Chapter 16 #2
I fall back onto my bag and stare up at the orange glow pressing against the darkness.
I can only feel my heart beating in my ears. Not fast. Not rapid. Just strong.
The noise of the bay is muffled.
“He bite you?”
I turn a blank, almost dazed look on Mika.
She doesn’t look at me. Her eyes, filled with longing, are still fixed on the water.
“He bite you,” she parrots.
I sit up, stiff. “What do you mean, why would he bite me?”
That punchable smile returns—and her murmur is soft, “He will.”
The serene look on her face shutters.
Finally, she tears her focus away from the bay and looks over my head—
I twist, numb, and trace her gaze to Samick.
He’s pulling away from the general who’s turned her back on him now.
A painting of pride, his chin is high and his shoulders set as he makes his way back to us, almost like he doesn’t at all feel the stares following him, or couldn’t care less about them.
Mika is relieved of her babysitting duties.
Samick isn’t even halfway across the shore when she’s kicked off her boots, rolled up the legs of her leathers, revealing the sheepskin interior, and treading off to the waters.
I watch her go.
And I watch her even after Samick has dropped to a knee by his bag, and the familiar sound of his rummaging around in the perfectly organised satchel becomes background noise.
I’m only interrupted when he tosses a packet of beef jerky my way. It grazes my thigh before landing on the sand.
Looking down at it, I feel nothing but numbness, like Mika took a carving knife to my insides and just cleaned it all out of me.
My mouth twists with a cold hatred.
I kick out at the packet.
The rustling stops—and Samick aims a sharp look at me.
For a beat, he just stares. Then his hands abandon the satchel, and he braces his forearms on his thighs.
I sniff and turn my cheek to him.
But I can’t escape the sound of his voice—
“What is your trouble?”
A scoff jolts my shoulders.
My trouble.
Him.
He’s my trouble.
Mika’s my trouble, whether she’s telling me the truth or she just likes to annoy me with her conversation.
This fucking unit is my trouble.
The blackout is all of my trouble.
If I could set it all on fire now and vanquish every dark fae in this world, I would.
I would burn them all.
Even him.
I feel the corners of my mouth tug down—like there’s something not right about the thought.
Samick loosens a weary breath, like he’s sick of me all over again, and pulls out another packet of meat strips from the satchel, his kind, different to the ones he gave me.
“Meals will come later,” he says. “Eat now.”
The acidic turn in my stomach doesn’t break me. I don’t even look at it, the jerky on the shore, untouched.
Samick drops to sit on the sand.
Out the corner of my eye, he tears off a chunk of black meat with his teeth.
He says, “You are hungry.”
My mouth puckers.
The urge to hit him is strong.
The fact that he sits here, sticking by me on the shore, trying to get me to eat, telling me camp will be made soon, I’ll eat better then—all this reassurance crap that he never gave me before, it makes me think…
Maybe Mika isn’t so crazy.
Well. I won’t go that far. There’s something a little manic behind those glassy eyes. Unsettled.
But I wonder if she was telling me a truth, her truth, or the truth.
Does she really believe that he won’t take me to Bee, that he will keep me?
Did he tell her this?
Is it a guess—or a possibility?
And what if she’s just fucking with me? Getting in my head for the fun of it?
Something strikes my arm with a muffled thud.
I glare down at the chocolate bar that’s landed on the damp sand. The purple wrapper glints in the light.
I lift my glare to Samick.
His expression is chiselled from marble and impatience. His upper lip curls around the word, “Eat.”
Back to being fed up with me.
Good.
I’m fed the fuck up with him, too.
I huff. “Blow me.”
His lashes flutter, just once, before a frown knits his brows.
Confusion holds him for a heartbeat.
He lowers the meat-stick. “What do you say?”
I hold his stare. “Blow me.”
His lips curl with his cold impatience. He repeats the question, slower this time, enunciating each word, “What. Do. You. Say?”
I shift around to face him.
Leaning my weight on my hands flat on the sand, I tilt close enough to him that I can smell the smoky flavour of the meat-stick.
The glow of the torchlights is dim without the campfires. But lashes of crimson and orange light battle over his marble complexion and in the frosting green of his eyes.
I shouldn’t.
But I do.
“Blow. Me.” My teeth bare. “It means fuck you, arsehole.”
A moment passes.
Samick just stares at me. Not bewildered, not raging, just staring—
Then that moment ends—and the bay is thrown into a whirl around me.
I come down on his shoulder, hard. Hard enough to shove the air out of me.
