Chapter 10 #2
That slight pressure folds me into a slow sink to the ground. Then I’m too low, the pressure of his fingertips gone, and my bum thuds to a smooth, flat boulder.
That anger from before, when he suffocated me with the powder and had me pinned down on the forest floor, lingers. It echoes in the cold look aimed down at me, and he might as well say it, it rings so clear.
‘Stay right fucking there.’
I do.
Bum planted, I draw my knees to my chest and stay on the flat boulder.
Still, the glacier feel of his stare doesn’t waver. It chills through the protection of the oil and tickles my face.
Holding my gaze, he peels the strap of his satchel over his head, then tosses it to the rocks. It only just thumps when he’s tugging back another strap from a single shoulder—and my backpack is next to land, right at my boots.
I aim a frown at it.
It’s only now I realise I don’t have it on me, that he’s had my bag the whole time I slept off the powder in the cart.
I lift my frown to him, just as he’s pulling his top leathers over his head, dishevelling his faint blond hair, pale sawdust caught in a blizzard.
He draws out his arms from the sleeves, and I’m never more certain that he’s sculpted from marble.
It isn’t the cold look he turns down at me, the echo of the warning lingering, but the sight of him that stuns me.
I don’t know what I was expecting, if anything at all. But it startles me, just how much he looks like us.
People.
Humans.
Only bigger, stronger, and I’ve never seen skin so smooth before, not a blemish in sight, no veins to push against an ivory complexion.
It really is marble.
I’m sure of it, that if I reached out my fingertips, he would be cold to the touch, and as hard as a brick fucking wall.
Then my frown hooks on his stomach.
Flat and strong, bordered by the lines of a V-shape. In the middle, there should be the indent of a belly button.
There isn’t.
That snags in my mind.
No belly button?
What the actual fuck…
Do these fae not have umbilical cords in the womb? Do they just fall out? Do they come from eggs?
No.
No, that would mean Bee, too. She didn’t come from some egg. She’s fae…
But she’s like me, too. Human.
And she’s not like these fae either, the dark ones—and this cold warrior also isn’t like the dark ones.
My mind is mush.
I glitch like an old operating system, and my mind just crumbles under the spiral.
Before the fae can take off the rest of his leathers, I drop my head into my hands and let the mush sway in my skull.
I grew up in the Welsh countryside. Only left when I was maybe eight years old, but before that, I was around my grandparents a lot, the older generation with those persevered stories of the fae, of Elidyr, the Telwyth Teg.
I sift through the stories in my mind, a mind washed clean of the constant pain that’s had me since the fae trapped us on the road, but a mind that struggles, like an old computer in the 90s starting that dreary task of just turning on, and it sounded like a fucking rocket ready to take off.
That’s my brain.
Always has been.
Overload, crash, reboot, repeat.
I feel it now, drifting closer to me, the crash, as I go through all those old stories my grandparents told me before bed, the kind that gave me nightmares and made sure I didn’t wander off too far into the fields.
But I don’t remember a single fucking tale that went through lack of umbilical cords, fae coming from eggs, or dark ones and light ones and cold ones and human ones.
So I shut it down.
My hands slip down to the rocks and flatten before I sink my weight, slumped, and look around the unit.
Can hardly call it a camp this time.
The torches flame, but not as many, because there aren’t as many spots to plant them in.
The captives are down by the river, washing leathers it looks like, but there is no tent for them to hide in during the sleep hours.
Most of the fae have stripped down to nothing, their muscular bodies strong and chiselled, tall and proud, and they move in and out of the hot pools.
Then there are the few who don’t go in the springs—like the glassy haired female who, just some rocks down from me, digs aimlessly through her bag.
The disturbance of water at my boots draws in my gaze.
The cold warrior steps into the hot pool. The smooth sculpted detail of his legs disappears, swallowed up by the water, until he’s in up to his middle.
There’s a couple of fae in there already, the one with the lazy grin and all-sharp teeth, and who wears a wildness in his bright pink eyes.
Shark.
The other two have their backs to me, leaned over the other side of the pool, relaxed, just soaking.
I turn a slick look out the corner of my eye to the female.
Her bag goes ignored now. She’s slumped over in a huff, her moody face aimed at the males in the pool.
She wants to go in.
But she doesn’t make any move to join them.
