Chapter 10
TEN
Samick’s hands spread out the parchment, flattening the map over the boot of the car.
His fingers are slick with mostly dried blood. Smears of it stain the thick, beige paper crinkling under his hands.
Samick hasn’t told me to switch off the torch yet. Not once since leaving the pharmacy. So I push my luck and aim it directly at the map.
My chin lifts, and I try to get a better look over his moving forearm.
Samick murmurs in his language, his fingertips grazing from landmark to landmark, leaving traces of dark blood.
A compass—dated, and with symbols in place of letters—is clipped to a folded edge of the map. But I have no doubt about what it is, and what it does.
The car suddenly creaks.
Leaning his hip on the boot, Arwyn folds his bulky arms over his chest. He gives a faint nod and a grunt to whatever Samick said.
I don’t know what he agrees to. But I do know that the longer I stare at the map, the more I realise something is utterly wrong with it.
It’s not that it isn’t fully spread out and parts of the parchment are still folded, and so I’m staring at only a section of Canada, but that it’s basically unintelligible.
Any letterings—like with the compass—look more like scribbles and symbols. And the whole map is criss-crossed with red and black lines.
The frown furrows on my brow for the longest moment before it makes a little sense.
The red lines could be the route Samick’s unit follows. So the black lines would belong to other units.
The towns aren’t named, the cities and the roads are untitled, but the coast lines the edge of the folded parchment. That means we’re closer to the east coast than I thought.
As for the actual province we’re in, the red line cuts around rocky mountains, which I think we’ve passed already in the winter, then it comes down to the border.
That’s where I guess we are now, because there are no hills or mountains. The terrain here is mostly flat.
But from the border, the red line shoots off in a winding route to the coast.
Samick seems to know exactly where we are.
He and Arwyn consider the map without any hint of confusion, and they talk in their foreign tongue.
Mika is quiet.
She doesn’t even participate in their planning.
Maybe it’s the loss of Shark that silences her.
I look over at her.
Sagged on the bonnet of the same car, with the swell of the rusty roof between us, she slumps in the wisps of my torchlight.
Her hand presses to her gut, lashes low over her glassy eyes, like she’s on the verge of passing out or throwing up.
Whatever energy she had after waking up in the prison was spent in the fight. Then the mental, emotional fatigue of losing Shark.
They were friends.
I doubt that she would even be here if Shark hadn’t taken all those shots to get involved in her fight, to save her, to kick and strike away the fae with the twisted mouth.
Shark saved her.
Now, he’s back there on the road, neck twisted all the way around, and she’s here.
The rustle of paper comes as Arwyn drags a corner of the map closer to himself.
I forget all about Mika and watch as Arwyn’s finger traces a black line on the parchment, still planning our route back to the unit.
Guess we can’t go back the way we came, with the earthquake splitting apart the land and all that.
But I take the chance to burn as much of the map’s details into my mind as I can while it’s out.
I consider the lines, the red one, the dark-inked ones, as though that’ll help me find out which unit Bee is trapped in—but even if I knew, what could I do about it?
Nothing.
I’m useless, a human in a dark fae apocalypse.
And I’m even more useless alone.
I got a taste of that when Samick told me to run—and maybe it was an hour, maybe it was a few, but it was terrifying either way.
I’m not built to persevere.
I’m not built to overcome fear.
I’m just not.
Something I’ve learned about myself out here—before those hours, I’ve never really been alone in the world. I had my mum, then I had Bee. Now, separated from her, Samick looks after me.
It’s now I realise how heavily I rely on him.
And that should scare me.
But it doesn’t. I just stand close to him, closer than I should, closer than I need to.
My hip bone—too prominent, too protruding—digs into the weapons holstered to his thigh. My shoulder presses against the knives strapped to his arm.
But he doesn’t push me away.
Like I’m not here at all, he goes over the map, and I wonder if he realises how scared I was alone, how my mind started to turn on me, and just how fucking unlikely it is that I’ll run away from him and go out into the blackout, alone.
Could be why he doesn’t bother hiding the map from me.
Not that it’s overwhelmingly helpful or anything.
I definitely don’t know enough about Canadian geography to figure out where I am exactly. I only know that we’re passed the mountains and close to the coast.
A thud shudders the car—and silences the conversation between Samick and Arwyn.
We all look over at Mika.
