Chapter 8 #4
Every glance I throw up at him reassures me.
His gaze doesn’t wander to me.
Not once.
I believe what he said to me.
He’s never desired a human, he loathes our bodies, what we are, and to him we’re just off.
I believe him so certainly, so completely, that the tension stiffening my body soon becomes a reaction to the frosty air around me, not the threat of his gaze.
It takes a while.
Lathering the cloth, rubbing my flesh raw, rinsing with the other cloth, then doing it all over again.
The dampness of my flesh is quickly attacked by the frostiness of the air around me, and I’m turning blue under the raw redness of my scrubbed skin.
My breaths are shuddering into choppy mists at my bruised lips.
I rush—until it comes to my wounded shoulder.
Then I soften the strokes of cloth around the tender flesh, wincing with each touch.
The bruising discolours my freckled skin, but it’s not torn and ghastly, it’s just a hole padded with some sort of moss, moss that I understand now to have stopped the bleeding.
I’m just as careful with my face, until finally, I toss the cloth to the foliage, then grab the brown jar.
The lid is loose already, as if done for me in advance, and so it pops off at a swift touch. I dip my fingers into the oil—and as I smear it onto my leg, I hesitate.
Brown like olive oil, but it doesn’t go on brown. It goes on warm. It tickles, sort of, like those kinds of lotions meant to warm up muscle tension, but it doesn’t stink with menthol, and it glides over my skin better.
I’m generous with it—and the cold is starting to thaw from my body.
I rub it all over, every bit of myself that I can reach, and when I’m done, wiping my hands on a damp cloth, I look around for the warrior.
Chin turned to my good shoulder, I find him behind me, just out the corner of my eye.
Now, his gaze is on me.
The cold green of his eyes flickers over my back, probably black and blue from when he slammed me down on that car.
Still, his steps don’t falter.
He considers my wounds, my poor condition, but doesn’t pause his casual pace.
I loosen a huff, then—reaching for the underwear—shift onto my bottom.
My legs lift out in front of me as I tug the underpants over my feet. The moment the briefs are hooked on, I flop onto my back, lift my bum, then drag them up.
The warrior stops.
The soft bootsteps circling me come to a sudden end with a scuffed sound, like a stagger or a falter.
I throw my gaze to him.
My cheek presses into the material of my parka, I am frozen in the most vulnerable of ways, and I blink at him just once before my heart stamps in my chest.
The warrior looks.
He’s doing what he said he wouldn’t.
There’s a confusion in the faint furrow of his brow, a bewilderment, but that baffled look is aimed right at my pelvis.
My heart lurches.
I fling my gaze down my body, expecting to see something horrible—but there’s nothing…
My bum is lifted off the ground, the knickers barely tugged up all the way, and I’m looking down my body, searching for whatever he sees on me. But there’s nothing there.
It hits me, like a bough breaking from above and crashing down on me.
I’m too exposed.
A burn itches at my cheeks. The flush spreads all over my crimson face, and I yank up the underpants.
I shield myself from his startled glare.
His lashes flutter over eyes the hue of iceberg lettuce. So pale, so icy, almost white. Then he turns his cheek to me, a muscle stroked across his face.
I shift for the clothes—and I make quick work of dressing.
My gaze burns from under my lashes, following the warrior as he resumes his perimeter walk.
He doesn’t look at me, but that faint frown of his sticks to his brow, fading then returning, fading then returning.
I wrangle on the tights like his gaze could return any moment. Then I’m pulling on the cami, flailing my way into the sweater, shimmying on the sweatpants—and finally, the thick woollen socks that slip snug on my feet.
I could melt into the warmth and fleece of it all, the gliding caress of the fresh material on my clean skin, the oil that either heats my skin or combats the cold. My boots are still not best for snow, or any sort of ice or sleet, but they are all I have, so I pull them on.
I’m fastening the laces when the warrior’s bootsteps turn at my left, and I twist around to watch him advance on me.
He swipes for the earth—and steals the tiny glass phial into his grip. “Stand.”
I do.
It’s slow work, and when all my weight shifts onto my crouched legs, I take a pause just to breathe through the aches.
Before my spine is even upright, he’s on me, impatient, and his hand has fisted onto the sleeve of the sweater.
I stumble into him, just as he yanks down the sweater’s shoulder.
