Chapter 5 #2
I don’t know what he’ll do with me once I’m untied, whether he’ll drag me along or deposit me on a cart or throw me in with the other humans down at the bottom of the camp. But I do know he’s going to make me stand up, maybe even walk, and that burns nausea through me.
It’s not the shoulder that worries me, it’s that he slammed my entire fucking body onto the hood of a car, and I’m convinced my back is completely purple and the back of my head is probably cracked, so yeah, I’m not thrilled about walking.
The breath that escapes me is too close to a sigh, too risky, and I turn a rigid look up at the knot.
Slender, pale fingers work and weave through the plaited rope.
The upside of this is that my arms will be back down where they belong, where gravity commands them, and blood will pump back through them.
That numb, dull throbbing will be gone soon, in three, two, one—my arms drop. The weighted thud of them hitting my lap is loud, but louder above me is the screech of the rope he tugs out of the metal hook.
I loosen a breath and sink into the cart.
Pins and needles are quick to dance through my arms. My mouth twists, braced, for the onslaught.
I don’t get the chance to let my blood flow, to fight through the tingling sensations, to even recover, not before my wrists are snatched from my lap, and—
My face falls.
Don’t know what I was expecting, really. It shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s fastening the rope around my wrists now that it’s free from the hook.
He was never releasing me, he was only removing the hook from the equation.
Once my wrists are tied, nice and tight, he drops his frosty stare to me.
He gives the rope a slight tug.
Up.
Plain and simple.
Stand or suffer.
I lean my weight onto my boots—and the groan that comes from me is instant.
The pain is instant.
It’s an explosion that erupts through me, spreads over my back like lava, sears into the meat of my shoulder, thumps in my skull like my heart has burrowed in there and it beats and beats and beats—
My groan lifts into a shout.
The warrior stands and yanks the rope with him. It stumbles me, and my boots slip over the cold earth.
Before I can fall, his hands grab my arms and steady me, but there’s nothing kind about it, his impatience, or the faint hiss crawling up his throat.
I plant my boots—and rise uneasily with my legs trembling beneath me.
My chest aches with the trapped moan in there, the one I don’t dare release, not with his cold stare spearing down at me.
I fight the moan, the whimper, the sobs.
The warrior’s hand moves in my downcast gaze, fingers threading through the rope. He fastens it to his weapons belt, a tether dangling between us.
Guess I’m walking with him, not with the other humans.
I don’t know if that’s good or bad, or it’s just bad because everything is, and there’s no fucking silver lining in anything, not anymore.
The metre of rope sags between us, and I think back to skipping ropes and songs on the playground, trying to jump in and skip with a partner, or mess them up if we didn’t like them.
I was a pro at that.
Skipping.
I competed in it… at school, primary school, but still. I won.
Should’ve stuck with it. I enjoyed it, it made me happy—and the stamina would probably come in handy these days.
I’m not sure how much stamina I have left in me. A cup that never refills as quickly as it empties. I need it to fill up now because, the rope tugs, and the warrior moves away from the cart.
I stagger to catch up with him, two steps ahead.
Body aching, I grit my teeth against the pain and follow him to the nearest campfire.
It’s doused now.
A scattering of a few embers gleaming from ash.
The warrior crouches at a leather satchel.
The other fae around this pile of ash and embers are packed and ready to move, except one.
A female with glacier hair, a faint bluish hue to it, the same shade as her eyes—eyes that are fixed on me.
I blanch under her stare, lifted from the bag she crouches at, and I turn my cheek to her.
The warrior—the one whose name I don’t wish to acknowledge—has one knee pressed into the thawed dirt and the mouth of the satchel tugged wide open.
Delicately, he folds paper wrappings over dehydrated meat strips, then secures them with string.
I don’t recognise the meat, but it faintly reminds me of beef jerky, that sort of parched meat, but this kind is black. No reds or brownish hues, just black to the core.
My mouth tugs with a frown, a look of faint disgust, before he slots the paper-wrapped meat into his satchel.
Beside his planted knee, there is a leatherbound notebook on the ground, speckled with some charcoal sticks and a stained cloth.
