As I looked around, I noticed gaps in those groups of the dead. Untouched and spilled water cups. Those who hadn’t been as quick to drink with their morning meal. Those who’d seen what happened. And then…

To my left, the body of a man lay over a woman’s, his head nearly cut off by a hatchet blade, his arm still around her. Beyond them, another man lay halfway to the tents, a child in his arms, taken down by a blow from the rear. To my right, a woman had been killed trying to drag a dying man to shelter, her hands still wrapped in his tunic.

That was when I saw Gabriel, standing between the forest and the camp. His gaze was fixed on a body near his feet. It was a girl, no more than eight or nine, who’d been running for the forest. An unarmed child. Cut down by a blow so hard it nearly sliced her in two. And under her? A baby, clutched in her arms.

Gabriel’s gaze went from me to the girl and the baby, and though he didn’t say a word, I saw them in his eyes.

I don’t understand.

Gabriel knew death. He’d defended killers, and he conducted that job with cold detachment. But now he looked at these two victims, and he saw no defense. No way to even attempt one.

“Evil,” I said. “This is evil.”

He nodded and squinted at the camp. Two ravens circled overhead. For a moment I thought they were scavenging. Crows already worked on a body at the periphery, as if they weren’t yet convinced it was safe to move in, all the humans gone.

The ravens flew at the crows, croaking, and the smaller corvids winged off, cawing indignantly. The ravens didn’t take over the feast, though. They kept circling the camp, swooping to take a closer look at the carnage and then flying up again, letting out croaks that sounded frustrated, angry.

“Looking for fae,” Gabriel murmured.

The ravens were from the Cŵn Annwn, seeking evidence of fae-blood victims among the dead so the Huntsmen could exact vengeance for the massacre. Those croaks meant they weren’t finding what they needed.

“Then let the sluagh take the killers,” I muttered.

The words were no sooner out of my lips than I fell into darkness again, this time landing near a small encampment. Hide tents in a forest. A smoldering fire pit. Snores from inside the tents.

“The perpetrators,” Gabriel said.

An odd choice of word. Very clinical, very legal, and it might seem as if that let Gabriel put this horror into a perspective he understood. But what he understood were killers, while these men had perpetrated something far worse.

In the tents, the men snored and mumbled in sleep. Then came the distant sound of a thousand wings beating the night air.

“They deserve it,” I said.