Chapter 11
ELEVEN
The drizzle has been constant since the farm. It stuck around through the hailstorm—and even now, stagnant in the air, it’s starting to turn my nose raw and runny.
My sniffles follow us through the dark streets.
I mean, I guess they are streets, because that was the last thing I saw around me, apartment buildings and storefronts—
Then Samick reached down my wrist for the torch and switched it off.
No command, no order, just did it himself.
I prefer that.
Something about orders…
Ugh, they knead into my spine, a tension that burrows too deep in me.
A natural resistance.
I could barely hold down a job for more than a couple of months in the Before. As soon as I started getting too many commands from whatever boss I had, that was it. My resolve was chipped away, piece by piece, order by order.
But with Samick… it feels different sometimes. Like I can just exist, switch off, operate on autopilot, and he guides the way.
Like he guides me now through the dark.
We follow the sound of Arwyn’s bootsteps on the hard road, hearing the jangling and clanging of his weapons with each rushed step.
To them, it’s just long, swift steps—but to me, it’s a jog, and I can hardly keep up.
Those ragged breaths return, raspy and sandpapery down my chest.
I suck my breaths out of the inhaler.
I hope Samick has another in his satchel, because I’m running this one dry just trying to keep up.
But my lungs haven’t properly rested from before. I need them to soothe—more than what the inhaler can offer.
Whatever that virus did to me, it’s more than constricted, crackling lungs. It’s exhaustion in my bones, fatigue in my muscles, a tiredness that fogs my mind—and sometimes, at its absolute worst, hacking up blood.
That hasn’t happened in so long.
But it doesn’t mean it won’t happen again—and I don’t want to find out what comes after.
So I whisper in the dark, without the prying ears of a unit’s worth of warriors, “I need to stop.”
I need to pause.
To rest.
To sit down.
My boot scuffs over the road—and that’s all, before Samick’s solid arm swoops through the dark for me.
I’m hoisted off my feet.
For the countless time in his impatience, I take the rest of the journey slung over his shoulder.
The muscle of his firm shoulder presses into my belly and chokes the air out of me, but I’m grateful for the ride—because the rush through the blackout goes on a while longer.
It’s at least another half-hour before my hair whips my cheeks and my neck sways to the side, and so I know Samick has taken a hard turn off the road.
The rattle of a door comes before bootsteps are muffled on carpeted floors.
Samick tugs me off his shoulder, not nearly as violently as the first time, when he just yanked me off and I smacked down to the ground on my back, air winded right out of me.
Now, he sets me down on my feet, almost gingerly, like he’s finally accepted what Dare said.
‘They are a fragile kind.’
Samick shifts a bit, like he kicks his heel back for the door—and I hear it thud shut.
It doesn’t slam. It wasn’t booted in, either, before we came inside. And since we could’ve found any apartment, any place to bunker down back in the borough, I realise Arwyn and Samick made a point of getting out of that area. All those shops and cars and buildings, but they kept it moving.
It seems they want to go unnoticed.
The question lingers on my tongue for a beat, are there units coming this way, are there people around—
But I don’t voice those questions.
Not as I’m pulled with Samick into a carpeted room.
The darkness doesn’t hold for long, not with the clammer and clatter that bounces off nearby walls, then a hissing sound that comes the moment a flame is struck on a matchstick.
I home in on the flame in the blackout.
Then I clench my eyes shut, because the flame suddenly bursts into a bright, blinding light.
Arwyn lit the hearth.
My eyes squint against the glare.
Always feels like an attack each time light comes through the dark with so much brightness.
But then again, in the Before, I did hate fluorescent light strips above me, or ‘the big light’ on in the flat. I prefer the lamps, softer and cosier.
And as the seconds pass, and my eyes adjust more and more, the flames in that tall, black Victorian fireplace start to soften, and the light brushes over Mika.
Sweaty and paler than usual, she’s draped over an uncomfortable-looking sofa pushed up against the row of tall, slim windows. Spikes of black stain her veins. It’s a poison spreading up the collar of her leathers and down over her twitchy hands.
Arwyn, still by the fireplace, with his back to me, starts digging through his satchel.
And he’s not careful about it.
His belongings are spilling out all over the hardwood floors—and I realise the floors aren’t carpeted at all, they are covered in too many clashing rugs.
The familiar feeling of frost creeps by me, like a gust of winter wind breezing by.
I turn as Samick moves from the front door to the windows.
The tether dangles from his belt.
