Chapter 3 Zaria
ZARIA
Get up.
If I stay down, I die.
But She always sees the ones who flee.
My hands are shaking so badly they are almost useless as I push off the ground. I stagger to my feet and keep running. The air is so cold it burns my lungs and white fog spills from my mouth into the night with each exhale.
I stumble through the woods, my bare feet slamming against frozen earth and roots that spring up like broken bones.
The ritual robe snags on another branch and jerks me backward, scraping the side of my neck. The thin fabric was never made for running through woods; it was made for kneeling, for bowing, for following the rites.
“Don’t stop,” I whisper, voice breaking, even as that damned conditioned voice inside me yells that running is betrayal, that I should’ve stayed and obeyed.
Somewhere behind me, the chanting continues. The voices rise and fall in that rhythm, the one I've heard a thousand times, the one that used to comfort me when I was younger and didn't know better.
Now it just sounds like death closing in.
I push through another cluster of trees, thorns and leafless branches scraping my arms, but I can't stop.
Because if I stop, they'll find me, and if they find me, I'm dead.
The image flashes again, her face. The sister they dragged forward during the ritual. I can still hear her screaming, can still see the way the flames swallowed her whole while everyone stood in a circle and chanted louder, louder, until her voice was nothing but smoke.
I'd seen sacrifices before. Animals. Offerings. Symbols burned in fire.
But never this, never one of us.
This wasn't a normal ritual. Not the big, carefully staged masses with masks and incense and prepared speeches. Those have rules and predictable patterns.
This one was different.
And then someone said my name and I knew I had to flee.
My stomach twists at the memory, bile rising in my throat. I swallow it down and keep running.
I don't know where I'm going. Don't know if there's anywhere safe. I'm in Germany, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but this robe and the dirt under my feet and the scar on my arm that burns every time I think about going back.
This was supposed to be an offering after the success of the hunt. That’s what we were told. A thanks to the Morrígan for favoring us in our objective.
That being the man we came here to kill, Darragh Killaney. Head of the Killaney family and everything we were told was evil.
I knew things in the Order were changing.
I’d been worried for months. Ever since we stepped up the attacks on the Killaneys, something in the air shifted. The rituals got darker. The offerings, bolder. It wasn’t enough to threaten anymore. She wanted spectacle and blood, they told us.
I should have refused when Cormac told me to pack. Should have fought harder. Should have done something other than nod and obey like I always do.
But I was scared.
I still am.
My foot catches on something, a root, a rock, I don't know, and I go down hard. Pain shoots through my knee and I bite down on my lip to keep from crying out. Blood runs down my leg and I press my hand against the cut, gasping.
The chanting is quieter now. Farther away, but that doesn't mean they've stopped looking.
I push myself up, legs trembling, and keep moving.
As I run, I try to bury the most intrusive thought I have, that I don’t expect to live through this.
There is no world where I get on a plane, fly back to the U.S., and slide quietly into some normal life. The Order has eyes everywhere. Shadowharbor has hands everywhere. I’m marked and owned, but I have to try.
My legs stumble as the slope turns steeper. For a terrifying second I slide, leaves and soil rushing under my feet, then I slam shoulder first into a trunk and cling to it, breath ragged.
Think.
Running blindly only gets me so far.
They’ll have people on the roads. They always do. Shadowharbor guards in plain clothes, watching for strays, ensuring no one wanders too close to the wrong forest at the wrong time.
But if I stay in the woods, I freeze or they track me. Dogs. Drones. Men with guns and torches and tranquilizers and the authority to call my death obedience.
The trees thin out ahead and I can see the faint outline of a road cutting through the darkness. My heart fills with a stupid desperate hope and I go. I run faster, branches whipping against my face, my arms, until I break through the tree line.
The road is narrow, barely wide enough for two cars, and it stretches out in both directions like a promise I'm not sure I can trust.
But it's something.
It's more than the woods.
I crouch low, trying to catch my breath. My hands won't stop shaking and my teeth are chattering so hard I can barely think straight.
I need to get to the U.S., but I have no money, no passport, and frankly, no plan.
The only thing I know as I press my hand against the scar on my forearm, the one they gave me when I was fifteen, the one that marks me as theirs, is that I will not die for their god. If the Morrígan wants blood, she can take Cormac’s.
