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Really, anyone who wanted to question the history and way of life we’d always been taught, the Good Council punished in front of the entire village.

Guilt nipped at me. It was my fault the Esholians were second-guessing and opening their eyes to it all. Without my plan, there wouldn’t be a string of elites breathing down their necks on the way to their council-sanctioned jobs.

Then again, without my plan, they’d all be dead at my hand in a few months’ time anyway due to the tattoo writhing along my back.

Either way, my fault.

“Don’t even think about it,” Sasha murmured when my grip tightened on Old Veracious. Another elite had just sent an elderly man to his knees with a Mind Manipulating command and was now tearing through his jacket as the man groaned.

“Yeah, don’t,” Sylvie agreed with a nod. Her voice cracked with nerves, her hands wringing over the handle of a scythe as the trumpet tree’s leaves dripped residual rainwater all over us. The twins had plucked the farming tools from a soybean field on the outskirts of town upon our arrival. “Stick to the plan.”

Right. The plan. Any second now…

A minute passed. Then another. My eyes drifted to a harpy eagle perched on the roof of the nearest building, cocking its head at the village people as if contemplating whether or not to dig its talons into one of them and fly off.

I was beginning to wonder if Dazmine and Terrin hadn’t been quite as convincing as they thought they’d been when a shriek rose from the middle of the street, slicing through the fog.

“NO!”

It was a woman whose husband had just been dragged to the village square between buildings with peeling yellow paint and mossy shingles. Several elites swarmed him, and I saw the flash of the single coin they held up from here.

“You have been found,” one of the elites hissed, “with an unlawful artifact that marks you as a treasonous individual.”

His voice didn’t just reach our ears; it reached our thoughts as well, his Mind Manipulating power casting a net around everyone in the vicinity and making the words reverberate in our skulls.

I gritted my teeth, canines snapping. It took all my restraint not to rip the asshole out of my mind right here and now, but I didn’t want to alert him to my presence before it was time. Right now, I was just one mind amid hundreds of villagers who were gawking at the scene unraveling before them.

“Do you deny this charge?” the elite asked.

This was the part where the man was supposed to say yes and beg for forgiveness and claim he hadn’t even realized he had such a thing in his pocket.

The man didn’t do that. Just as Dazmine and Terrin had said he’d promised to on this day, at this hour, he jerked his chin skyward until his eyes flew over the elites’ heads and rested among his wife and neighbors.

“I don’t deny it! That coin is proof that someone else used to run this island! That things could be better! That we could have a new leader!”

Shock oscillated through the crowd. Silence screamed louder than the wind. The man’s wife shook her head frantically, but the damage was done.

The elites broke into a flurry of motion. One of them summoned a leather whip. Two others hauled him toward a post, where they chained him up. The Mind Manipulator flung his voice over everyone’s minds again: “The faerie king of old is dead. Just like this traitor will be for trying to dismantle the system that keeps us ALL safe from the monsters beyond the dome.”

“No—monsters—beyond the dome,” the man huffed, struggling against his chains. “Just—monsters—here—right in front of us.”

It wasn’t entirely true. There were plenty of monsters beyond the dome, Queen Mydusia and the vampires included, but not in the way the villagers thought. And now they were all glancing at each other, obvious dissatisfaction in their gazes as the man’s wife began pleading with the elites to let him go.

She merely received a slap that echoed throughout the entire canyon.

Nobody used their magic to stand up to the elites, though. They knew the Good Council was more powerful, and I’d never expect them to forfeit their lives.

That’s where I came in.

Just as the elite with the whip lifted his arm, I unleashed myself.

My darkness spit me out into the square. I stuck my blade through the elite’s back and ripped it out again with a squelch of blood and entrails before the whip could crack. He doubled over, crumpled, then crashed to the ground.

Screams lanced through the crowd.

The other elites swiveled toward me, shock widening their eyes when I tipped my head in their direction.

“Good evening, shitheads. Let’s dance.”