With a glance at my cuff, I realise I’ve been released.
Samick barricades us in—or something out.
A worry springs in my gut, a bud of concern, because why the fuck does he need to do that?
Samick feels it.
Senses it.
Lashes low over faint green eyes, he glances at me.
“Are we in danger?” My voice is hushed and tired.
Turning to the walnut wardrobe, he grips it with just one hand then easily drags it along the frilly rugs to stand flat against the door.
I spare the wardrobe an odd look before I realise, this isn’t a home we’ve taken shelter in.
It’s more like a waiting room than anything.
The stiff, chaise-style sofa that Mika’s been uncomfortably set down on, the polished Victorian fireplace, the wardrobe—for coats, I guess—and the overall hollowness of it.
Maybe it’s the tall windows or high ceilings, maybe it’s the hardwood floors covered in mismatched rugs, or the wooden steps that lead upstairs, or the modern crescent desk that sits against the other wall facing us, but there really is something about these old beautiful historical homes being turned into offices that just makes me feel so disappointed.
Samick tugs away from the wardrobe fitted against the door. “No.”
I throw a frown up at him. “What? I’m not doing anything.”
A blankness steals his face—that look I’ve seen on him so many times before. A wish for more patience. A tedium.
“No,” he echoes, firm. “We are not in danger. It is a precaution so we can sleep.”
“Oh.” I slide my gaze the wardrobe. The barricading. Then I hear it. ‘We’. I ask, “You and him?”
I tilt my head in the direction of the waiting room, right beside us.
Arwyn doesn’t pay us any attention, not as he brings an armful of medicinal salves and balms and powders to the stiff chaise.
A little jar of red catches my gaze, and I think of jam. Real, fresh jam, like my granny used to make, not the shit from the shop.
My mouth waters—and just as it does, my stomach syncs up with the sudden surge of hunger.
And it gurgles.
Samick brushes past me.
I hurry after him, over the narrow rug that passes the ugly glass desk, then down a hallway that would be claustrophobic if it wasn’t for the high ceiling.
“You slept at the prison,” I press, and that’s a point, I know it because he never sleeps, so that one sleep was like… his annual sleep or whatever.
But I’m pushing my luck. Asking too many questions, making too many comments.
Samick doesn’t cut me down for it. “Not enough.”
He moves down the corridor, unbothered, but darkness is inching back in as we leave behind the flames in the hearth.
I slide a hand down my wrist to the torchlight—and pause.
I wait for him to react.
Still, he’s unbothered, his steps moving patiently down the hallway.
I switch on the light.
We pass some open doors—doors that open to offices, gorgeous rooms turned corporate spaces.
Samick doesn’t stop to board up the windows in those rooms. He glances into each room that we pass, closes the door, then moves onwards to the next, then the next, until we’re at the end of the corridor.
The final door is wide open already.
And it opens to the kitchen.
The rooms back here are… odd.
Oddly placed.
The kitchen is small, compared to the size of the waiting room, the ceiling is lower, and I decide it must be some sort of extension.
I shift the torch to the open door on my right, and the light catches on the porcelain curve of a toilet seat.
Not a full bathroom.
Just a toilet and a sink.
I spare the careless extension a moment’s look of annoyance—
Then Samick heads for the back door, leathers glistening over slinking muscles. He grabs the edge of a solid kitchen table then drags it over to block the door.
That’s not to keep fae out.
That table is light enough for him to fling through the whole building. Any fae could get through that as easily as a mist of feathers.
“Are there people around here?” I ask.
Because Samick must be barricading against any humans that might be lurking around in the dark.
And I don’t quite believe what he told me.
Sure, maybe he does need more sleep. Maybe Arwyn does, too.
But it’s not their own safety they are worried about. Mika is out cold from that poison or the medication Arwyn gave her, or both.
I suspect Samick is more concerned about the collateral damage if survivors do notice our arrival and take a shot at us. I’m collateral. Like to the prison guy with his shotgun.
“Possibly,” he says. “Possibly not.”
Samick moves through the kitchen. He stalks like a predator, like it’s not just in his nature, but in his bones to be one.
He starts tearing cabinet doors off their hinges.
The blood of his fellow warriors stains his leathers, the mute patches that don’t glisten in my torchlight. And that blood is dried on his fingers now, caked under his nails.
As though he didn’t just slaughter some of his own people, like it doesn’t bother him at all, he just starts boarding up the windows with the cabinet doors.