Chapter 28 #2
Once again, something flashed in her yellow eyes, something that made a bad feeling spread in my gut like wildfire.
I never asked what she was thinking out loud, though. I didn’t think I wanted to know, anyway. I already knew way too much about everything else, and I had no clue what to do with half that information.
Luckily, less than ten minutes later, the carriage stopped.
The wall that marked the border between Unseelie and Midnight on whichever part we were wasn’t broken.
The carriage had left us in the middle of a woods to continue on foot, and the soldiers had then retreated.
The one that Rune sent for Hessa took one of the horses tied to the carriage for himself, mounted it, and disappeared between the trees.
The other two moved back slowly, and the way those two soldiers were looking at Rune, I was pretty sure that they weren’t planning to leave for real—they would stick around and wait, maybe even try to cross the border after us.
Raja had surely given them their orders, and from what I’d seen so far, Rune had no problem with her calling the shots.
For now, we were alone, the three of us, and one of the moments in which we walked among the trees felt so surreal, like I was in a dream. Like none of this—not even Verenthia—was real at all.
It was, though. The bird that Rune made for us burned brightly against the night.
This part of the Unseelie territory was in permanent darkness, and I couldn’t see if it was dark everywhere else in Verenthia from the canopy.
The magic in the air, the black, dead bark of the trees, the stink in the air like there were animal carcasses spread about in the distance—yes, it was all real.
And the farther we went, the more pronounced the feel of magic became.
It felt wrong. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, why it was so different from the Midnight Court, but it was. Weak. Dark. Filthy.
Then there was the wall.
It wasn’t as high as it had been where the Unseelie territory met Mysthaven, possibly on the other side of this forest. Here it was lower.
If I rose on my tiptoes, I could see beyond it, could see the rooftops of the buildings next to the wall inside the court.
It all looked so ordinary—pointy rooftops and deep maroon shingles.
What I thought was fire was burning somewhere on the other side, but then the lights rose over the top of the wall.
They were fae lights, except these were smaller, a group of five or six small spheres floating about together, releasing orange light.
Deep orange—not golden like the Seelies.
Easy to tell they weren’t the same thing.
Most importantly, there were no morvekai that we could see.
“Are there—” I started to ask, but a hand on my shoulder stopped me.
My heart jumped, the fear ringing all the alarms in my head, but it was just Maera holding a finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet.
Rune stepped forward from my other side, thick shadows slipping out of his hands and moving forward, climbing up the wall, moving over the top and to the other side.
Then he looked at Maera and nodded.
Before I knew it, Maera had stepped back, and she threw her jacket on the ground, then pulled her top off.
She was naked underneath, and she was still pushing down her pants when fur began to sprout from her pale skin.
The shock going through me made sure I didn’t even blink, that I caught every single detail: every sound and every visual of how her jaws seemed to break and rearrange, then her skull and arms and legs and back; how her hair fell off and disappeared into nothing before it even touched the dry, cracked soil; how her ears grew and her nose turned black and she fell forward on all fours, like she was slipping into her wolf skin, within seconds.
Maera’s wolf looked at me for just a second, her eyes the same glistening yellow. Then she went right where Rune’s shadows had climbed the wall, ran on the side of it at an incredible speed, and jumped over the top, disappearing from my view.
Rune then leaned down and linked his fingers together to tell me to put my foot in his hands.
He was going to help me up there, too. I didn’t think at all, just stepped onto his hands and let him push me up until I reached the edge of the wall.
From there, it was easy to pull myself up to my knees at the top and look at the other side—at Maera’s wolf who stood just a few feet away, ears perked up, looking around to make sure we were alone.
We were.
I jumped before I gave myself too long to think, and I landed on one knee on the ground on the other side.
Yes, it definitely smelled like death here. Bile rose up my throat and I had to cover my mouth with my hand to make sure I didn’t throw up. Rune landed right next to me, silent as the night.
Silent as this place—which also felt very odd.
The sun was setting over the rest of Verenthia.
From here, when I looked at the sky, I could tell where the eternal night ended and daylight began, and the sky was burning orange with sunset, so it was still early.
People should have been around us, at least somewhere close because there were buildings in front of us.
The back of them. Most had their doors closed, and the walls were dirty, and the smell was so awful.
Maera disappeared down the alley between two of the buildings. When Rune and I followed, we found out right away where the smell was coming from.
Whatever part of the kingdom this was, safe to say it was abandoned.
The buildings were set in an oval configuration all around us, going on for possibly a mile in each direction, and save for the small fae lights floating here and there, the buildings were dark.
Most windows were broken, most doors open, and it must have been a market of some sort, this place, because the smell was coming from the inside, and it was that of food.
Rotted food. Most of the buildings that looked like shops had rotted food in front of their doors like animals had gone in and dragged it out.
Fruit, vegetables, dairy and sticky-looking liquids, and even dead animals torn apart possibly a long time ago decorated the cobbled ground, with flies swarming over everything you could see.
Dead. It smelled dead and it looked dead here. Like this little part of the realm was on the verge of disappearing completely already.
Except the lights were still floating around here, and so that meant a fae had called them forth, had fueled them, had left them here. This place wasn’t completely forgotten yet.
Maera’s wolf moved to the right where we could see the tips of trees over the rooftops of the buildings in the distance. When we started following, my hand instinctively slipped into Rune’s waiting one, like they were magnets. The comfort that came from his touch was unmatched.
We said nothing as we went, but whatever this place was, the smell didn’t let up until we were near the last row of abandoned buildings.
And finally, we began to hear noises.