She’s slumped over the windshield on the other side of the car, her arms limp on her lap… then there’s the creaking sound of leather screeching over metal as she slides off the bonnet.
She goes tumbling—
And the moment she does, Arwyn snaps out of his surprise and lunges for her.
He moves like Samick does sometimes.
In a blur of frost and mist, and it’s less time than a blink before he’s crouched by the side of the car, Mika limp in his arms.
He caught her midfall.
Her head lolls back from his arm, and the sight of her—
A sickly tendril runs down my throat.
There’s a slackness on her face, letting her jaw hang to the side, like she’s dead.
But she’s not there yet.
A dark slime trails from her parted lips over her sweaty cheek. The sign of life is in her lashes, fluttering. But her eyes are rolled back, and so all the light catches on are the whites of her eyes.
Arwyn hugs her closer to him.
His face is pinched with worry as he looks her over, a whitish intensity flaring his eyes. He searches for injury in all the blood stains of her leathers.
And the realisation comes out of me before I can stop it, “Her gut.”
Arwyn swerves his blizzard eyes to me.
Samick looks down at me. There’s a silent question in the furrow of his brow.
“She was holding her stomach,” I say, quieter. “I thought she was just sore—and tired from the powder. Or nauseas. But she didn’t look good. I thought…” I swerve my gaze between the two winter warriors. “I thought you knew.”
Arwyn’s jaw tightens for a beat before he drapes Mika’s unconscious body over the car bonnet.
Her arms get caught under the small of her back, like a dropped puppet.
Arwyn runs his hand over her stomach.
In the same moment, Samick folds the map, clips the compass to it, then packs it away into one of the outer pockets of his satchel. Then he’s grabbing the rope bound to my cuff.
He moves for Mika and Arwyn, his steps urgent, and the torchlight bounces with us.
White wisps cascade over her inky leathers—and highlight the black blood that comes away with Arwyn’s hand.
He extracts a small blade from a holster, then hurried, he cuts into the leathers shielding her midsection.
The moment the leathers peel apart, a burn of sick tickles my throat.
I turn my cheek to it.
I can’t look at the gnarly green and black lines spearing out from a festering wound.
A knife wound, no doubt about it.
I’ve seen so many of them since the blackout hit that I’ve lost count at the top of my head. I would need to sit and think through every fight, every attack I’ve seen through binoculars, and up-close, consider the bodies I’ve stepped over in the dark, the ones I’ve left behind…
I’ve seen so many that I would recognise a knife wound anywhere.
Like every other time I see a fresh one, I can’t look. I just… can’t.
And Mika’s is more than a slit that gapes and oozes blood. Her’s festers. Like it’s infected.
But it can’t be.
She was only just stabbed down the road. Takes a whole lot longer than a couple of hours for a wound to look as fucked up as that.
Arwyn utters a single word in his language.
Samick’s grip on the tether tightens.
I look up at him. “What’s wrong with her?”
The frost of Samick’s eyes cut down at me. “Poison.”
I should maybe be startled that he even answered me. But it’s the answer itself that snags in my mind.
One of the fae stabbed her in the stomach—with a poisoned blade.
My face twists with the grisliness of it.
Because why the fuck do the fae have poisoned weapons?
Really, what’s the point of it if the people that the fae are here to kill are either held captive or killed on the spot?
Unless there are types of fae, those with a different kind of sickness in them, find it fun to cut a person, then let them run… let them think they got away…
But the poison gets them in the end.
A sadness settles in me.
Dejected, I watch as Arwyn throws off his satchel and it strikes the car with a clang, then he’s rummaging through it with an urgency that tightens his mouth into a twisted line.
I can’t look.
It’s too… gross.
But I hear it.
The sludge of open flesh with the clattering of phials and murmured words that I can only assume are curses.
And I smell it.
The pus, the festering, the infection that sprouted in such a short amount of time.
I tuck closer to Samick’s side, the tip of my nose grazing his arm, as though it’ll shield me from both the sound and smell.
It doesn’t.
Not until Arwyn is done, and he has Mika in his arms again, cradled.
The torchlight glimmers over them, revealing the concern in his slanted mouth and icy eyes.
Samick is just as uneasy.
His fist is frost on the tether, his jaw clenched so tight that a muscle feathers on his cheek.
I don’t need to be told that this shit is urgent.
We move—and we move fast.