Chapter 20
TWENTY
The forest floor is only flooded for the next half-hour of walking—and after that, the foliage is crunching and snapping under our steps.
My thighs are burning, my calves on fire, as we climb up a slope. All that water-wading has gotten to me, and my mind slips back to the campfire, resting my head on Samick’s shoulder, letting sleep come over me—and knowing that I’ll be safe as I rest, because he’ll be watching over me.
There is no resting now.
No time to stop for a nap.
And it’s a waste of time to try to find another way around this hill.
With the map in the bite of my teeth, the compass in my pocket, the torch dangling from my wrist, and the weight of the satchel trying to drag me back down to the pine needles dusting the floor below, the most annoying part of the hike is that every time I dig the toe of a boot into the damp hill, and I think I have a grip, I don’t.
Mud clumps under the sole of my boot before it gives out, and I start sliding back down again.
Connie is having the same trouble beside me.
A metre’s gap wedged between us, but I hear the grating raspy beat of her breath as though she’s right at my ear.
Her hand swipes out for the tree sprouted in front of her. The tree whose trunk is barely as thick as my thigh. This hill is covered in them, baby trees, thin trunks, and thick shrub.
We use everything we can to pull ourselves up the incline.
One wrong move, and it’s a hard, long fall down.
I wish I had my gloves.
Trunk after branch after shrub, my palms are red, raw and torn.
Leaves shower down on me. Get stuck in my hair, drift over the tip of my nose, catch on the hood of my rain jacket.
It’s a proper scaling, not an upwards hike, and it surprises me that Connie can keep up.
But she does.
All the way to the top.
I reach it first, the flat soil, and flop onto my back.
I tug the map out of my bite.
My teeth ache from the pressure. I roll out the tension, and listen to the hoarse breaths running ragged through Connie.
I almost think she has what I do. The effects of the blackout virus ruining my lungs. The reason I reach into my pocket and take a puff from the inhaler—but just one, because I need to ration.
But it’s not the virus that’s weakened Connie.
It’s the starvation, the trekking, the horrible conditions that all the captives have endured.
I’ve been lucky compared to them.
But Connie wasn’t just a captive.
She’s a mate to one of those warriors.
And I doubt he’ll let up searching for her.
Even with the flood watering down our scents, and the distance that the wave carried us out, I don’t feel the least bit safe.
“Come on.” I roll onto my knees, hand pressing into the dirt. The light washes over the foliage. “Your mate will be chasing you.”
Every second we waste is another step closer for him.
“Mate?” she echoes as she staggers to her feet. “Oh, the British way—as in friend?”
I throw her a furrowed look. “No. Mate as in evate. That’s… That’s what they call their person. Their, I don’t know, soul mate or whatever.”
It doesn’t matter anyway.
It shouldn’t matter—not if we manage to get away.
All that matters is the bridge. Reaching it. Getting through it, however the fuck I’m supposed to do that.
But Connie hesitates.
She stares at me, and I rinse the weak torchlight over the soil. Flattened soil, packed and treaded on over time.
A trail.
The breath is tugged out of me.
Relief slumps my shoulders.
A trail might not lead us to the next town, depending on the direction I take, but it does mean we don’t have to climb and cut and trudge our way through the thicket of a forest.
“Is that what I am?”
The sound of her voice is weaker than the wispy beams from the torch.
The corners of my mouth dig into my cheeks. A grimness—of guilt, I guess. Because she didn’t know what she is to that warrior, and I just gave her the worst news of her life in the worst way.
I wish I cared.
I don’t.
I just nod and push into step.
The light is weaker than it’s ever been. Like the battery is giving out.
It’s a fresh battery, or so I thought. Maybe it took a beating in the wave, or Samick got it out of an appliance back in the house, and it was already near-drained.
“We need to get to that town.” My boots stagger onto the trail. “This light isn’t going to last long.”
