Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
After a whole dead-to-the-world sleep, I wake up to a drool rash on my cheek and the light of the torch is out.
For a while, I stare in the direction of the torch, left on the nightstand—but I have to feel around for it in the darkness.
There’s something puzzling in the first few minutes of waking in a blackout.
Maybe in sleep, my body forgets that darkness is permanent around me, and so when I wake up, it feels like waking up in the middle of the night.
I just know my body clock feels out of order as I scrape the torch off the bedside. My thumb presses down the familiar switch on the side.
But the light doesn’t come on.
I try again.
Disappointment deflates me. Batteries are dead. Samick didn’t turn it off.
The thought of his name has my cheek turning to the flat pillow.
The blankets and quilt rustle as I slide my foot to the other side of the bed, and I move it around until I connect with him, his leg, his calf, his ankle, something.
But nothing, because he isn’t in bed with me.
Not anymore.
He’ll be in the house somewhere, nearby and around. I don’t doubt that I could call out his name and he would hear me—but that’s not my problem right now.
I’m not dressed, I need to use the bathroom, and I don’t have my torchlight to help me.
So I do it without the light.
Just means I move slow.
I find my backpack leaning against the door, and I know I didn’t leave it there. But I take it and shuffle my way to the bathroom.
There’s no doubt that the fae downstairs will hear the floorboards creaking and the doors opening and closing, but I’m left alone to do my business, wash my hands and face, then clumsily get dressed—while I’m sat on the same spot of the floor that Samick…
I throw the memory from my mind before it can take root, before it can even begin to haunt me.
It’s a skill of mine.
I can hold onto ropes of disconnect, separate my mind from the things I’m not ready to face.
And that isn’t something I want to think about right now.
My mind is a fortress of steel and fog as I feel my way along the corridor to the wisps of firelight climbing up the wainscoted walls.
I come down the staircase as quietly as I can manage with the old wood groaning under my weight.
Samick looks up.
His face doesn’t change from cold marble as he watches me descend the last of the stairs.
He sits on the rug by the fireplace, a leg hiked, and his spine resting on the edge of a metal chair.
At first glance, I think he’s just lounging by the warmth of the flames, that when he snuck out of the bedroom, he came down here to be with the fireplace—
But then I see the pot settled on the grate, flames curling and licking around it.
The scent of stew is thick in the air, but not leftovers. A fresh batch.
I stop at the bottom of the stairs.
My mouth floods. I swallow back the saliva and look over at the firm chaise.
Mika is awake.
The inky lines of poison on her pale flesh have faded. But her weakness hasn’t.
Elbows planted on her thighs, she’s slumped over herself, face buried in her hands.
She doesn’t look up as I wander in.
I drop my backpack before joining it on the rug. Close enough to the fireplace for the warmth to start cascading over my winter clothes.
The heat reaches me, threading through the knitted wool of my jumper. I keep my rain jacket in the bag for now, with my gloves.
But the torch, I hand to Samick.
He considers me coldly for a beat, then takes it.
“Needs new batteries.”
That’s all I say.
He sets it down, then looks over my head as bootsteps thud on the rug.
I crane my neck just as Arwyn comes in.
His leathers glisten as though damp, like he’s been in the powder room back in the kitchen, using the tap water to wash himself.
For a measly sink, he did a decent job.
But he isn’t impressed with me.
Those glacier blue eyes land on me, and the moment they do, his jaw flexes—then he’s storming over to Mika’s side.
No one speaks.
Not a word as the stew cooks, then Samick dishes out massive servings into fresh bowls looted from the kitchen.
We eat.
Spoons clattering off porcelain, water sipped from waterskins—and the best thing that’s ever happened to me…
Samick makes a small pot of coffee.
It’s stale and tinned, another thing looted from the kitchen, but I have no complaints in me at all as I sip on a steamy mug of what can only be described as an elixir.
My lashes shut on the bliss of it.
I savour it, every sip, taking my time.
Unlike the others who down theirs, as though it doesn’t scald their insides to do it.
Patience holds in the group.
Not so much for me taking my time with a coffee.
I suspect more for Mika who might have beaten the poison but doesn’t look all that great.
Not with the sweaty sheen over her sickly pale face, her softly slumped shoulders, and the way she rubs her head every other moment, like she’s trying to knead away a brewing headache.
