Chapter 3
THREE
Torchlights reflect off the concrete walls and onto the stark, twisted faces of the fae.
I’m reminded of their strange blood.
Thick, black sludges of tar rolling down cheeks, over shoulders, streaming down faces and napes.
A lot of them were hit.
A lot.
Over by the opposite wall, there’s a fae with a ribbed scar twisting his mouth—a perpetual snarl I’ve noticed around camp. A trail of black blood spills from a gaping cut on his shoulder, like a fucking axe-wound.
Beside him, an orange-tinted fae—skin and face and eyes and hair, all orange—holds a spillage of black blood on his forearm, as though he blocked a chunk of hail from striking him on the head out there, took the hit to his arm instead.
If I’d done that, my entire arm would have been shattered or blasted off.
There are more wounded.
Everywhere I look.
So many more.
Gashes, flesh torn, wide open, bones visible, some cracked, others protruding from the flesh.
It’s brutal.
Almost half the warriors huddled and crammed into the concrete corridor look hurt. Faces bloodied, shoulders fractured, fae who lean on just one leg, some who even sink down walls to sit and hold their boots—as though, within the leather, bones are crushed.
The humans are worse.
The limp ones are discarded on the floor by the entrance, and the others moan through the pain of battered faces and cracked skulls and broken hands.
My stomach worms.
I look at Samick.
His cheekbone gleams with the rainfall, that same gloss over his pink mouth.
Drenched, his soft blond hair sticks to his temple, and I think of a lovely sculpture caught in the rain.
The sight of him—
It does something to my throat. Thickens it, like a pip is suddenly lodged in there.
Raindrops cling to his long lashes, and as though none of this gruesomeness bothers him at all, he keeps his feathered cheek to me and watches the rest of the unit pour in.
More and more warriors fill the corridor lined with cells until it’s completely crammed and claustrophobic, then the rumble of metal rattles the air.
A warrior slips behind the general and slides the solid door shut.
The door is as thick as a wall.
Heavier than any human can move—even a few human men wouldn’t be able to shift that door.
It’s one of those powered ones, the kind that run on electricity and cards swiping through readers.
But that warrior slides it shut, like it’s easy.
The bang jolts my bones.
I flinch closer to Samick.
The curve of my shoulder digs into his arm.
He tenses, his hand flexing on the rope that tethers us.
I’ve walked with the unit for so long now that I shouldn’t be this unnerved by them—but those slightly unnatural looking faces are twisted, mouths curled with bites of pain, hands pressed to bleeding wounds, and we’re too congested, too clustered that the weight pressing down on my chest and constricting my breathing won’t ease.
My exhale is loud but hollow.
I sink closer to Samick.
In answer, his fingers slip over the rope to my wrist, and he grips, firm.
The dampness of his grip lures in my gaze.
I blink down at his hand.
Tears of milk trail over a porcelain complexion.
Blood.
That weird white blood of his.
It weaves along his knuckles and oozes out of holes and torn skin up to his wrist.
That’s his me hand.
The one that was on my head as a barrier.
He took some hits.
I drag my gaze up the wet, glistening leather of his sleeve. The chain-link armour is sprinkled with a mist of white blood—and as I look up at him from beneath my lashes, I see the damage now that he’s turned to look down at me.
I see the other side of his face.
Not even his weird powers with ice and mist and air stopped a hunk of hail from striking him on the jaw.
Looks like he took a right hook to the face… with a metal bat.
The faint blush of a bruise is blotted along his strong jawline. It’s darkened along the tension slashed down his cheek. And around the edges of a shredded line of flesh, his complexion is purpling.
Samick loosens the smallest, slightest breath that’s too close to a sigh, like my existence is back to annoying him. Then he looks away from me. Lifts his chin and his frosty stare starts sweeping the corridor.
His gaze snags on faces for a beat, lingers, then swerves onto the next.
I rethink it.
Less like a right hook, it’s more like he turned his cheek to the hail…
I blink, and I remember the sudden pressure of his cheek against my temple, like he was using his face as a shield to protect mine.
He took the strike of hail that would’ve otherwise clocked me on the face. And it would have done more than left a bruise and a cut.
If hail that can do this much damage to Samick struck me on the face…
I frown up at him.
And the moment I do, with his profile unmoving and chin still lifted, his gaze slides down to me—and the frost starts to shift.
