadows rising around me, the body at my feet.
One of them screams—a sharp cry that echoes through the forest. As one, they dive for me.
My sword whistles through the air, nothing more than a blur. Skin breaks beneath my blade; blood splatters across the ground. I am faster than they could ever hope to be. I move like a dancer, in graceful whirls and kicks and rapid slashes.
I am powerful. I am merciless. Each kill fills me up, gives me more energy. My massacre is as swift as spreading darkness.
Something comes at me, a light out of the corner of my eye. I grasp it before I even know what it is, a small body in my hand, my fingers closing over tiny bones and soft, breakable wings.
“Aileana!”
That’s Derrick’s voice. Derrick’s scream. I stare down at him in shock, catching his stricken expression before he flies off into the trees.
I drag in a breath as I survey my kills. I did this. Derrick saw me do this. He saw me lose control.
Why don’t I feel anything?
Not even pride or accomplishment—and something tells me I felt those things about battle once. That later, I fought only out of necessity, survival. Kill or be killed. Either way, I felt something.
I gaze at the dozen dead fae across the forest floor and I know this: I didn’t do this out of necessity. I could have forced them away. I could have run and they wouldn’t have captured me. If I disarmed them, none could have defeated me. I slaughtered them all, because I could.
I would have killed Derrick, too.
A rough sound escapes Derrick’s throat. He’s settled on a branch in a nearby tree, examining the bent tip of his wing. Then he turns and stares down at me through a glistening veil of tears. He doesn’t say anything, but I feel his fear again. The taste of it is foul, bile down the back of my throat.
I did that. I injured his wing. I did that.
“You hurt me,” he says, his voice trembling with anger and . . . something else. Something like betrayal. “You hurt me.”
I know from his voice that I’ve never hurt him before. Not once.
That’s all it takes for me to rein in my power. To stuff it back into its too-small bone case and let it settle inside me with the ache that I deserve. And when I do, I’m suddenly aware of Derrick’s thoughts. I can hear them so clearly, as if he were saying the words aloud.
She slaughtered a dozen fae in under a minute.
She’s a monster wearing the skin of a girl.
She came back wrong.
Is that how he sees me?
Without thinking, I shove into Derrick’s mind. His thoughts are prismlike, a cacophony of colors and images. At first they’re unclear, difficult for me to understand. My mind doesn’t work this way; even now, it’s still too human, too simple.
Each thought is layered, never one at a time. It’s a complex intermingling of observations and smatterings of gold and red hues and images. His sounds have taste. His tastes have texture. His colors evoke feelings and desires.
The color he had given me—the old Aileana—was amber; the texture and taste is like honey. His favorite thing in the world other than me. A girl with wild copper hair and a smile as devious as his own. A girl whose bravery he admired. A girl he felt so close to that she became his family when all the rest had died.
I’ve eclipsed that Aileana and become something less than human. Because that’s what I am: a creature. Not human, not fae—a girl in-between, powerful and formidable. Someone dangerous. Someone who could easily hurt him without meaning to.
I bite back a gasp when I see myself through Derrick’s eyes. He sees his friend—the girl he searched for these last two months, wishing that she’d come back from the dead. And here I am, right in front of him: dripping with blood, my face covered in it. My eyes glow fierce and bright and inhuman; freakish eyes. As uncanny as any fae. Shadows gather around me like a cloak, a shroud.
And beyond the images and colors and textures, a single thought of Derrick’s rings as clear as a bell: She’s not my Aileana.
That thought makes my chest ache. Not his Aileana. Not his friend. I’m just a monster who doesn’t remember where she came from or who she is.
I don’t care what she looks like, his thoughts continue. She’s not my Aileana.
“Get. Out. Of. My. Head,” Derrick says through clenched teeth.
I hadn’t realized I had forced him to stay unmoving while I read his thoughts. I used my powers against him effortlessly, without giving any thought to them at all. First I hurt him, then I broke into his mind.
He’s right: You are a monster. I shut my eyes and pull away.
The moment my power leaves him, Derrick’s breathing turns ragged, as if he’s trying to find his bearings. His lips tremble. He smooths the thin line of his left wing. It’s straightened slightly, healing.
I’m sorry, I almost say. But I swallow my apologies down because I don’t deserve his forgiveness. I read his thoughts without permission. I could have killed him.
I wonder if, in the heat of battle, I would have even cared.
“I’m different from the girl I was,” I say, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. She was in control of herself. She didn’t hurt you. She loved you.
Without memories, the feeling of home isn’t enough. Without them, I’ve learned nothing, been nowhere. I have no parts of myself to remind me of what I’ve lost, what I’ve overcome, who I am, who I’ve been.
An apology is on my lips again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m this shadow creature who doesn’t remember the girl you loved and lost. I’m sorry you wished for her and got me instead.
Derrick’s fear turns to anger. His power is as sharp as blades on my tongue. “How dare you?” he snaps. “I could forgive you hurting me—I know how easy it is to lose yourself in battle. But how dare you invade my mind like that? You didn’t even try to stop yourself.”
“I know.” My words are barely audible, but he hears them anyway. “I’m sorry. I am.”
“Don’t,” he grits out. “You don’t know and you’re not sorry. How the hell could you be?” He rakes me with a glare, hard and accusatory. “The friend I knew had someone break into her mind, day after day, for months. If you were her, you would never have done that to anyone. Not after what Lonnrach did.”
After what Lonnrach did.
Teeth biting me over and over. They sank in so deep that blood slid down my skin and dripped onto the floor. Drip, drip, drip. Thirty-six human teeth. Forty-six fangs that descended from his gums, pointed at their tips like a snake’s.
They left behind hundreds of scars that dotted my arms, shoulders, chest, and neck. They were a declaration: You’re mine. I own you.
But when I feel for those scars, they’re not there. They’re on that other body, the one burned on a pyre by the loch. Whoever brought me back left behind the only scar that mattered: the one that had killed me.