She needs more time.
In the lazy, relaxed vibe, Samick ventures off into the house. He leaves me with them in the waiting room, and he’s gone a little while before he returns with a handful of assorted batteries.
He drops them onto the rug, then tosses down the torch.
I don’t ask how he knows what a battery is, where to find them, and what they look like.
He knew how to use the shotgun.
He knew how to load it.
Maybe there’s some curiosity in him, like he observes more than the others do while they slaughter their way through our world.
I replace the batteries, toss aside the spent ones, then wrap the rest in socks and underwear before packing them into my backpack. I don’t want them rubbing together and sparking a fire in my bag, and I certainly don’t want to leave them behind.
Batteries are too valuable to abandon.
It’s a while longer before we leave, heading out into the darkness again.
And all my mind can settle on is—
Not what happened with Samick in the bathroom.
Not how he homed in on me like a whole other kind of prey.
Not how he stayed with me on that bed, until I plummeted into a deeper sleep than any I’ve had since the blackout started.
Not even all the ways he confessed parts of himself to me while he bathed.
I can only think of how close we are getting to the unit. Each step takes us closer to the other fae, and I hate that.
I don’t want to go back.
I wish Samick would finish the last two weeks of the journey without the unit.
I dread the thought of the camp. The kuris. The sloppy food. The constant walking with no breaks.
And the silence.
I don’t speak at camp. I don’t speak much around the others. I doubt I’m allowed to, really.
It’s strange that, with the unit, the silence feels oppressive. But now, as we walk through the blackout, it feels instinctual—just as it did when I was with Bee, Ramona and Emily, moving through the dark.
That’s a memory I can’t fight off.
Maybe I have too many in the vault, or cracks are fracturing the steel walls in my mind, but I’m suddenly swept back to the pavement, my legs tangled in a toppled bike, watching Ramona’s torchlight wisp over the fae invading our world.
I remember him.
Proud and bleeding on his steed—the steed I had no idea that he would kill later. Just like I never could have guessed that he would be responsible for my life months later, that his hand, his cock, would be—
I shut my eyes, tight.
Too much goes to war within me, and I force it all behind the steel door.
The darkness around me is so thick, so pure that I can’t tell if Samick notices—if he considers me, the way he usually does when my mind goes to battle with itself.
But then, he’s hardly acknowledged me since I came downstairs.
The few times he has looked at me since, it’s come without words, and it’s cold.
Good.
It’s better this way.
I hope he suffers the same self-loathing as I do.
I hope it turns on him, the way he was disgusted by humans, the way the idea of lusting after us produced a rage in him like cracks skittering over ice.
Now, he lusts after me.
And it beats him.
Twice, now.
I hope it’s killing him inside, deep in his proud self.
My thoughts are stewing and rotting and twisting when, far ahead, a red bulb appears in the dark.
It starts as small as a firefly against a black sky—then it grows. Like fire. Like flames eating another part of our world.
The more it grows, the slower we move.
Samick’s solid arm shoves into me, redirecting me, and our soft bootsteps go in a new direction.
Must be another unit.
Another town burning.
And for whatever reason, we’re avoiding it.
I’m steered back into darkness.
I’ve learned to predict the gradual slowing down of our walk in the dark, and usually it comes with the raising of torch flames.
But we’re not with the unit, so there are no flames that magically ignite before the sound of boots hit what sounds like stone steps.
Hours and hours of walking, and finally we’re stopping.
The door groans shut behind me, and only then do I flick on the torch.
I’m greeted by an old hotel lobby.
Red carpet, old brown wooden panels climbing up the papered walls, lampshades that probably house a thousand dust mites each, and the musty smell.
My nose crinkles against it.
But my throat tickles.
I slip out the inhaler from my pocket and take a precautionary puff, just in case the old stale air in here, the smell of the leather seats older than me, burrows forever into my damaged lungs.
My cheeks puff with a slight cough. I hide it in the crook of my arm.
Arwyn starts up the staircase for what I guess is a sweep of the place. Samick goes through the double doors on the left.
It’s a hotel, so they might be a while.
It’s a break I’m glad for.
I don’t want Samick around right now. Or Arwyn. I want Mika, alone, because she talks too much.
I need her to talk to me without the ears of others around.
With a long sigh, Mika peels the strap off her shoulder and lets her bag hit the floor.