Suddenly, headlights cut through the darkness.
I jump back, pressing myself against a tree on the edge of the road. My pulse hammers in my ears as a black sedan rolls past, slowly, and I catch the flash of an insignia on the driver's jacket.
Shadowharbor.
Not the charity one. Not the fake smile and clean hands version they show the world.
The real one.
The kill if you run one.
The car disappears around a bend and I wait.
I need to move. Need to find another way, but my legs feel like they're made of lead and the cold is seeping deeper now, making everything numb.
From across the road, deeper in the woods on the other side, I hear the rumble of an engine.
My head snaps up.
Suddenly, a dark SUV bursts out from the tree line on the opposite side of the road.
Its tires spit gravel, headlights flashing on as it hits the road at an angle that sends my heart slamming against my ribs.
For a split second I just stand there, caught in the glare.
Those lights don’t look like salvation, they look like a spotlight.
Then the engine roars and instinct takes over.
Run.
I bolt toward the ditch, robe whipping around my legs. The SUV swings its nose toward me, picking up speed. The tires squeal and the vehicle lunges across the road, cutting me off.
I duck the other way and the car swerves.
Doors slam open before it’s even fully stopped. Voices explode into the night as men jump out, yelling in a language I don't recognize.
“Stai! Stai acolo!”
Panic spikes hard enough to make my vision blur and I keep going.
"Stop!" they yell now in English, but I don't.
I decide to head back into the forest so I sprint for the tree line. Footsteps pound on the ground behind me, fast and hard.
I make it about five more feet before a body slams into me from the side.
We hit the ground hard. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs. Pain explodes through my ribs and shoulder.
I scream. “No. No, get off!” I gasp, thrashing. I twist and kick, but the man is twice my size and he pins me down with one hand on my chest.
I claw at his face, my nails dragging across skin, and he jerks back with a curse. His grip loosens just enough for me to twist free and I scramble to my feet, lungs burning, legs shaking.
I run ten feet, maybe twelve, when someone grabs my hair and yanks me backward.
I fall to the ground and hands grab my wrists, wrenching them behind my back.
Another pair of hands closes around my ankle, dragging my leg out when I try to curl into myself and protect my stomach, my ribs, my throat, any vulnerable piece of me.
More hands surround me. “?ine-o!” someone snaps. “Nu o l?sa!”
Adrenaline floods me, hot and wild.
I bite.
My teeth sink into the fabric over someone's forearm, hard. The man swears, jerks, slams my shoulder into the ground so hard stars burst across my vision.
“Bitch,” he spits in English. “You wanna lose your teeth?”
I scream and kick and fight with everything I have, but they're all too strong.
“Enough,” a voice barks above me. "Stop fucking moving." The tone is authoritative. “Leag-o ?i bag-o ?n ma?in?.”
Rope surrounds me and they tie me up.
“Please. Please, wait,” I gasp, coughing around dirt and blood. "Don’t take me back there, please don’t take me back. I'll do whatever you want.”
They ignore me and suddenly someone hoists me up and tosses me over their shoulder.
We walk to the idling SUV and they throw me into the back seat.
I hit the seat hard, gasping, and try to push myself up, but someone shoves me back down. A man leans over me, his face hard and unfamiliar, and he pulls out his phone.
He holds it up to my face, the screen glowing, and looks at his screen and then at me and over his shoulder to the others.
“Da. Da. O avem. E ea. Da.”
I yell, "Let me go! Please."
"Shut up!" someone says and before I can say anything else, a bag is yanked over my head.
Darkness swallows everything.
“No,” I gasp. “No. Please, not the dark."
A rough hand clamps over my mouth for a second, fingers digging into my cheeks through the bag.
“Nu avem timp de asta," he says before letting go.
“Who, who are you?” I choke out. “I don't know what you're saying. Where are you taking me? Please, I can give you anything you want, I can.”
"Relax," the man with the authoritative voice says. "We're not taking you back to those fucking lunatics in the woods. You belong to Matei Ionescu now," he says and they all start laughing.
The name means nothing to me. I don't know who he is. Don't know what he wants.
But the way the man says it makes my blood run cold.
I open my mouth to scream again, but something hard slams into the side of my head.
Pain explodes through my skull, bright and blinding, and then the world disappears.