If I’m following the map and the compass right, then I’ll come across a town and a city on my way to the bridge—
And the final town, where the bridge is.
Sunken into a silence, one I’m certain is misery, Connie becomes a shadow trailing me.
Her mind must be going a hundred miles an hour, combing over every interaction she’s ever had with that beast, and comparing it to the have-nots in the group of human captives.
But she doesn’t say a word.
Not all the way to the fork in the trail.
Not as I check the map and compass, then decide on going downhill.
Not as we reach the bottom of the hill, and stumble onto a fucking massacre.
I turn the light over the faces of the corpses.
All of them, blank, and frozen—
And fae.
These aren’t freshly dead corpses. And they’re not wet. I don’t recognise any of them.
Not from our unit.
Connie tucks closer to my back, as though I’ll protect her from the dead, all seven of them.
That’s how many I count.
But Connie puts too much faith in me.
I won’t protect her from the dead or the living.
The white beam ghosts over the corpses, from face to face, and I linger the light over broken necks and torn throats and gutted insides.
No sign of campfires, no embers and charcoal.
There was no camp here.
These are strays. Were.
I don’t want to know who, or what, had the ability to slaughter their way through that many fae warriors. Strays or not, a half-dozen or a hundred, it seems utterly impossible.
A shudder runs down my spine.
But I steel myself against it, against the echo in my head that’s telling me not to go to the town.
I continue on the trail.
“What—” Connie’s boots scuff over the packed dirt. “What was that?”
I turn a plain look on her—then slide it, with the torch, along the forest. The trail is clear, but we’re bordered by foliage and tree trunks, moss and boulders.
There’s nothing to see.
But that.
The light snags.
Tangled in shrub, like he fell over, like he was running, is a human. A man, whose face is all wrong. Twisted, frozen in a death scream.
I consider the greens and browns streaked onto his cheeks. Not dirt. Not natural. That’s fucking face paint.
He camouflaged himself in the forest.
Still died, but I wonder if this man had anything to do with the dead fae back up the trail.
“It’s just a body.”
I don’t risk getting closer, even if the spine is ripped out of his back and dangles over the back of the shrub.
I glance at Connie over my shoulder, the pallor of her complexion, the worried and pinched gaze she swerves around the forest.
“That guy is super fucking dead—and has been for a while. Don’t worry about it. Let’s go.”
Before I can turn my back on her, Connie breathes the words—
“No, not that. I heard… I heard…”
I arch a brow. “Heard what?”
“I—I don’t know… It was…” she falters, that panicked gaze still swerving around from tree to tree, bush to bush.
The thicket is dense around the trail.
So dense that, if we have to go off-path, and out into the forest, we’ll need a machete to hack our way through.
“It was probably just the trees,” I tell her. “Or birds.”
Bears.
Wolves.
Anything that survives in the dark.
I don’t know what wildlife is still out there, surviving, adapting.
I don’t want to find out.
The weak torchlight cascades along the forest and the trees once more. Foliage, moss, boulders, boots—
My heart sinks. It drops to my gut, now an icy puddle, and I aim the torch at the pair of black, leather boots planted between two trees.
My heart doesn’t get the chance to beat—
Not before I spin on my heels and barrel into a run.
If Connie follows, if she chases me down the trail, I don’t know.
I don’t risk looking back at her.
I look ahead, chasing the faint beams of light down the trail.
The weight of the satchel cuts into my shoulder, slowing me down.
But the adrenaline is pumping through me. It keeps me on my feet, forces me into a sprint.
I jump over fallen branches like I wasn’t tumbled and thrashed by violent waves.
I swerve around overgrowth like I wasn’t battered in the flood.
I run like my legs didn’t give out when I was free of the waves, like I wasn’t sagging to the ground with sheer exhaustion.
Something in me rebirths—
And when I hear the cry behind me and it turns into a grunt, I just keep on running.
I leave Connie behind.
I leave Samick behind.
I save myself, and I run towards Bee.