‘Why?’ the question whispers in my mind. ‘Why doesn’t she go in?’
As if she can sense my stare, feel it on her fallen face, she throws a sudden, sharp look at me, one that has my heart lurching in my chest…
Then a small smile slides onto her pale mouth.
She jerks her pointed chin.
My lashes flutter, a flustered blink.
Am I allowed to look at her?
Is she allowed to smile at me, to gesture over at the next pool?
My chin grazes the shoulder of the rain jacket, and I consider the hot pool over, a larger one, one filled with about a dozen fae warriors.
Half of them are more readable than I care to admit.
Loathing floods me.
Guess there’s a universal sleaze of males.
Six of them over there are throwing glances at us, at both me and the female warrior, lifting their chins as if to get a better look the moment we start undressing. They are elbowing one another, mumbling words I don’t recognise but that I understand.
Guess I am only a thumb to the cold warrior.
That’s not a welcome realisation.
I hide the disgusted snarl that warps my face by turning around—and the female’s gaze snares mine.
Her wink comes and goes, her smile fades.
And I want to drown her in the hot springs.
I want her to choke on the water, the heat, and die in it, because how fucking dare she, how dare she communicate like that with me, as if we are somehow in “this” together, the inability to wash because of males?
She thinks there is a kinship to be found in me, just in this one moment, but all other moments she is slaughtering my kind.
I have nothing but loathing for her.
I have nothing but pure, unfiltered hatred for the beasts that act just as the beasts of humans do.
Because there is nothing I hate more in this dark world than seeing that we might not be so different.
That festers in me, rotting my soul, twisting my face. I hug my knees to my chest too tightly, and my shins start to ache.
The emptiness of my stare pierces into the cold warrior as he rises up to the surface, shrouded in steam and shadows.
That loathing in me was a flame—now it’s a blaze.
He runs his hands over his hair, flattening it back, before he gestures to the female—and he speaks a single word, a curt sound, that has her chucking a bar of soap at him.
It cuts through the mist, fast as a bolt of lightning.
The warrior catches it with a swipe, too easy, before he starts to run the bar down his chest.
A huff swells my cheeks.
I’m not exactly feeling secure enough to be bored, but there is the return of that hollow hum amidst the anger, that emptiness, a void that just grows and grows.
I slide a tempted look at my backpack.
Magazines in there. Books, too.
But I’m in a magazine mood. That sort of temper that’s best to read trash in, stories that don’t matter, fillers in the blank spots of life.
That’s what I need right now.
But I leave the Vogue and People untouched for now.
Doesn’t matter anyway, everyone in those mags, in the pictures, in the stories, everyone behind it who took the pictures and wrote the articles—they’re all dead.
Maybe one or two survive in the units, with the captives, somewhere in the world.
Like the people here down at the riverbank, washing leathers, and some further down at the end of the rockpools, starting small fires, pouring rice into pots.
Most of them work.
The tattered ones.
But that smaller group down there, of the well-kept women, sit by the warmth of a rockpool.
Not one of them chips in with the other captives.
Like me, they don’t do a single chore.
A guard is posted closer to them, not wandering the border of the light and dark, not staring directly at them, but casually wandering a pace back and forth, as though unbothered, or completely fucking secure in that those three women won’t run—or won’t get very far.
I find Connie among them.
And my eyebrows lift as she brings a red stick to her mouth and bites into it.
A Twizzler.
The corners of my mouth tuck into my cheek.
Is she allowed to do that?
I flick my stare between her and the guard, but he only glances at her for a split second before he looks away, disinterested.
She snaps off part of the Twizzler and, with a darting glance over at a pool near the river, hands it off to the woman beside her.
That woman is the younger one I saw back in the town, and I placed her in her early twenties.
She tucks into herself, shielding the chunk of Twizzler behind her hand, and hides as she nibbles.
My frown is for more than the obvious sneakiness of sharing a sweet. It’s her—the mousey girl.
Mousey hair, mousey nose, mousey demeanour.
She reminds me of Erin.
Friends have always been in short supply for me. I never had an abundance, sometimes never cared to, sometimes I did care.
I met Erin in school, and I swear we got along back then, when we were just teenagers, but our friendship lasted… and lasted… and lasted far beyond its expiration date.
Then she got on my fucking nerves.