Chapter 3 #2
Before I can even suck in a breath, his hand shifts from my thigh to the small of my back—and he fists a bunch of my jacket.
A hollow cry chokes out of me as that grip yanks, once, and I’m ripped off his shoulder.
The ground rushes up at me.
I smack down, hard, on the frozen earth. My arms thud, legs bounce, and the back of my head erupts with fresh aches.
The grunt that jolts through me on impact is fast silenced by the sudden pressure on my chest.
I squint through the stars dancing in my sight.
The warrior stands over me, a face carved from ice and fury, his boot pressing down on my middle.
Faces are aimed at us from all around, some snarling, some with curled mouths and humour dancing in their eyes—but most just watch, as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening, nothing beyond a scene that’s slightly interesting.
But those faces belong to my peripherals.
He steals my blurred focus.
He holds it, harnesses it, and I don’t fucking dare look at anyone but him.
The inkiness of his leathers gleam in the firelight, and in that glare, I see the blood spatter, old and dried, and the dirt smearing him.
His pink upper lip curls over the word, “Stay.”
That command bolts through me, an instinct that even stops my hand from reaching for my bleeding shoulder—a wound that burns deep in my torn flesh.
I swear I’m losing too much blood.
But the warrior pays no attention to the bleeding hole in my shoulder, not a mere glance, before he’s tugging away from me and marching up the camp.
The release of his boot from my middle rises my chest, a ribbon of air flooding into me. My hand moves on instinct to find my chest, and just hold, as though that’ll help the breaths ease in me, as though it’ll soothe that crackling crispness in my lungs.
Those stars still dance, glitter staining my eyes, but I can make out enough to trace the warrior to his steed. He grabs the reins, then marches into the throngs of the camp.
My gaze turns with him, follows him, and my body rolls with his direction, onto my side.
He becomes a silhouette in the murky light and the blurriness of my vision, but it’s an outline I trace to the cusp of the camp.
There’s a chair there, black as ink, a spine that arches way above my own height. It’s a fucking throne. And on it, sits a fae. A female one.
I notice everything about her all at once, her proud posture, smaller than the males around her, but somehow seems taller; the sparkling lilac eyes that switch from me to the cold one; and that she wears a crown of sorts, a tiara but sharper and black and chalky, like it’s made out of coal.
I didn’t need to see the crown to know her authority. Even through the race of my heart, the beats hitting the palm of my hand, still pressed to my chest, and the shuddering breaths that mist the air at my face, I see her well enough to know she’s in charge.
Two warriors flank her, their leathers not unlike the others around camp, better decorated with silver pins running down their arms like seams, and one of those warriors, with the same lilac eyes and chalky hair as the leader, wears a silver crown.
Her eyes flash as Samick drops to a knee before her.
I must’ve been staring at her too long, because now, he isn’t holding the reins tethered to his steed, and—with a swift look around—I find the beastly creature standing calm and patient near a wooden cart.
The cart has a human on it…
An unmoving one who looks shredded.
No other way to say it.
Shredded.
His clothes are torn, his face is scratched and bloody, his hands are ripped. Looks like he’s been shoved through the paces in a fucking blender.
I think he’s dead.
Draped there, he doesn’t move.
Fuck, I hope I’m not next.
My mouth twists with the fresh surge of panic. I swerve my watery stare to the throne—and there, a pair of lilac eyes are fixed on me.
I stiffen.
The crisp cut of her dark hair ends at the angle of her sharp jaw—where a line of scars starts down the length of her narrow neck.
They warp at the edge of my sight, worming in my peripherals, but I’m pinned completely by her gaze—and it’s slow to tug away from me, but when it does, it feels like the release of a truck from my body.
My breaths come easier, deeper, but I force them through my flaring nostrils, because it somehow feels more controlled or quieter. Any breath too loud, any sudden cough that’ll strike me, that’s going to end with my head rolling through camp.
If it isn’t him who slaughters me, it’ll be her. The leader who considers him for a pulsing moment that I feel in my own body, my own heart thumping too hard, too violent.