He’s just as delicate with it as he was the meat, and he slips it gently into the edge of the satchel. Then he wraps the charcoal pieces, the kind that stains his fingertips with a dust, in the cloth.
Maybe I’m too focused on the way he slots those packages into his bag, tidy and organised, maybe I watch too closely, but with a swift glance at the female warrior with glacier eyes, the difference is obvious.
Tidiness, organisation, delicacy—it’s not a dark fae thing. It’s a him thing.
The glacier one just grabs things at random and rams them into her bag, until it’s bulging at the sides, planted between her boots, and before she fastens it shut, she fishes out a ribbon from the inside.
It’s tangled.
Her pale fingers weave through the knots for a beat, then she scoffs an irritated sound and gives up.
Knots and all, she lifts the ribbon in one hand as she flips her head until its dangling between her knees—and the flow of icy hair falls like a winter waterfall.
Out the corner of my eye, I watch her fingers spindle through her hair, from the nape of the neck up to her crown, and she braids it without a mirror or any help at all.
If I had a speck of energy in me to spare, my brows would lift, impressed, because I am.
The braid takes her just some practiced moments before she uses the tangled ribbon to lock it in place.
I toss my gaze down before she can throw her head back.
The cold warrior finishes packing his satchel, then ties a leather waterskin to his belt, and when he rises and rolls out the tension in his shoulder, the glacier one takes a step closer—
She murmurs something in a low hum.
Both their gazes slide to me.
Too much frost, too much ice, much too cold.
I cringe against it and curve my shoulders inwards.
Neither of them actually does anything but look at me, and I drop my gaze to the embers.
Then I’m forgotten.
Other fae draw closer, stand around the dying embers, and that barbed sound lifts as murmured conversations snake around the camp.
I keep my gaze down until the last campfire is extinguished, and the humans are huddled at the end of the unit, surrounded by a half-dozen armed fae guards, and, as I look around, the light gets dimmer every second.
The itch to reach for my torch flinches my fingers.
But where my torch is, I don’t know.
It’s not with me, not anymore. Last I had it was in the street, on the road, before we walked into that trap.
Now, I stand in the swell of darkness.
Those slick blackwood sticks with flames dancing on their tips are the only source of light left in the camp.
But even that is taken from me.
All over, dark fae tear out the torches from the earth where they were planted, then lower the torches until the fiery tips are downwards, and… the flames vanish.
The blackout swallows us whole.
It comes thick, swelling my lungs, and my instinct reacts with a sudden pinning of my muscles to my bones.
The tension ignites my injuries.
I wince against the surge of pain.
In the pure darkness, I lift my hands to my chest and dig my fingertips into the seam of my ribcage.
That ache…
That fucking ache.
I need the inhaler.
My hands tremble against the cold. Even sheathed in gloves, the bones of my fingers shiver as I reach out into darkness.
I find him.
My fingers press into hard stone—and I flinch.
I flinch, though I reached for him.
My lips part, but no words come from me. I should speak it, I need my inhaler, but my throat tightens around any noise I can make.
My lungs are hungering for it, for that relief to drive the ache out of my body, but I’m just frozen.
The stone moves against my fingertips, until it’s gone—and replaced by something softer, something much smaller.
I close my fingers around it, the L-shaped curve of plastic with a tin-metal tip.
I feel it for a beat, as if to make sure it is what I think it is, then bring it closer to my parted lips.
I don’t go easy on my low supply. I should. I should probably space it out, since I don’t know when I’ll get more, if I’ll get more.
But the greed in my lungs can’t be battered away, and I suck in one, two, three desperate breaths before the ache starts to fade away.
It feels like sludge evaporating, ice melting, fog fading…
It feels so much like freedom.
But it will come back.
It always comes back.
And I will need him when it does.
He makes that clear when, in pure blackness, he snatches the inhaler right out of my hand.
A way to make sure I don’t run, maybe.
But this fae will work out soon enough that I’m stupid like that.
I won’t run.
Not until I have word from Bee.
I just hope he doesn’t notice the hunk of black metal hanging off my belt.
This radio is my only way of contacting her, my only hope of reuniting with her in this blackout.
The warrior can keep the inhaler—so long as he keeps his icy fucking hands off the CB.