Spin the Shadows (Dark and Wicked Fae #1) - Cate Corvin Page 0,77

away to the safety of gleaming coral.

Brightkin thrashed when the vines wrapped around him, but the mermaids scattered, leaving him to his fate.

“Smart ladies,” I told them, and pulled back on my vines, hauling Brightkin with them.

The Prince emerged red-faced and sputtering, choking up water. It dripped off him into the lake, and I finally stood up. My trees were happy where they were; they didn’t need me to survive here.

But the mermaids should probably be leery of the shoreline for a while.

Brightkin spat curses at me. I waited until he stopped to take a shuddering breath before I spoke. “Brightkin, you’re a right cunt, you know that?”

He bared his teeth. It was all he could do with his arms and legs completely bound, mummified in thin but powerful roots. “You can’t speak to me like that!”

“I just did.” I beckoned my branches.

They hauled Brightkin after me. The root network I’d planted on the way down sprouted tendrils when they felt me approaching, and passed Brightkin from tree to tree, overlapping so he never had a chance to escape.

When I reached the junction where I’d left Gwyn, Hellekin was long gone, but two more pairs of eyes widened.

Jack Frost had Robin’s arm slung over his shoulder. Ice was packed all around the bullet hole in Robin’s chest, but the bleeding had stopped, and the dark veins had been halted by the cold.

“Excellent, Briallen,” Robin whispered. The Faebane might have been slowed, but he was still so pale, almost deathly in the dim light.

I felt Brightkin struggling against my branches and had them tighten up a little bit. Just enough to squeeze the breath out of his lungs, but not enough to crush him.

Well, they might crush him if he decided to struggle. I wouldn’t be unhappy about it.

I stepped forward and pinned the gold badge back on Robin’s shirt. “I found the mermaid grotto where they were planning to escape,” I said quietly. “I think these are all the humans.”

He leaned a little harder on Jack, who, to his credit, didn’t complain or even roll his eyes.

But why would he? Now I owed him a massive favor.

Robin looked up at Brightkin, disgust written all over his face. “I see she did the honors of arresting you,” he said. His voice was so hoarse it was painful to listen to. “Now your mother can pass judgment, but I don’t believe she’ll consider you much of a son by the end of it.”

All the blood remaining in Brightkin’s face drained away. Instead of cursing more, he just stared out of hollow eye sockets.

It was over.

Hours later, we emerged on Sobek Street with one captive prince, ten human girls who cried the entire way to the surface, a Wild Hunter, and two Left Hands, one of whom was knocking on death’s door.

Understandably, every single Fae in the vicinity stopped what they were doing and stared.

I took the rear of the cavalcade, carrying a load of the unnervingly fleshy faerie fruits in a makeshift bag made of Gwyn’s tee shirt. Jack had pointed out that after weeks of living on nothing but the fruit, separating the girls from their sole food source entirely might kill them outright.

The entire way up, I had to hand out the fruit when the girls cried. It was sickening to do it, but necessary. More than once, Gwyn had needed to pick a girl up and carry her when she abruptly stopped moving.

He’d sent Ceri back home to the Hunt; the Otherworld hound had been disturbed by the glassy-eyed girls, growling and scratching at the ground around them.

Jack touched my elbow, so softly it was barely a brush.

“The healers might be able to help them,” he told me, giving me a little bit of hope to cling to. “If it hasn’t been too long, they might be able to wean them off the fruit.”

I just nodded grimly and kept walking. Now that the adrenaline had worn off, I was aware of just how much of me hurt, and it was just about everything.

My feet were deeply cut and caked with mud, and I’d been scratched by my own thorns without realizing it. Hellekin’s spiked leather jacket had left bloody gouges in my arm.

Jack hauled Robin out of the Undercity door as Gwyn herded the human girls against a wall, encouraging them to sit down.

My heart swelled a little when he held one’s hand. She was the silent crier, the one who’d been knocked over and hadn’t had the presence