Kaitlyn
Linton gazes at me with unmistakable hunger in his eyes.
“So”—I swallow hard—“do you want to eat me?”
His throat bobs too. If anything, I think more colour has drained from his face.
“I’m not allowed to eat my marks,” he says eventually, averting his eyes. “Unless it’s part of the contract.”
I don’t know whether to be terrified or relieved.
“Is it part of your contract for me?”
He looks at me for a long time, then gets to his feet, pulling me up with him.
“We need to move,” he says without answering my question. “This is not a good place to stop.”
I look out over the moorland we’re passing through. Purple heather blooms, and the land undulates into the distance until it joins with a pale blue post dawn sky. It seems quite harmless.
“Why?” I ask as he frees me from my bonds and I rub at my wrists.
Linton lifts his fingers to his nose and inhales deeply, half closing his eyes. Yet again, emotions conflict within me. Is this creepy or is it cute?
“Why?” he echoes, as if he has the memory of a goldfish.
“Why is this not a good place to stop?”
“The spirits,” he says, as if this is something everyone should know.
“I doubt there are any spirits here.”
“Then what are those?” He nods over my shoulder, and I turn, expecting there to be nothing but moor and sky.
Instead, making their way steadily towards us is a spectral army. Flags with symbols I don’t recognise flutter in a non-existent breeze, and the skeletal forms move jerkily as the multiple columns march inexorably onwards.
My jaw goes slack. My legs instantly want to run, but I’m not sure I can outrun them. In the time it’s taken for me to see them, they’ve halved the gap between us.
“What do we do?” I turn to Linton.
“What do you want to do?” he asks, as if this is an everyday occurrence to him.
“Run.” My voice rises in a sort of shriek.
Linton shudders, his wings vibrating and dust rising from them in the early morning light.
“You would run?”
“Yes. But I don’t want you to think I’m running from you.”
The ghostly army is getting closer, marching in determined, terrifying silence.
“If you ran from me, I’d catch you,” Linton growls, his eyes a darker red than before.
“I’m sure you would. But what do we do about them?” I point at the corpses leading the marching columns, their armour hanging on their fleshless bodies, their faces a mass of rictus grins.
“Not much,” Linton says. “They’re already dead.”
“I didn’t mean for us to kill them…again,” I say urgently.
Linton opens his wings a little. “You didn’t? I could try,” he suggests with a hopeful half smile.
“What are they going to do?” The army has joined the path we’re on and is bearing down on us.
“Most likely kill us.” Linton has a dagger in each hand and is glaring at the approaching skeletons.
“I’d probably prefer it if that didn’t happen just yet.”
Linton looks at me briefly. Then the daggers are gone and in what is less than a wing beat, I’m in his arms, and we’re soaring up above the moor, the army fading away beneath us. I fling my arms around Linton’s neck and bury my head in his chest.
If I was expecting him to smell like dust, I was wrong. He has a soft scent somewhere between the spice cabinet we had at the bakery and the sharp chill of the scullery.
Concentrating on this is all I can do to take my mind off our current situation, high in the air, propelled by his wings and I am not strapped in.
All he has to do is let me go, let me fall, and I am dead as a doornail.
Admittedly, he is an assassin sent to kill me, so that is the inevitable outcome of our meeting, but I’d rather he suddenly plunged one of his daggers into my heart without warning than fall from a great height to go splat on the ground.
A girl has to have choices, after all.
The smooth ride so far becomes bumpy, and I manage to unscrew my eyes even though I’d rather not find out what is going on.
We’re on the ground, and I’m still in Linton’s arms as we enter a deciduous forest, the temperature dropping as we move under the trees.
“I can walk, if you prefer,” I say quietly.
Somehow, amazingly given all I’ve been through, I’m still wearing my slippers, and while I doubt they’re up to much of a journey, at least I’m not barefoot.
I am, however, still in my nightclothes and there doesn’t look like there’s going to be a chance to get changed any time soon.
“I do not prefer,” he says. “You feel nice.”
“You are a strange sort of assassin.”
He turns his eyes down onto me. “You have met many assassins?”
“Well, no, I suppose not.”
“I am only an assassin because that is what the Faerie wanted me to be,” he says, looking ahead again.
Hope rises in my breast, a hope which I thought had been snuffed out the moment I found out I’d been marked for death.
“Perhaps you don’t need to be an assassin anymore, not now the Faerie have gone.”
“They have not gone,” Linton says. “Tam Lin is a Faerie and he is biding his time.”
“Then what?”
“He will return.”
“And what will you do?”
Linton releases me to slide down his hard, muscular body onto legs which feel like jelly.
“I will kill him,” he snarls, his face twisted into a mask of vicious anger. “I will kill them all.”