My breath comes out in strangled grunts as he storms towards the treeline—leaving the bay behind.
I dangle with his swift bootsteps, all the way through the dim torchlights speckled around the bay, until the light fades, and it’s only darkness and the sound of his boots coming down on foliage.
But he doesn’t put me down.
Not yet.
He goes deeper and deeper into the forest.
I’m upside-down for so long that my face is purpling from the pressure of my blood, and my hands are pushing down his back, as though I can get enough grip to leverage myself upwards.
It’s all futile.
Then he comes to a sudden stop—and the darkness tilts with a wave of dizziness before I come slamming down on the ground.
He doesn’t give me the chance to catch myself, to stumble to my boots. He just heaves me off his shoulder, like back at the start, and foliage comes lifting up all around me.
The packed dirt beneath me thuds.
I feel it.
But I don’t see it.
I scramble for my jacket pockets, sifting in and out of them in a hurry.
He must be watching me. Sees me just fine in the dark. Watches me search the outer pockets, left and right, then dive into the inner ones before fumbling with the torch.
I aim it at him like a loaded weapon—and switch on the light.
White, harsh light blasts him.
In this little pocket of darkness, shadows snake around him, desperate to reclaim the space and eat through the light.
My eyes narrow on him. And they stay narrowed as I shift around to sit on my folded legs.
But there’s patience on his face. His pale eyes are haunted by the shadows of the dark. No snarl, no hatred, no frost climbing along his cheekbone—
He looks down at me, and waits.
Waits for what, I don’t know.
Then he echoes his earlier words, “What is your trouble, Tesni?”
I stare at him with a mixture of shock and outrage. Then I blink—and it all comes tumbling out.
“You talk to them.” It’s an accusation that comes with too much force, too much strength in my voice. “On the radio, my radio, you talk to them. And you never let me speak to her, and you never tell me if she’s ok—”
“Why should I share with you?” Samick’s tone is ice, sheeted in it. “You are a human. A ward. You are nothing. Who are you to demand I tell you anything?”
Green runs through his eyes, like faint brushstrokes of jade through pale quartz.
That gives him away.
And it spurs me on.
I scramble to my feet, my middle aching from the pressure of his shoulder.
“Who are you,” I start, my voice shaking—both with rising rage…
and the instinct sparking through me, the reality that I’m this little speck of life standing in front of a towering, muscle-packed beast, “to keep that from me? You have no right, no right,” I seethe, my face reddening, “to decide what I know about her.”
His lashes lower, casting shadows down his face, but the light still reveals the faint strokes of green.
“It is my right,” he says, and he says it with too much conviction, like it’s an absolute. “As it is my right to kill you now.”
I can feel my face hardening, muscle by muscle, and my grip on the torch tightening. “You can’t.”
Samick takes a step closer.
Just one.
Foliage cracks under his boot, and I feel suddenly smaller than I ever have before.
“I cannot?” His face is unchanging, pure stone. “I cannot rip your throat out here where you stand, or touch you with frost and watch you freeze at my boots, unable to gasp for air to feed your sickly lungs?”
My resolve falters.
My boots slides back a step, but the rage stops me from running.
My face twists with nothing short of hatred. “You have a bargain. And that is to keep me alive.”
His smile is small—and cruel.
It sends a chill down my spine.
“I am not dokkalf. I am not litalf. I could kill you now and tell your friend you died from the elements, from the earth cracking, from the morke, from the forsaken—there are many tales I could tell of your death, human.”
He spits the word like it’s the greatest insult.
My hand betrays me.
It shakes.
Trembles with the torchlight shuddering over him.
But my hatred is stronger.
“Do it.”
My mouth curls, baring my teeth at him. It would look savage on a fae, but I feel almost as dangerous right now. That icy adrenaline rushing through me tricks me into thinking I could take down the world.
“Stop talking about it,” I spit, “and do it. Kill me. Go on,” I basically growl the words out now, “kill me.”
I don’t think you can.
That’s the truth.
The hatred churning in me.
There’s too much doubt between us—but I don’t think for the life of me that he can pick up a blade and sink it into my heart.
And he doesn’t.
His jaw tightens. Shadows slashing along his cheeks.
“I am so—so sick of you,” I heave the words out, like I’m releasing all the weight inside of me. “I am so tired of it all!”
I blink—and tears fall.
Samick watches one roll down my cheek.
“It is near the end,” he says, as if to reassure me in the quietness of his tone.
My breath shudders, misting at my face.
I look at him, and I see the things I hate on him.