She looked like hell. Her black hair hung around her face, ratty and singed. Soot and blood smeared her porcelain skin, with cuts and deep welts on one side of her body, where her simple clothing was burned and torn. Long wounds ran down her right arm, laying her open to the bone, but no blood fell from them. Inside of her arm, the muscle was black, and the skin looked almost ashen, all the way up onto her neck, old and dead.

Blood magic.

My eyes darted towards my shotgun, sitting uselessly on the table to my left.

A cruel smile curled up her red lips. "If you try to pick up your weapon, dear girl, I will have every fae in this room kill themselves slowly."

Fear thudded into me, adrenaline making sweat break out across my body and my heart rate jump up towards tachycardia. "You're the blood mage," I said, my voice shaking. "It was you all along, after all. You did this."

Her smile spread. "I am. And I did."

"Why?" I sounded like a lost child, staring at the Stag Queen, with her dead arm and her dead army.

"Come with me, and I will tell you," she said. A hard light entered her eyes, something full of hatred blazing inside of her. "Or don't come, and be made yet one more sacrifice."

"I'll come," I said, trying to keep my voice steady, as my hands trembled and my stomach twisted with nausea and horror.

With a mocking smile, she held out her dead arm, offering it to me the way Dain had so often offered his. I walked up to her, barely feeling my own body, and laid my own arm along her cold skin. Her fingers closed over mine like the jaws of a bear trap, and I closed my eyes, my whole body shaking from adrenaline and fear.

The Queen turned with me, walking me out of the war room. She touched the wall across from the war room, and to my horror a dark doorway appeared in it. "The Antlered Palace is still mine," she said, her voice slithering across me like a twining serpent. "It answers to its Queen."

We stepped into the doorway, and out into the throne room. It was one of the rooms closest to the outer walls, and totally indefensible, so all we'd done with it was bar the doors with wood and bricks, and leave it empty. She led me across the dais to her throne, then sank into it gracefully, pulling me down to sit between her spread legs.

I sat, trembling, wanting to puke and wanting to flee, as she drew a dagger from her waist. The Queen showed it to me: a Damascus steel blade, the grip made of gold, with golden patterns curling down onto the steel. Then she set its edge against my pulse, and stroked my hair with her dead hand.