Chapter 5 #2
The arm around my ribs releases first. I suck in a shallow breath through my nose, and the pain of expanding my lungs makes my vision swim. Stars burst behind my eyes. Then his hand lifts from my mouth.
A sound escapes me, small and broken, half sob, half whimper. I don’t know what to call it. I know I hate how weak it sounds.
The heat of his body leaves my back as he stands. He steps around me, moving into my line of sight, and looks down at where I’m still on my knees.
I don’t have the strength to get up.
They were right there. Brennan was right there. And I let them walk away.
He grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet, then we’re moving again.
Time loses meaning. There’s only the pattern of putting one foot in front of the other, the fire in my ribs with each step, and the ache in my shoulder. I keep listening for horns, the dogs, or any sign that the search party has doubled back. But the forest stays silent.
They’re gone, searching in the wrong direction.
That’s the thought that finally breaks me. The crushing weight of how helpless I am. How at his mercy. I stop when he stops. I have no control over anything. Not my body, not my freedom, not even my own voice.
The tears start again, spilling from my eyes, running down my cheeks. I don’t bother stopping them. What would be the point?
I’m not a person anymore. I’m just prey he hasn’t finished toying with yet.
The tears turn into heaving sobs that wrack my chest. The pain is blinding, but I can’t stop. I can’t do anything except cry, stumble, and wish I’d never heard of the Dell. Wish I’d never wanted to hunt a fae. Wish I’d never looked at those antlers and imagined them on my wall.
The dizziness is getting worse. It comes in waves. The ground tilts beneath me. I keep losing time. One moment I’m walking, the next I’m stumbling, and I can’t remember the steps in between.
My body is shutting down, piece by piece, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
And him … the fae, the monster … he just keeps walking, towing me along, toward whatever destination exists in his head.
He stops and turns toward me. For a moment I think he’s going to hit me again. Instead, he looks at me, studying me with those gold eyes, fingers curled around my arm, and waits until my sobs taper into hiccups, then into shaky breaths, and then into silence.
I’m empty. Hollowed out. The tears have taken everything with them, and what’s left is exhaustion, and pain, and the terrifying reality of what my life has become.
He starts walking again. I follow.
At some point, I start watching him instead of the forest. The back of his head. The antlers. The bare skin of his throat where the collar used to sit.
The wounds at his throat look different than they did this morning. They’re still marked with dark bruising, but the swelling has gone down. The places that were weeping and bloody are starting to crust over.
I blink, frowning, and look closer.
It’s not only his throat. The gray-green of his skin is patchy, flaking and peeling away. There are streaks along his arms where the color has faded entirely, revealing paler skin beneath. The antlers, too. Were they always that rough and uneven? I don’t think they were.
He’s changing. Whatever the Dell did to him, the modifications my father ordered, they’re coming undone.
We stop at a narrow stream. The water runs clear and cold over smooth stones, and the sound of it is torture. I would salivate if I had any water left in my body, but my mouth is bone dry.
He crouches at the water’s edge and drinks from cupped hands. I stand where he left me, swaying, my eyes fixed on his throat as he drinks, and swallows, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
Water. It’s right there. Cool and clean and everything my cracked lips and swollen tongue have been screaming for. But the idea of moving is terrifying. My legs are shaking so badly I don’t trust them to hold me. If I try to kneel, I might not get up. And if I try to drink without his permission—
He straightens and turns to look at me.
The gold of his eyes is brighter than it was. I noticed it in the hollow, right after the collar broke, but it’s stronger now. And his face … the angles seem sharper than before. More defined. Almost as though he’s coming into focus.
He studies me for a moment, and I wonder what he sees. A filthy, tear-streaked girl barely staying upright? Prey that’s not worth the effort of killing? A tool that he used to break the collar?
Then he moves toward me and I flinch before I can stop myself. All he does is grab my arm—the same bruised spot, always the same spot—and pulls me toward the stream.
“Drink.”
One word. A command.
I drop to my knees at the water’s edge. The cold hits my hands first, shocking enough to make me gasp.
I cup water in my shaking palms and bring it to my mouth.
The first swallow hurts and my bruised throat protests, but I don’t care.
I drink until my stomach hurts. Drink until I’m gasping.
Drink until water spills down my chin and soaks into my clothes.
When I’m done, I’m shaking harder than before, but my head is clearer, and the gray edges of my vision have pulled back.
He hauls me to my feet, and sets off again.
An hour later, maybe more, maybe less, he pauses at the top of a low rise.
I stop beside him, breathing hard, grateful for a moment’s rest. My eyes drift over him without really meaning to. The set of his shoulders. The line of his spine. The way he holds himself, coiled and ready, a breath away from violence.
As I watch, his hand lifts and his fingers brush the base of one antler. He presses against the place where bone meets scalp, and his jaw tightens, a muscle jumping beneath the skin.
The antlers look worse than they did earlier. The flaking has spread. Whole patches of bone look rough and pitted now. At the base where they meld into his skull, the color has darkened, and cracks are forming.
They’re falling apart.
I can’t push the thought away, no matter how hard I try. They were grown for me. Shaped and forced out of his skull in a configuration my father chose.
I didn’t think about what that meant. I heard the words and ignored their meaning. I didn’t imagine what it might feel like to have bone forced through your skull in a shape someone else designed. I didn’t wonder if it hurt, if he screamed, and if he begged them to stop.
I didn’t think about it because he wasn’t a person. He was an it. Quarry. Game. A trophy to be hunted, killed, and mounted on a wall for all to admire.
But he speaks.
He speaks, and animals don’t do that.
And I was going to kill him.
My stomach heaves. I double over, one hand pressed to my mouth. The water I drank threatens to come back up. Nothing does, but the retching tears at my ribs and leaves me gasping.
He glances back at me with an expression that doesn’t change, and waits until I straighten, then starts moving again. I stumble after him, my head spinning.
All my life, I’ve been told fae are dangerous animals. Magical beasts that need to be contained, controlled, and culled. The hunts are sport. The trophies are prizes. It’s no different from hunting boar or stag.
But you can’t mount a person’s head on your wall. You can’t track a person through the forest and put an arrow through their heart, then call it a birthday celebration.
Except that’s exactly what the Dell does, and exactly what I came here to do.
What does that make me?
What does that make all of us?
The trees begin to thin. More light reaches the forest floor. He’s moving differently now, stopping more often and scanning ahead with an intensity that wasn’t there before. Every few steps, his head turns, nostrils flaring, testing the wind.
His grip tightens on my arm whenever I slow.
The ground levels out, and through the gaps between trees, I catch glimpses of something. There’s a shift in the light, a change in the quality of the air. It feels different here.
He stops, staring at the trees. Tension runs through the line of his shoulders. He moves forward, pulling me with him, and then I see it.
A stone.
It juts from the earth at the base of a tree, half-hidden by moss and roots. There are marks carved into its surface—lines and whorls and angular shapes.
He stops in front of it, and the way he’s staring makes the hair rise on the back of my neck. Then he turns toward me, and my stomach drops.
I know that look. I saw it this morning, right before he cut my palm open. Right before he pressed his mouth to the wound and drank. Right before he used my blood to break his collar.
His hand closes around my wrist. The wounded one. His fingers find the edges of the cut on my palm and press down.
Pain flares. Blood wells up, seeping between his fingers.
“No! Please. Not again.”