KARIS

A cold rain is falling. My hair and clothes are soaked and I can’t see anything. Something must have happened to my vision. I touch the skin around my eyes, but there are no wounds. Feeling my way forward, I stumble over something, trying to keep my balance.

A voice calls out, “Are you okay?”

“Who’s there?” My hands stretch out before me.

“What are you doing out here?” the voice asks kindly.

“I can’t see. Can… can you help me?”

“Where’d you come from?”

“I don’t know.”

A warm hand wraps around mine. “Listen, you’re safe. My name is Iric, and I’ll help you.”

“Why? You don’t know me. I don’t even know what’s happening.”

“Do you know your name?”

I think hard, and a single name echoes in my mind. “Karis.”

“Okay, Karis. Let’s get you out of the rain, for starters. Are you hungry?”

“I’m starving,” I tell him, my voice breaking. There is a sound, a tinkling sound that echoes all around us. “And my head hurts.”

He laughs. “I can make a tea to help with that, too.”

“Why would you help someone you don’t know?”

Iric pauses and squeezes my hand. “Because I’d hope someone would be decent enough to do the same for me.”

“Why are you here, Iric?” I asked.

“She brought me here,” he replied, nodding toward Nemain, who looked to be winning the fight against the Leancan.

“Was she going to hurt you?”

“She was going to kill me.”

I zeroed in on Nemain and grinned. “Well, she’s not the strongest creature in Faery,” I confessed with a wink.

* * *

LOFTIN

I eased Iric toward the mirror and banged on it twice. Where the hell was Finean?

Karis threw an invisible shield over us, a dome, just like the ones she used to guard the human cities, but clear as glass. We could see and hear her. We could do everything but reach her.

“Mother, you really should stop fighting. You’ve already lost,” Karis called out. She strode across the room, and at the sound of her daughter’s approach, Nemain let go of Alistair’s neck.

“I haven’t lost anything,” Nemain growled.

“Mirror, show me the Court of Reflections,” Karis beseeched quietly. The surface of the enormous mirror on the wall across from us shimmered and an image appeared. Fae from every court were there, busy and happy. Not only surviving, but thriving. There were homes built high into the sky, Spring fae helping Winter fae grow food, and Summer fae bringing warmth to the place. The image zoomed out to reveal streets and shops and fields full of gardens farther out. It zoomed out further to reveal a smoky dome shield.

“This isn’t possible,” Nemain stuttered, reaching toward the mirror.

Karis grabbed her arm. “Without you ruining it, Faery will thrive again. It already is. Without you, the Unseelie will be sent back to hell—where they belong.”

“No,” Nemain breathed.

An explosion of light energy burst from Karis’s middle. Aspers, brighter than the sun, filled the floor and slithered out of the building to hunt down the Unseelie scum Nemain had brought with her. “It’s already done. You’re all alone now.”

Nemain backed away slowly. “No.”

“But you won’t be going with them. The fae call you a goddess, but I know what you really are.” She shook her head, disgusted. “You’re nothing.”

Karis stretched her hands out and withdrew Nemain’s power, taking into her body a dark force that was almost blinding. She drained Nemain of all the power she’d had before she took it from others, as well as everything she’d stolen since. Nemain wheezed and inhaled, the tendons at her neck tightening into thick cords. She clutched at her chest and reached out to Karis.

Karis shoved Nemain into the mirror on the wall, trapping her inside. In a tone I’d never heard come out of her mouth, Karis screamed, shattering the mirror into a billion tiny shards of glass. And Nemain shattered with them.

Karis kept screaming. Darkness exploded from her, like she’d taken in too much from her mother and had to purge it from her body. Plumes of smoke and ash poured from her and she fell on her knees. I beat on the dome, begging her to let me out, but she couldn’t hear me. She stayed there until she was empty. Until the entire room and everything in it was coated with ash.

The heels of my hands and elbows were going to break, but I didn’t stop beating the dome.

“Let us out, K!” Iric yelled.

“No!” I screamed. Finean stepped into the room through the mirror that remained. I pointed toward him and yelled his name.