Hunted by a Night Fae

Chapter 8

Bile rose in my throat. I had never seen so much blood. From what I understood, based on Marlais's mutterings, the fae were very hard to kill. Which meant they could be stabbed several times and still stand.

"We heal very quickly," Marlais said watching as my eyes widened in horror. I couldn't look away. Never before had I seen such brutality play out before me. I had watched violent horror movies more than once, but this wasn't a movie; it was real.

And as I watched, there was no denying that none of the other fae compared to the male with the blood-red eyes. I had to wrap my arms around myself to keep from throwing up.

He was grinning. One of his opponent's swords had already sliced a gash through his chest. His tunic hung open to reveal a torso covered in blood. As I watched him—mesmerized in a sick way—he cut down ten fae. After that, it was hard to keep count.

What if this fae came after me? What if he took me as his? I caught his attention already, and it didn't look like he was going to lose this fight.

Marlais noticed where my attention was as she hovered in front of me, painting designs on my skin with white paint. She ran it down my nose and across my cheeks. What the markings meant, I had no idea. I was hoping it meant luck. I would need all I could get if I was going to make it through this night alive.

"A Night fae of the worst sort, the offspring of a vampyr and a fae. He lives off bloodshed, craves it like a drug." She wrinkled her nose. "A halfling of the worse sort. There's a reason we prefer to interbreed with humans rather than some of the other things that live in this world."

I could tell there was more to him than what Marlais was saying. The was the other fae watched him, the presence he commanded. He was feared, yes, but also respected.

"Who is he?"

"Ronan."

Even his name sounded violent.

I watched as Ronan cut down a tall, monstrous-looking faerie that stood about two heads taller than him. He had done so with one great sweep of his sword, severing the male completely in half. Ronan appeared to radiate an aura, dark and filled with blood, sharp fangs exposed as he smiled in glee.

I remembered Gran's tales of the vampyr fae, or baobhan sith, as she had called them. She had said they were beautiful female faeries who seduced their victims so they could drain their body of blood. To imagine such a creature bearing a child... I shivered.

My eyes gravitated briefly from the blood-lusting Night fae as he struck down two more.

Eirian used an indirect and somewhat less bloody technique—though it was just as lethal. But it wasn't that he was killing that shocked me to my core, but how. My eyes widened, and I felt everything else fade away as I followed his graceful and fluid movements. Despite everything, the memory of ten-year-old me had me parting my lips in awe.

He was using magic.

The Prince held two oddly shaped weapons. They had thin, three-pronged blades on both of them, twins to the other, with one long spear down their center. Their handles glittered with beautiful stones encrusted in their hilts, visible even at the distance I sat. Their metallic sheen shone as golden as Eirian's eyes. 

On their own, they likely would have been as lethal as Ronan's sword. However, the air around him shimmered and rippled, water droplets coalescing and gathering to form a large bubbling barrier around him. Then, with a scissoring motion of his blades in front of him, a wave appeared on the air, five men's heads dropping to the ground, their bodies taking another step or two before they fell, twitching and decapitated.