Chapter 3
THREE
The blackout feels thicker than it has since it first came. The touch of it against my skin comes with more pressure now that I’m alone in it.
That’s what I am.
Even with the firm, locked grip of the fae’s hand fisted on my wrist, and the steady clop, clop, clop of the steed’s steps, I’m alone in this darkness.
In all the time since the blackout started, I’ve never really been on my own, not more than a few moments to sneak off to relieve myself, and even then, I made quick work of it the more exposed we were, and that time I saw the deformed cactus, and I ran my ass back to the group as fast as I could.
There’s no torchlight to lead my way, either.
I can’t see a fucking thing, not a whisper of a light, not a flicker of flesh, nothing but pure black blindness.
There’s something disorientating about it.
My steps are untrusting; heavy and staggered. My free hand is outstretched in front of me, gloved fingers spreading and searching for a barrier that I might be dragged into.
And I’m slow.
Slower than the fae tolerates.
An annoyed hiss strikes at me in the dark, and before I can flinch against it, the grip tenses on my wrist and I’m yanked a few steps forward.
His pace is impossible.
My boots scuff over mush and ice and snow and gravel, a shifting terrain beneath me, and I can’t see where my next step should land.
I have one guidance.
Him.
Not even the hooves of the steed clopping on the road can guide me, not in such dense darkness where sound is distorted, and it’s like it comes from all directions.
The fae drags me with him, but his grip is a bracelet of stone pressing into the bones of my wrist. My flesh tugs and pulls, but his fist just tightens impossibly, and it feels like my bones might splinter.
It doesn’t let up, not once in all the strides, the fast paces, the sudden turns that stagger me into him.
And not once do my whimpers stop.
Can hardly call them sobs. They don’t reach all the way down to the pit of my gut. They’re dampened by the darkness, the urge to be as quiet and small as I can be in the presence of beasts, so they are shallow, pitched breaths, a wobbling mouth, thick swallows—
And wet cheeks that so isn’t ideal for the winter.
A breeze is drifting over me, prickling the dampness on my face, freezing me from the prickling of my raw cheeks down to the bones.
Between the cold, the tears, the injuries, I don’t know how I’m still standing, let alone stumbling through the dark with him, but this dark trek goes on for so long that the ground beneath me becomes a road, no slippery ice to unbalance me, no snow to crunch, just slush and mush and asphalt.
I can’t see shit, but apparently this dark fae can, apparently he can see everything, because he takes another sharp turn, his arm smacking into me, and the edge of my boot scuffs along something curved and solid—like the side of a pavement.
The chopped breaths that hitch through me are deepening now, the further I’m taken into the dark. Sobs are brewing from the pit of my insides, hiking up my chest, higher and higher—
And every fucking step has my body screaming.
When the fae smacked me down on the hood, my back hit the metal too hard, and even though my backpack softened the landing a bit, the canned food packed in there really dug into the bones around my spine, and I can hardly breathe now without a crackle in my lungs.
It doesn’t help that the impact of my boots hitting the road reverberates up my bones—all the way to the bleeding knife wound burrowed into my shoulder.
I don’t know how I’m still standing.
I think, at first, adrenaline—that pure, unfiltered fear pumping through me—was keeping me going. But now, my lashes are dull over my watery eyes, my legs are starting to slow, to sink.
Without missing a beat or a step, a sound hisses from the fae, something like frost forming over a blade, and his nails dig into the crinkled, torn flesh of my wrist.
A sharp sound catches in my hoarse breaths, a wince that doesn’t quite take root.
Then he smacks into me, the side of his solid, muscled body striking me, and I lose my footing.
I stagger into something hard, but not solid, and it rattles with a deep hollow sound—like a plastic tub or bin.
The rattle is fast left behind, and the fae is turning me onto another direction, down another road.
But this one is different, this road, it leads down a dark narrow path like all the others, but at the end, there’s light. Hot crimson firelight tunnelling down a narrow alleyway—a lane that ends in a wrought iron gate.
A frown creases my face under the glare of the light that the fae hauls me closer to; but there’s vertigo climbing up through me, too. With each dizzying thump in my head, blur of my vision, I feel the blood loosening from my shoulder, the slick threads of my jacket growing heavier.
My steps are clumsy and lethargic; his are purposeful and swift. It leans my upper body closer to him, a growing sag down the lane.
