Chapter 13 #2
His grip on the tether remains, a fist that I picture in my mind, coiled with rope, and that feathered muscle in his jaw as he looks down at me with frozen apple eyes—like he reads my thoughts, felt my sudden spark of murderous rage towards him.
I right myself, boots finding balance on the snowy ground. The tip of my tongue rolls over my teeth as I turn my glare ahead, at nothingness.
Still, his grip on the tether is too tight.
He doesn’t loosen it, doesn’t allow me the extra space to walk. I’m too close to him, the shoulder of my rain jacket crinkling with every step as it brushes against his arm.
The proximity doesn’t ease, not so much as an inch, for the next long while.
Hours.
Hours upon hours upon hours—
Until, ahead, crimson light starts to flicker.
Thank fuck for that.
The torches with flames of another world are being lifted, starting at the fae on the hairless steeds, then down in a ripple to the end of the unit.
I blink against it, the rise of light.
As my sight adjusts, more flames are lifted, more torches rise, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut against it again.
My cheek turns to the glare, the peak of the marching unit, and the tip of my nose brushes over the arm of the ice fae.
He tenses, a current of bolting muscles running up his leathers. I feel the bolstering of his bicep against just the tip of my nose, a ball of steel against a feather.
The squinting look I aim at him is a blur of darkness and firelight and marble. But, with each flutter of the lashes, I make out the leathers wrapped around his bicep like a second skin.
I lift my gaze, up and up, over the fine drape of chain armour that curves over his shoulder, along the smooth marble hue of his neck, to the cut of his jaw.
He faces straight ahead, but his eyes are low, an ice-gaze angled down at me, and his lips are twisted, as though fighting the natural urge to snarl at me, a human much too close for his liking.
But, as I cut my gaze down to his hand, a fist wrapped in a thin, silky rope, I realise I was right—he holds it too tightly.
He’s the one who gives me no space to step away. It’s his fault I’m this close, so fuck him.
Still waiting for that pothole.
The sigh that sags me is fed up, but the roll of my eyes is risky.
I snub him and stare ahead.
The crimson has settled, the firelight softer now that my sight has adjusted, and I see the road for what it is.
A highway, littered with streams of cars and trucks and lorries, all frozen in the snow.
I squint against the hot glares of firelight and look ahead at the city.
And this…
This is a city.
Not a large town, this is exactly the sort of place Bee and I avoided for the entire fucking blackout.
That memory is instilled in me, the instinct to turn around and go the other way, to never go into a city.
There are people surviving in there.
Only to a desperate idiot is that a good thing.
My legs move slower with the city looming ahead, as if my muscles are suddenly made out of lead.
The draw of the tether keeps me from falling behind, and I can only move towards the place I don’t want to go.
The highway turns into a bridge with legs planted in a river, and beyond that is a still-standing horizon of concrete. The signs that are erected along the border of the highway are so thick with snow that I can’t read them, can’t make out the name of the city we’re encroaching on.
This unit isn’t the first to come here.
Half of it has already been destroyed.
I thought we just walked a highway, getting closer to when the road arches into a bridge—but it was once more than that.
I look over the roads, left and right, where the dust of a city borders us.
Debris and rubble and ash, that’s all that remains of a place that was probably built with concrete and steel. But those otherworldly fires eat through fucking anything.
A fate that inches closer to the remaining half of the city, over the bridge.
The closer we get, the more tension prickles over the unit—but it grows beyond what I know.
In the trek that burns my legs and aches my glutes and numbs my feet, there was a soft irritability growing from a patient silence. In all the towns and farms we’ve stopped at, that the warriors have destroyed, that excitement in them never reached a level like this.
Guttural growls rumble down chests all around me, hisses catch at the back of throats, snarls curl in the air.
It’s more than excitement, than tension—it’s the brink of exhilaration and release.
A city like this offers so much more to them than all the little settlements that have been in their path since I joined them.
