The Faire (Harrow Faire #5) - Kathryn Ann Kingsley Page 0,1

was silent except for the agony. It was the kind of sensation that she knew would stay with her. Even if the pain itself went away, the memory would linger.

Somewhere, faintly, far overhead…she heard someone shout her name.

Metal jutted up out from her body in places it should not be. Her chest, her legs, her arms, her throat. She tried to breathe. Tried to cry out in response to the voice above her. But all she could do was taste the blood that flooded her mouth.

Darkness cloyed at the edges of her mind but came no closer. She knew there wouldn’t be any quiet relief from this.

She couldn’t die. Her body was trying to heal the damage, but she couldn’t move. She couldn’t climb off the structure that impaled her.

She was trapped.

Honestly, she preferred the falling.

Usually, Cora loved dreaming. All through her life, dreams had been fun. She had never really been bothered by nightmares. Not, at least, until Duncan had hurt her. In the years afterward, it seemed all she could do was relive that terrible moment in her dreams. But slowly, those nightmares had thinned out, became less frequent, and dreaming became a pleasant experience again.

Until she came to Harrow Faire.

Now her dreams fucking sucked.

She couldn’t sleep. The last one had woken her up, and then she tossed and turned for a while, trying to get comfortable. She stared at the wood-panel ceiling of the boxcar for an hour before she finally slipped out from under Simon’s arm. He made a grumbly, whiny noise, but rolled over and began softly snoring again.

She smiled and watched him for a long moment. He was evil. Pure, unadulterated evil. But man, he was adorable at the same time. That said more about her than it probably did about him. She reached out and gently stroked her hand over his dark, curly hair.

Evil. But…not, at the same time. He was oddly considerate in the strangest of ways. He was sweet to her. He was funny. He made her laugh and smile more than anyone else ever had in her life.

And he had helped her commit murder. What said “I care about you” more than that?

She cringed at the memory of what she had done to Duncan. She didn’t regret it. But it lingered in a weird way. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable realization—finding out that she was capable of killing someone.

Climbing from the bed, she got dressed. She could hear the rain pattering on the roof of the car and tapping along the windows. It’d be nice to walk in the rain, regardless of whether she got soaked. After just a few weeks stuck in the Inversion with its disturbing lack of weather, she had been very much over the whole situation and was happy to have the simple thing called “a sky” back in her life.

A hundred-and-one fun things she never thought she’d take for granted. A sky. Live and learn. Or un-live and learn. I still don’t know if we count as being alive or not.

Pulling on a coat, she quietly opened the door and shut it behind her. She waited a beat. When the lights in the boxcar didn’t flick on and Simon didn’t come after her, she stepped out from the awning over the stairs and headed into the park.

The rain was chilly. It was September. It was just about to officially be fall. She hoped she was around long enough to watch the leaves turn. Halloween at Harrow Faire must be one hell of a party. She tucked her hands into her pockets as she walked the path through the closed midway games and deactivated rides. Only the lampposts were lit.

Well, the lampposts and the giant, glowing observation tower.

Looking up at the structure, she sighed. It was the Heart of Harrow Faire. And Ringmaster had the Key. The Key she was supposed to pry from his cold, dead hands. But she hadn’t wanted to commit murder.

I didn’t want to commit murder right up until the moment that I did.

I’m such a fucking hypocrite.

But she didn’t kill Duncan. Not really. He left on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. But she had things to pay attention to other than people’s new-looking cellphones and their jump ahead in time. Because Duncan was breathing. He was gaping at the world around him.

She hadn’t killed him.

She had done something far worse. Far, far worse.

She had destroyed him.

The lights were on, but no one was home. She had ripped the