Everyone watches.
Every face that was turned to me before now looks up at the one on the throne.
The general.
Her ungloved hand is a slender feather as she lifts it from the arm of the chair—and flicks it in the most disinterested, elegant summons I’ve ever seen.
Then she distorts.
Her edges wobble, her body twists, and for a moment, frozen on the ground, I think she’s about to transform into something, another kind of beast, another version of the monster she already is.
But I blink, and nothing happens.
She blurs in and out of focus—and I realise it’s me.
The glove on my hand rustles as I slide it over my chest, away from my heartbeat to the pulsing sensation in my bleeding shoulder.
Lashes are drooping too low, too much, and I squint my eyes over and over, as if to help fight keep them open, keep my vision clear.
But I’m losing blood…
A lot of it.
I hold onto the burn of my shoulder as firm as I can. The threads of my glove are quick to soak through to my palm.
Bee has a bargain.
That’s what she told me.
So maybe I won’t be killed for passing out, or maybe the cold warrior who kneels at the throne, and speaks his foreign language, maybe he’ll come back and stop the bleeding.
My mouth almost curves, lazy, at the thought. A ridiculous, stupid, delirious thought.
I don’t trust them, any of them.
Bargain or no bargain, I’m not safe here.
But that truth isn’t stopping my eyelids from lowering over my already distorted sight.
I cling to consciousness as firm as I can.
The rope I hold onto is the still-pulsing adrenaline lashing through me, those threads of fear that whip and burn me from the inside out.
And that is my tether as the general’s voice, another language, barbed but somewhat softer from her, somewhat elegant, floats around the camp—and another fae approaches.
I frown on him, the tall and slender one, that looks like he’s been stretched. Reins loose in his hand, he guides the fucked-up version of a horse with him.
The firelight grazes over the length of the steed. Hairless, grey skinned, sickly—but now, the light cuts into the jagged, sharp edges of its ribs, and brightens the crimson of its beady eyes.
My face twists, fear and disgust.
I’ve seen them before, on the road when I first saw the fae, and again from safe distances through binoculars, just like I’ve seen the dark fae.
There is no safe distance now.
I’m in their den.
I’m captured prey.
And I can only watch the sway of the creature’s tail moving steady, side to side, but it’s sharp and metal-like, and I think it might be some sort of venomous weapon.
The urge to crawl away, to scamper, is strong. But I’m so weak that all I manage is a whispered moan before my cheek presses harder into the solid earth, smooshing it, and my lashes flutter that bit lower.
Blood.
Too much blood.
It soaks into the earth, defrosts the cold and the ice, spilling out of me too freely. I can feel it, myself, fading, and in a flutter of my lashes, the cold warrior stands.
I hold onto the tether of consciousness, the fear that pumps through my veins like shards of ice.
The words of the general send a hush rippling down the camp—and whatever it is she said, it commands the cold one to move for his steed.
His ungloved hand reaches for the neck of the hairless creature and, somewhat softly, he strokes it. Like… like there is a bond there between them, some form of affection.
That thought knits my brows closer together.
These monsters with feelings… it’s a whole thing I don’t want to sink into, like I’m sinking into darkness now.
The cold warrior murmurs words to the beast, words I can’t hear in the distance between us, but I see his mouth moving over silence. It’s like he’s reassuring it until—
Blood whips through the air.
Not a blast, not an eruption. Ribbons and threads of hot, fresh blood.
It’s thick and black and spurts out from the steed’s neck, and hollow shrieks come with it.
The cold fae…
He tore out the steed’s fucking throat.
Literally tore it out.
There’s a hole, now. Gaping and sputtering.
The legs of the steed wobble with its cries, sharp and icy, until it collapses, just crumples to the earth at the cold warrior’s boots. Hurt by the one who murmured soft words to it, who stroked its neck with some pretence of affection, of a bond that doesn’t exist.
A shudder rinses through the cold warrior, a tension in his jaw, and he holds the creature’s throat in his fist.