The fae stalks to the gate, undeterred by my stumbling weight, and—with the hand bound in leather reins—he hits out at the metal in a swift strike.
I flinch.
The gate swings open with so much violence that the lock shatters, and a shard of metal strikes me on the knee.
I double over, my hand smacking to the curve of my kneecap. The guttural wince coiling through me is suffocated.
Then I’m pulled upright by the yank of the tether—and the warrior drags me through the gap of the broken gate.
The light spreads out ahead.
Out the mouth of the lane, I see it better now.
Firelight.
It glares from torches impaled into the earth, protrusions of long, black wood that don’t seem to catch fire from the flames dancing on their tips. Dozens of them, peppered all over a camp beyond the metal barrier of the highway, between the woods and the road…
A dark fae camp.
An icy feeling shoots through me.
The dread weighing me down is instant.
My legs are suddenly heavier, my boots filled with sand, and I tug my leaning body the other way.
I fall back—away from the camp he’s dragging me to.
The warrior hisses a sharp, icy sound, like a blade drawn, and he turns on me with glaring green eyes.
I stagger under the assault of his gaze.
A breath cuts through me, sharp, and I flinch—
But it does little good.
He snatches me by the waist, then hoists me off my feet.
I drop onto his solid shoulder, hard enough that a grunt punches through me.
The air is shoved out of me.
Not a heartbeat after, his hand smacks down on the back of my thigh and holds, firm. With that alone, he grips me in place.
I turn into a limp noodle.
Suddenly, all that urge to flee, the instincts to run in the opposite direction, it freezes with my cold insides, and I’m just limp, staring wide-eyed at the ground.
Draped, I can only watch the heel of his boots kick over the road, and the sharp silverish hooves of the steed walking alongside him.
The road is discoloured beneath the glare of the firelight before he steps over a guardrail, and my view shifts to hard, frosty grass.
For a long moment, grass and dirt are all I see, the heels of his boots kicking into my sight with every swift step he takes, the gentle thudding of that creature steed… but I hear it.
The camp.
Them.
There’s that undercurrent of sound, of clanging and rustling and murmuring and fires crackling and boots shifting; noises that weave together to make the constant.
But then…
Laughter.
The sound of it tenses me, turns my bones rigid, that inhuman guttural, cutting, harsh sound.
My teeth grit, pure tension bolted through me, head to toe, and I’m hardly aware of the curling of my fingers, grabbing onto the back of the warrior’s leathers, as though holding onto him will, what, save me?
If he feels it, he does nothing about it.
Just like I’m sure he feels the violent pounding of my heartbeat against the solid muscles of his back—and still takes me into the den of his fellow beasts.
Rigidness keeps me in its iron grip, but I turn my cheek to press against his leathers—and I see them.
He carries me into the camp, and I haven’t gone unnoticed.
The stares of fae, of dark fucking fae, are latched onto me.
We pass them, the fae watching us, some grinning, others outright laughing—and my gaze finds more, the deeper into the camp he takes me, and every fucking one of them is watching us.
They laugh at me.
It’s a sickly thing, coiling in my gut, nausea burning around the panicked thumps of my heartbeats.
How they can watch me—some pushing up to stand, as if to get a better look, others sitting by campfires, grinning around bottles of purple liquid—and laugh.
It strikes me silent.
Even my serrated breaths mute.
My fingers are gripped onto the leathers as tightly as they can be, and I wonder, fleetingly, in this horror, how silly I look to them.
Ridiculous.
Weak.
A human draped over the shoulder of a dark fae warrior.
I wish I was stronger than what I am. I’m too accepting when I should be fighting, writhing, biting. But those are just thoughts, fantasies, and then, a fae with yellow hair like buttercup flowers, cropped and tidy, lifts his nose—and fucking sniffs the air.
His lopsided grin widens with a scoff, and he elbows into the female fae standing at his side whose nose is crinkled… and she rinses her disdainful glare over my backside.
Oh.
The pee.
I wet myself.
I forgot about that.
The reminder throws me back to the hood of the car, where I was sprawled like a doll, and he, the cold warrior, was crouched down… just looking at me, considering me.
And I fucking pissed myself.
I shouldn’t have forgotten, not with the damp sensation sticking layers of fabric to my inner thighs, but I did.
And now I’m reminded of it in the laughter, the stares, the jests shared between the ones who watch this beast cart me to the heart of the camp—before he stops, sudden, and the hooves of the steed go quiet just as quickly.