Chapter 19 #2
Desmond hisses as he staggers, but he stays between Gashil and me. I have to do something. I have to help him!
I untether Gashil’s mask above his brows, blinding him. Desmond grabs Gashil’s upper arm and squeezes with all his might.
The assassin hisses, thrashing to get away, but Desmond doesn’t let him. He grabs Gashil’s mask and throws it off, revealing cascades of waist-length white hair with a widow’s peak, long pointed ears, and pale lavender skin. A snarl twists his sharp, elegant face.
Gashil headbutts Desmond, but he doesn’t let go. A strange, purple light flickers through Gashil’s arm, lighting up his veins. “Any last words?” Desmond asks, his voice dropping into a dangerous calm.
My vision blackens, and then a battlefield appears before me, black ribbons of smoke unfurling into the hazy night sky.
Two moons stare down at me, one large and silver that consumes the north, and another smaller and golden.
There’s too much acrid smoke to see the stars, but I have no doubt that I’m far from home.
From my viewpoint atop a vast hill, I watch as hair-raising screams echo and plumes of fire blast through the small human enclave before me. Timber homes collapse, but soldiers are throwing their dead into the burning rubble.
At the heart of the blazing village is a stone arch even taller than Mythos’s city wall.
A strange, shimmering green thrums across it like a bubble stretched from pillar to pillar.
Humans shout as they drag carts of gleaming diamonds and ore toward it, each vanishing as they pass through.
Then the bubble hums and stretches, and dozens of armed Avedoran guards pour out of it.
They run to join the garrison that hefts iron pikes in a barricade around the village.
Fae clad in steel rush toward them, swords drawn and hands out to summon magic.
I gasp, my gut churning at the sea of bodies stretching from the foot of the hill to the arch. Many are human, but most are fae.
“We need to fall back,” a familiar voice says behind me, pain throttling every word.
I whirl around. Desmond and Auri stand together before a small troop, smears of ash and blood on their skin. She clenches her bow as it trembles, rage in every tense line of her body. Then she breathes in, stills, and shoots. The arrow pierces the throat of a human soldier below. He drops.
“We failed to retake it. Just like the war,” she continues bitterly. A tear rolls down her cheek and along her tight jaw.
To their right, a line of ten fae archers fire, most hitting their marks. Still, they’re vastly overwhelmed.
Desmond draws his sword from the sheath at his hip. “It never ended,” he says, watching the sight below with grief etched in every pinched line of his face. Then he looks at the troop behind him, the anguish replaced by a sharp, commanding frown. “Isolde, Conan, Adder, and Saoirse, you’re with me.”
Four of the fae step forward, their expressions grim, but they look at him with reverence, like they’d run to the end of the world if he asked. Then Desmond runs down the hill.
And as the four fae follow, the guard that Auri had shot twitches, then slowly rises onto his feet.
The world tilts, and my stomach drops as the enclave blurs until it’s replaced by a dark forest of towering trees, taller than any I’ve seen in Avedor.
Someone gasps for breath behind me, and I swerve to face them.
Desmond stumbles toward me. A seeping gash up his calf leaks blood, and his chin is split open, right where his scar is now. He drags his leg behind him, grasping low-hanging branches for support. The four fae he named flank him, each cut up worse than he is.
The short female clad in leather armor is missing one of her wings, blue blood splattered around the raw slash across her back. One of the two males drags his twisted foot, so torn from its socket that it’s facing sideways.
They press on like it’s the only thought they can cling to, even as shouts of Avedoran soldiers and the bark of hounds echo behind them. Even as trees creak and crash, felled in the distance by another plume that haunts the sky with red.
Sweat rolls down Desmond’s brow. His jaw clenches, and he grunts in agony as he stares straight ahead. His hazel eyes are red from the smoke, wide, and haunted.
I glimpse the limping male’s slackened expression as he passes me. It’s empty, as if too traumatized to feel. Fear claws up my throat as I follow them. Something is wrong.
The barking loudens, closer. Desmond glances behind him, and his whole body starts to tremble. “Forgive me,” he says, his voice cracking as his face wrenches with pain.
The four fae stop and slowly turn, facing the way they had come.
Desmond closes his eyes, his shoulders shuddering as he lets out an inconsolable cry. Then he stares ahead and continues on through the trees, not looking back even once.
I’m yanked back to the present so suddenly that my head spins. Only one waning moon beams above the autumn leaves of the forest outside the thieves’ hideout. Desmond blinks, dazed like I am, and Gashil shoves him back. Then he sprints away.
“You’d be wise to be wary of him,” Gashil says into my mind as he flees. “He’s an abomination to all our peoples.”
“We can’t let him get away!” I shout, already running.
“No!” Desmond sprints after me. “It’s a trap!”
“He slaughtered my family!”
“An illusion of them!” he argues.
“How did he know what they looked like? He must’ve seen them, taken them—” I leap over a log and gasp as my foot catches on it. Desmond grabs my arm and pulls me against him.