The return of the cold air is a nip at the raw flesh, a cold burn that isn’t unlike the warrior’s stare. I couldn’t risk applying the oil too close to the wound, just didn’t seem safe.
Regretting that now.
And he’s in no rush, just considering my wound, cold as ever.
My glower aims up at him for too long.
His face is chiselled stone, a pallor flickering warmth under the siege of torchlight, and a stroked muscle along his jaw, all tension in the massive inconvenience I am to him.
Those long lashes cast shadows down his face and darken the frost of his eyes—that are back to that pale green, that iceberg lettuce.
He studies the moss packed onto my shoulder wound (courtesy of your knife, fucker) and the bruising all around. But his gaze, his attention, snags on the sickly varnish down the centre of the moss—like a damp layer, a congealment.
The word he utters is so soft, so quiet, I hardly hear him—
“Weak.”
Softly growled, muttered, and not to me. He didn’t speak directly to me, more of a thought uttered aloud.
But I did hear it.
And since it was his fucking knife that did this, his throw that did this, and he’s responsible for the constant tremble of my body using everything it has to just stay standing, he can fuck a cactus.
‘Weak.’
My mouth turns down at the corners.
That other fae, back on the street with the trap, the fae with one blue eye and one golden eye, he gave a warning to this one. He spoke the words in English—as though he meant for me to hear him.
To understand him.
‘They are a fragile kind.’
“Not weak,” I murmur and I look up at him from beneath my lashes. “Fragile, remember?”
His glare is a flash of white in the dimness, his mouth is a twitch of an almost snarl, but these are just warnings before he’s gripping my shoulder—
And a hollow scream is ripped out of me.
It wrangles my throat, twists my body, and freezes me, that ugly, horrid scream.
The warrior has his thumb digging into my wound, pushing easily through the congealing barrier, until the entire length of his thumb is in me, grazing my bone.
The scream doesn’t stop.
It rips through me, thrashes me.
My legs give out—and I feel every bit of his thumb leaving the inside of my flesh as I fall.
I hit the foliage with a thud.
My breaths are ragged.
Twisted on the forest floor, I hold my shoulder and watch, wide-eyed, as his boots press into the soil, right in front of my face, and he crouches over me.
Patient in the dying harrowness of my cries, he waits until the strangled sound is softening into moans wisped with whimpers.
“This,” he starts and lifts the phial pinched between his thumb and index finger, “will heal you—and force you to sleep.”
My mouth quivers with the harsh breaths grating through me. I fling my wide gaze to the phial, crumbled chalky powder glittering at me through the glass.
But this is no negotiation.
He doesn’t give me a choice.
There is no decision for me.
It is his.
And he makes it, swift.
In a blink, he’s got my chin in his grip and his knee digging into my chest, pinning me down.
The pressure of his fingertips pushes in-between my teeth, forcing my jaw apart, and he flicks his thumb against the cork of the phial.
It pops off and hits the foliage.
It all happens so fast.
Before I can fight him, before I can try and twist my face away from his incoming hand, he’s pouring powder into my mouth.
The cough strikes me instantly.
It’s a jolt that lifts my back off the ground as a hacking fit steals me.
The warrior’s grip shifts from my jaw to the entire bottom half of my face and clamps my mouth shut.
My coughs are useless against the cold of his palm, the pressure of his hand holding me down, muffling my hacking fit.
The taste, the bitterness…
My body fights it.
No, my body doesn’t fight the powder.
It fights him. His hand too firm on my mouth.
It suffocates me.
A scream rises up through my coughing fit, and in a snap of the fingers, I’m fighting him.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t fucking breathe!
My hand hits out, frantic, belting his arm over and over.
He doesn’t waver.
The sculpted marble of his face is unflinching, unfeeling, it is hollow and shrouded in shadows.
I strike higher, aiming for his face, but I can’t reach. My hits strike his shoulder instead—but they are slowing down already, weakening, and it’s like ribbons are being tugged from my body, my essence, and stealing away pieces of me, strip by strip.
My fingernails scrape along the slick leathers of his arm, but there’s no grip to get—and my hand slides down, then flops to the foliage.
I blink.
He warps above me.
Head tilted, he watches as consciousness ebbs out of me. Those pale eyes are sparked with interest, curiosity, and it’s all I see before I blink again, and he’s a smear of white in a blackout.
Then he’s gone.