I watch the hue of his eyes tint with the faintest green, like the inside of an apple.
For a beat, we just stare at each other.
No thoughts settling in my mind, it’s a cloud over my brain—and all I see is him.
Then a sudden shout bounces off the walls.
I startle and throw my wide stare to the general.
But I can’t see her.
Not through the cluster of warriors, standing taller and thicker than her.
All I can make out are a couple of those creepy as fuck horses sagged against the far walls, as if finding a place to catch their breaths.
The general must be close to them.
Sounds like her voice is coming from that direction, a foreign shout I pay no attention to.
I never know what she’s saying.
I look down the stretch of the long, concrete corridor. It’s cold with damp spots staining the walls, metal-barred cells in a row all the way down to the furthest wall.
But my attention snags on Mika.
Halfway down the corridor, near the grey steps that arch up to a doorway, Arwyn holds her in his arms.
She’s limp as a noodle.
Her arms dangle, her head lolled back, mouth agape—and black blood streams through her glacier hair.
The stone of Arwyn’s face matches the ice in his eyes, utterly cold.
But I see the worry in other parts of him, in his hands that flex and regrip on Mika’s body, as though he’s nervous and impatient, getting angsty about the general talking for more than a moment, and his gaze is shifting all around the unit, from face to face.
Searching for the healer.
I don’t doubt it.
Samick’s fingers tighten on my wrist before he’s dragging me down the corridor.
I throw a startled look up at the general, and while I don’t see her, I realise I don’t hear her either.
The speech is over.
I stagger at Samick’s heels as he weaves through the unit.
The awkwardness of it—brushed up against the wall, the moving warriors shifting on my other side, the outstretch of my arm as he keeps my wrist firm in his fist—means my steps are scuttled.
We move slow.
Congestion. Warrior traffic.
Takes me a moment to realise that there’s order to this.
We’ve passed the first staircase, the one that leads up to a metal balcony overlooking the row of gated cells, when I figure out the movements of the warriors.
Some are gathering wounded and taking them down to the makeshift triage at the far end of the corridor. Others are pushing their way through the crowd to find the humans peppered around, the guards just as strewn about, and I wonder what happened to separate them all.
A few fae are splintering off for the cells.
Samick has the same idea.
Fist tightening on my wrist, he tugs away from the wall—and takes me into the thick of it.
My boots scuff over the stained floor.
A path parts for him.
Warriors must feel his frosty presence just as I do, because without even looking over their shoulders at Samick, they step aside and lean away and push back into others.
We slip through the crowd effortlessly, all the way down to the second length of the cellblock.
So much is happening around me that my attention is pulled in every direction.
The steeds clop and huff back at the entrance, guards hunt down the humans lost in the crowd, warriors are shouldering their way to the walls and the cells as if to escape how claustrophobic it is in here.
Only a few warriors climb the rattling metal staircases, either to the with the overlooking balcony, or one that ends with a metal door that’s bolted shut.
The second party aren’t escaping the crowd.
Weapons drawn, the deputy leads them to the metal door.
I crane my neck to watch as he throws the first kick at it, then the second—but it only gives on the third kick.
The warriors rush into the darkness beyond the door.
Then it’s all out of sight.
Samick drags me down the cellblock, close to the grey wall ending it. At that wall, there’s a queue of wounded growing from the mouth of the very last cell.
I scan the faces, bloodied and battered, but I don’t see Mika or Arwyn among them. Might already be in the cell.
The healer must already be in there, setting up a triage.
It’s strange that hail can cause so much damage to them. The hail must’ve been the size of basketballs to beat them up this bad.
The injured faces are taken from me as we reach the fourth cell from the final wall—
And Samick yanks me into it.
The moment we’re inside, he abandons my wrist and leaves me standing at the entrance.
He moves for the double metal-framed bed in the far corner. It’s wedged up against the wall, just like the one across from it, with a barred window between them.
Samick grabs the bedframe, then slides it effortlessly down the room, closer to me in the entryway.
There’s no cell door. Like those gates in movies, or the metal ones for extra fucked up prisoners. It’s just an open doorway.
Must be one of those with a sliding door, another automated one in this block.
Maybe the whole prison is like this.
The shout of unsteady metal jolts to a stop. Samick has pushed the frame against the wall, an arm’s reach from me, and—from the top bunk—he gathers blankets and flimsy pillows.