Page 39 of The Filigree Key

Or when I released it.

I stuffed my hands into my armpits to warm them while I waited for the Stag Man’s instruction.

“What do you know of the essence of fire?” he asked.

“You said it was destruction.”

He nodded. “It is. It cannot be reasoned with because it has no mind. Its only desire is to consume and ravage. This half-heart is a rabid beast that you must subdue and kill before you are bitten. And I mean that literally. Kill the Unseelie heart to access the fire within.”

“Kill?” My hands dropped to my sides. “You said nothing about killing it. I thought the only thing that could kill a demon was its own kind.”

The Stag Man smirked. “Of course that’s what they’d want you to believe.” He held up a hand as I began to protest. “You will subdue it like you did the wight, except go one step further. You can kill, can’t you? You are a Hawthorne, a master of Life and Death aspects of Nature magic.”

Killing the half-heart would certainly benefit Redbud in the long run, not to mention free the Alder family of a generational curse. I just . . . wasn’t prepared to take a life—no matter how unsavory that life already was—to save my brother.

“It’s nothing more than an unthinking beast,” Ossian supplied, noting my hesitation. “Half of one, actually, and a lesser half at that.”

I had no choice, and there was only one thing left to do to prepare. I removed the tooled leather guards that covered my iron cuffs and tossed them at Ossian. The Stag Man caught them, affronted that I would treat him like a common valet, but I just shrugged. “I would’ve put them in my satchel.”

His upper lip twitched for only a moment before he stuffed the guards into one of his pouches. Metal grated and dark green sparks flew as I raked my cuffs against each other. Ossian took a step back, gesturing I should advance beyond the moonflowers in front of him. “We’ll hold the key together.”

Leaning forward, he held out the filigree key to me. The green diamond twinkled merrily, and the diamond that would hold the essence of fire blushed in anticipation.

I noted that the powerful fae king was going to stay on the opposite side of the moonflowers instead of joining me inside the dara knot. The all-powerful coward. Unable to help myself, I smacked my lips, seized my end of the key, and stepped inside the moonflowers.

A baleful heat slammed into me. I grunted against the assault, battle magic flaring and shoving the half-heart’s aura back. Unlike the wight, whose presence and influence was trapped inside the cloch, the half-heart’s aura extended past its prison. It rammed against my defenses like an incensed bull. Dark green battle magic wrapped around its horns and wrenched it to the side, exposing the half-heart.

Here goes nothing.

I slammed my hand against the pulsing red heart and felt my world turn to flame.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A short-order griddle that’d been sizzling sausages and frying eggs since dawn. Asphalt after it’d been baking in the summer sun all day. A pot of boiling, amber-colored caramel.

Imagine flattening your hand against any one of those surfaces and that would only be a fraction of the pain the half-heart was trying to inflict upon me.

If Ossian was shouting encouragement to me, I couldn’t hear it over the roar of my pulse in my ears. All that existed was the conflagration of the half-heart, the snarling of my battle magic, and the heavenly coolness of the filigree key indenting into my palm.

Kill the heart. Claim the fire.

Wreathed in swirling thorny vines, I sent my perception into the half-heart’s prison. Its crystalline structure was just as disorderly as the cloch’s. Instead of tunnels of soothing gray, I meandered through passageways of flickering ruby. Instead of a voice, snarls guided me.

In the real world, I felt my skin beginning to blister and peel from the blight, but battle magic could not heal. I had to make this quick.

My steps quickened, the ruby hallways turning a dark garnet behind me as I fortified them with my magic. I had not almost died from its blight nor spent all that time with Flora creating its moonflower prison to let whatever nasty lurked inside the half-heart out. A crosshatch of magical tripwires formed in my wake, ready to ensnare and collapse the tunnel if I failed.

I didn’t know the nature of the Unseelie creature who’d given part of its heart for this contract with the Alders, whether it was a demon like a cindercat or hellhound, or if it was a horned high fae like Arcadis, but it presented like a snake.

A snake whose fangs were lunging straight for my throat the moment I exited the tunnel.

“Thistle—” I didn’t have the time to finish the expletive before I pivoted to the side, a battle magic club bashing the serpent’s head into the wall behind me.

The creature was as red-orange as the rest of the half-heart, its body and tail like flame with only its spade-shaped head corporeal enough to strike. A head that was the size of my torso, fangs as long as my hand. It was lightning-quick too, hissing and spitting flames like venom and striking with frightening speed.

Overwhelmed, I let out a screech and spun a circle with my thorny club. The magic oak tree flexed its myriad branches, and a bolus of dark green light ejected from its canopy. Between one second and the next, I was encased in a mimicry of that canopy. Glittering green branches thrashed whenever the flame serpent attacked, swatting after the creature like broomsticks.

There was no time to catch my breath. The branches were on fire from where the flame serpent had struck them and leaves sloughed off and turned to ash, leaving gaps in my defense.