This energy zaps all around me, nips at my flesh—and alarm bells are ringing through me.
I go rigid in the current of bloodlust; my shoulders set, my legs drag with stiffness, even my breaths start to ache, like they just want to pin somewhere in my chest.
A quiet returns to these predators.
The snarls and hisses dissolve into a hum that feels like static through the unit. Their bootsteps are soft, leathers slinking in the dark stroked with crimson firelight, until we are finally on the bridge.
With the river rushing directly beneath us, and that pulsating anticipation tenses every step closer to the city border, the tug of my torn wrist winces through me.
Courage fails me; I don’t lift the glare to the cold gaze I feel scraping over my face, I aim it at the leathers moulded over a muscular chest.
That tug is the only command he gives, silent and unspoken, before he turns on his heels, turns his back on the rising city, the block buildings, the streets, the windows shimmering with the advancing torchlights.
The cold one moves fast down the unit, his pace brisk and determined all the way to the drop-off point, like I’m a child for minding.
My creche is the captive group, my minders are the guards whose gazes turn on me with our approach.
Something about their eyes, the eyes of the dark fae, unsettles me. The hues are deeper, the colours brighter, like the intense gleam of amber eyes burning from the predatory stare of a black panther.
Those instincts flicker back to me, tense my shoulders as if I can make myself smaller under those stares following my reluctant steps.
The cold warrior doesn’t give a shit about my reluctance. Never does. He still lugs me to the guards every time and thrusts me into the group by the swing of the tether.
This time is no different.
My boots scuff over the road as I stagger into the circle. Before I’ve even righted myself, the look I throw back at the warrior is pleading.
His returning gaze is cold, uncaring, as he threads the rope from his weapons belt, then tosses it to the ground.
I don’t know why I even bother with the plea in my gaze. It won’t work, it never does.
This is the pattern.
The unit makes camp, rests, eats, whether it’s for a short few hours or what feels like a couple of days.
Then the unit moves. Walks and walks and walks, and it feels like it’ll never end, until it does with the rise of the torches, the rise of light over a town, small or large, or just a street in some middle-of-fucking-nowhere settlement.
The fae attack, burn, destroy. They watch the flames eat away at the evidence of human existence. Then they walk again. Make camp.
It goes on and on like that, never changing.
Another thing that doesn’t change is that, before the unit attacks a settlement, the cold fae leaves me with the captives and the guards.
Since I was struck down and my mouth was burst for just trying to get back to the cold fae, the guards all around me haven’t exactly put me at ease.
Not at all.
Not with the gleaming, unnatural stares wandering over me, head to toe, and I just look at the cold one, an unspoken plea untethering between us.
Slowly, he looks me up and down, a flicker of annoyance, before his leathers ripple and he turns his back on me.
My heart sinks.
Disappointment deflates in me like a balloon, and I fall one step back.
I don’t know what else I expect him to do with me while he attacks the city, but I also don’t trust that fucking guard, the one eyeing me up, the one who has spilled my blood once before.
The cold one abandons me here, but only makes it to the car, just a few steps ahead, when the air fractures.
I jerk against that sound that was both like a whip cracking down the unit, but also somehow a blast, an echo…
Everything is suddenly motionless.
A crack in time, a second that freezes.
All I can do is gape ahead at the spray of black blood in the distance, a small spatter in the dim crimson firelight.
A warrior on a steed reels from the strike of a bullet, and it seems to happen slowly, gradually, like time itself has decelerated, and I can make out the spray of ink that erupts from the curve of his neck.
I watch dumbly as his weight sags to the side, like he’s about to fall off the steed, and then I blink—
And I blink into chaos.
The second gunshot barely cracks through the air before my legs are collapsing beneath me, arms throwing over my head, and I’m flattening myself to the road.
I only just hit the ground when the gunfire erupts from the whole city horizon.
We walked right into a fucking ambush.