Dain struck with one wing-hand, hooking his talons under a fae's armor and ripping upwards. He'd splintered wood and broken glass in front of me before. I'd known he was strong. At least, I'd thought I'd known he was strong. I hadn't understood.

He caught her in the belly, and tore off her chest.

I puked as the woman's guts fell steaming onto the ground, her ribcage visible, the organs moving for far too long as she died. I stared, and stared, and stared, unable to take my eyes off of the woman's insides, the shifting shapes of her intestines and liver and stomach and lungs—

Something hot and wet sprayed across my face. The head of a man thudded to the ground, rolling until it touched the wet intestines of the dead woman, and I vomited again. And again, and again, until there was nothing in my stomach and I was huddling inside of a rose bush.

"Leah. Leah, please."

Dain, that was Dain's voice, and I looked up from staring at the head and the guts into the blood-spattered, terrified face of my Dain. He was bleeding and he had another arrow in his chest. One wing-arm was held out behind him, hand spread, with a glamored fog hiding us from view. I whimpered, tears I didn't remember having started still running down my face.

"We have to go," he said. "Please, Leah."

Please. He kept saying please. Who even did that? This was Faery. Nobody said things like that.

I held out my hand to him. Something passed over his face, maybe shock, but the Beast of Phazikai held out his blood-soaked hand to me, and I took it. Dain hauled me out of the rose bushes and past the guts, and then we were running, Dain holding my hand and the defensive glamor around us, his dripping sword held in front of us.

Arrows whistled past us. One thudded into him; Dain only grunted. But then one hit me in the calf, piercing through, and I screamed and would have fallen, the brutal sharpness of that pain tearing all thought from me. As I went down, Dain picked me up, hauling me up by my wrist and hooking me with his wing-arm, the one he'd used to gut a woman, his strong forearm across my chest like a seatbelt and his fingers wrapped around my shoulder with such care that those scythe-like claws didn't even prick me.

He threw us into the palace through a fucking window, taking the blow for us and skidding across the floor on broken glass to haul us behind stone walls. I couldn't do anything but pant and sob, pain and terror and horror making me shake and turning my world into nothing but blurs of color and the sound of roaring in my ears.