And then the Unseelie Prince strolled through the archway, his black magic still coiling around his fingers. He wore no helmet and his armor was not the bulky kind the others wore. His were more like a combination of wool and chainmail. He looked the same as the others, with the same pale-bluish skin, long black hair, and black eyes, yet somehow there was no mistaking who he was. He glanced around Seelie and snarled, balling his hands into fists. “You know why we’re here. Hurry.”

The knights fled in every direction, like cockroaches when you turned on the light after a rainstorm. The Unseelie Prince marched away with his head held high and a cocky smirk on his face.

“Tegan! Tegan, can you hear me?” I yelled out. “Get me out of here. Help me.”

The world blurred around me. I cursed in a panic before I realized my projection was moving on its own. When I stopped, I found myself at the bank of a huge lake with water that looked like liquid metal. And standing in the middle of the lake, waist deep in the water, was the Unseelie Prince. His strange armor was gone, leaving his bare, shirtless torso in plain sight. He was thinner than I expected, with barely any muscle definition in his chest or abs. In fact, he was so thin it was easy to see his ribs. He looked like a dog that needed to be rescued off the street and hooked to an IV for a week.

He grinned and dropped beneath the surface of the water. My eyes widened. I glanced around to find a dozen knights on their knees on the shore, shoveling water into their mouths in a panic. It splashed all over them and onto the orange sand. Their hair and faces were soaked. They didn’t care, they couldn’t drink it fast enough. Some of them dropped down and held glass canisters to the lake and began filling them up. In seconds they had dozens of these canisters full of the silver lake water.

Movement in my peripheral vision made me turn—I gasped. The Unseelie Prince was walking out of the lake . . . and he looked . . . different. That was still his face, except now his cheekbones weren’t as sharp. His nose wasn’t so angular. Hell, even his pointed ears were a little more filled out. His lips had been thin, dry lines on his face but were now plump and pink. His face looked eerily human, or as human as Thorne’s looked. With every step he took, his skin darkened. His body thickened to where his ribs no longer protruded from his body. Muscles began to form. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew being in that lake just made him stronger.