Chapter 6 #2
Last thing I want is any of them realising what I have on my belt. Need to find a way to hide it.
But not yet.
Not as a sudden surge shudders down the unit—then utter stillness.
Not so much as a gasp, a breath, a rustle is heard.
The captives are as rigid as I am.
The guards are stiff against the tension, and their gazes are glares like the torchlight, aimed up at the warriors.
A heartbeat thumps through me.
Another reaches my tingling fingers.
The third touches my toes as they curl in my boots.
The general, at the head of the unit, bathed in crimson firelight, lifts her sword—and swords raise all over. Her head tilts back, her red mouth parts, and a vicious sound rips out of her.
The war cry.
I’ve heard it before.
A few times, but no more than that. Not often enough to get used to it.
It claws down my bones like the talons of a beast, it’s a tiger’s thumping snarl, a lion’s guttural roar, a bear’s hollow cry. It’s everything natural and unnatural, and it swallows up the whole fucking town.
My face twists against it.
I curl into myself, my chin digging down on my tucked-up knees.
Something shifts, like a switch flicked, and pure animalism releases from the whole unit. It starts as a violent ripple from the general and unravels all the way through the unit, down to the guards who shudder with the pulse.
I think of a whip lashing through the unit, and the moment it cracks, warriors are thrown into movement.
It’s a swell of black leathers.
I lose the cold warrior in the black ocean in the first heartbeat alone.
Warriors are fast to barrel down the smaller roads and lanes, disappear through windows, move as fast as the flames of the torches touched to the faces of buildings. Fires ignite in a sudden breath, like a sharp inhale that comes before a brutal scream.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
Not just the faster-than-what’s-possible fires roaring up the buildings and jumping to the next, but the fae themselves.
Never been this close before.
Now, I am stuck, stunned, as their brutal chaos spreads throughout this small town, from ripping car doors off their hinges to scaling the buildings, using nothing but short knifes to propel themselves higher, like it’s nothing at all to climb the face of a fucking four story building.
The thunderous crashing of doors cringes the violent slapping of the flames. Fae are booting in the doors and smashing through windows, and ripping through the pickup trucks…
The fae are hunting.
Hunting for survivors.
I wouldn’t think they would find any here, in a town so remote and small, but then a scream rips free from the building to my left.
I jerk back at the sudden crash above—and trace it all the way up to the fourth floor of the building, the window that erupts in a glittering cloud of confetti.
A man, a human, leaps out of the window, caught in the glittering shards of glass. And I know he jumped, because his legs are split into a leap, his arms thrown about as if he can propel himself even further through the air.
But he doesn’t.
He plummets.
His scream carries with him all the way down—
I shut my eyes, tight.
A chorus of winces comes from the captives.
And I turn my cheek to the body that I heard splat, so I don’t have to look at it.
More screams come.
But as I eventually open my eyes, I see only one human taken as a captive, a woman who’s thrown into the circle by a warrior with a twisted, snarling face.
That woman hits the road, hard, before she’s dragged into the fold—by the tattered captives.
The other screams are localised in two spots. The building to my left, and one further down the road, maybe back a road or two, since the screams are so far away.
A constant circle around the captives, the guards are rigid in the chaos. Their eyes gleam with a hunger for war, their gazes sweeping from warrior to warrior—but they don’t abandon their posts.
I wonder why they are charged with this, the babysitting of the humans.
Obviously I know why guards are assigned. If it wasn’t for them surrounding us, many would run, take their chances out there in the dark.
Fair.
I get it.
If it wasn’t for Bee, I would too.
But I wonder if these fae, the guards, are lower rank, somehow, or punished in the denial of that battling and violence they so obviously crave.
Might as well be foaming at the mouths, they watch it all burn with too much intensity.
I sink further into the mushy road.
Still haven’t learned that cringing into a solid object won’t steal me away and into the arms of safety.
Fucking instinct.
Now not only my ass is wet from the slushy snow, but my hip, too, and a chunk of my sleeve.
Even my gloves are starting to ice up so much in the cold mush that the chill is reaching my fingers.
I would bunch myself into a cuddle, wrap my arms around my legs and curve into myself, if I could stand the hum of pain in my back.
I cut my gaze aside to the captives.
Connie has her arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs, her sharp chin resting on her knees, and she watches the face of a building.
I trace her gaze, but all I see are smashed windows and smoke billowing out from them.
I return my wandering gaze to the other captives. Like Connie, some aren’t as haggard as others. Mostly the men are battered through their torn clothes, bloodied and bruised hands, a fatigue weathering their hollowed faces.
And then some others are in better condition. Less tears on their clothes, all of them wearing jackets to battle against the Canadian winter, lips that aren’t so cracked and chapped, fuller cheeks and bellies.
Just a reach away from me, the haggard ones are clustered together—and I wonder if they stick to each other for body heat, since their jackets are finer, flimsier, or it’s that they are afraid.
Some are closer than others, with arms locked, temples resting on shoulders, hands in hands.
And then the rest, the fresher ones, are isolated in their clusters, just sitting close together, like Connie and me.
But I’m not one of them.
Captive, yes, but not in with them.
‘In with kuris,’ the guard said to me.
So kuris must be what the dark ones call them, the word for the human captives in their language.
I might be one of them, I might not be. But either way, I do feel something for them.
A distant echo of pity.
Mainly because I feel it for myself.
Isolated, alone, in alliances but empty ones.
I stick to the cold warrior who, as I look around the burning rage of destruction swallowing the town, I don’t find.
I stick to him because I must, and he decides it.
Maybe he can’t just throw me in with the captives. Might be more dangerous down here with them. Maybe he can’t throw me onto a cart and just feed me when he needs to, because the general denied the request.
It’s all guesswork.
But I know that echoing void of empty alliances, isolation, and yearning—yearning for my normalcy, for the world to be returned, for the dark and its fae to be banished.
I yearn further than that.
I yearn all the way back to my mum, and at the thought of her, that fucking memory flashes in my mind, seared forever into the grooves of my brain.
I flinch against the intrusion.
It’s a strike to the soul, that memory of her face, painted in a way she never would have done to herself, surrounded by satin cushions, because I couldn’t afford silk, and under the ghastly glare of fluorescent lighting.
No one should see their mum like that, painted and prepared in a coffin.
My hand finds its way to the collar of my Kathmandu. Fingers slip into the gap and feel around for the familiar touch of the silver chain on my skin.
There.
A cheap chain, but not so poorly done that it will fall off me in a strong wind. The real treasure is what’s attached to it.
I finger it out of the collar, up to the dip of my clavicle, then fist my hand around it.
The pendant.
The locket.
And I hold it.
I hold it all the while it takes for the dark fae to ravage the town, and I release it, tuck it back into the collar, when the unit repositions down the road, and fires are blazing all around, thick smoke gathering in the streets, and the army marches out of the town.
It’s only then, standing, moving with the captives, caged in by the silent guards, that I let the locket rest on my breastbone, against the beat of my heart.