He stands there…
He just fucking stands there and watches the steed writhe lamely on the ground. He watches as its movements slow, and slow, and it all gets so feeble…
Until it’s silent.
And there’s no more twitching.
In the silence of the camp, with the steed dead, the taste of inky blood is thick in the air.
The camp simmers in it.
The quiet, the moment, the violence.
The cold one stares down at his steed for a long while. Then, as if breaking a spell, he tosses the fistful of a throat to the earth.
It thuds on landing, right at the hoof.
And it’s like fingers snapping in the silence, because that’s all it takes for the camp to return to life, to movement, to sound.
Boots cut through my line of sight, some stares are thrown at me, liquids slosh in bottles, murmurs grate and metals clang.
They all just go on as though the cold warrior didn’t just rip out an animal’s throat.
If I’m the only one who feels something about what he did, if I’m the only one who doesn’t forget it, he knows it.
The sheet-white stare turns on me before his steps do. His advance comes steady and threatening, a beeline right for me.
A grunt catches in my throat, a guttural sound that maybe should have been a word, a please, a no, something, but all it became was a pathetic sound of the panic suddenly alight in me.
I shift my hand from my bloody shoulder to the dirt, and I push.
It does nothing.
I push again—and nothing.
The strength is leaving me.
Whatever strength I had, it’s drifting out of me, seeping out of my pores like drugs after a night out.
I try to move away from his advancing bootsteps, I try to get far back from his glaring frosty eyes—
But all I manage is a writhe of my legs before he’s on me.
Ice snatches my wrists.
A cry hitches through me as he pins my wrists together, then winds a slick, black rope around them.
I cringe from his touch, my back pressing into the frozen earth, as though I can slip through the cracks between the soil and disappear.
Undeterred, his hands abandon my wrists and he snatches the collar of my jacket. He yanks it so hard that the zip tears with a ripppp and exposes my wound.
The cut of his jawline tenses, tight.
He considers the wound for a moment, then his glacier eyes swerve to me—my face. He takes it in, the sheen on my brow, the furrowed line, the weight of my lashes.
I wonder if he sees death on my face, coming for me. No, not coming. Here. Now. Hand on my heart, ready to tear me away.
Whatever he sees feathers a muscle in his jaw.
His grip on my jacket remains, and it holds me up, sagging against the air, as he reaches for his thigh.
I look down the upturned curve of my nose, and watch, dazed, as he fishes through a pocket on his leathers.
He only fingers through it for a moment before he tugs out a tiny jar that gleams blue, luminous blue, and it makes me fleetingly think of the fish that glow at night.
What’s that called again?
My mind is slipping…
It is slipping far and fast.
The fight is drifting, too.
My body is falling with the descent.
I feel the pressure of the earth against my skull as I sag further and further back.
The fae releases his grip on my jacket.
I thump to the earth, limp.
I think… I think I just lie here, blinking against the texture of the darkness above, like thick ribbons of smoke layered on top of each other, and disturbed by the firelight.
The fae cuts into my line of sight.
His face is stone, steeled rage, as he uncorks the tiny jar and, scooping a finger into it, lures out a… a… a smear of moss.
No, I must be slipping more. I must be losing my grip on reality. No matter what that looks like, it can’t be moss that he’s reaching to my wound.
Whatever it is, it stings the moment it touches my torn flesh—but the sting is distant, faraway, like an echo that reaches around me, but doesn’t quite touch me.
He applies that mossy stuff to the knife wound, and he isn’t kind about it, but I don’t know that from sensation, because I don’t really feel anything anymore. I only know because I rock and sway with his harsh handling until there’s a pause, then a ripppp as he tears a strip from a cloth.
I can hardly make out the face of the warrior beyond a harshness and frosty eyes and a fine nose. It is a fine nose, a perfect stroke of firelight down a straight line, and just beneath, the faint pink of a bowed lip…
It’s the last thing I am aware of before the final drop of my lashes.
I’m sucked into nothingness.