Chapter 14 #2
“Get off!” My shriek comes before the urgency starts to squirm my legs, as though I can free myself before he’s on us. “Get off, get off—”
The man doesn’t move because I command it in my own panic to get away, he moves for himself. I know that the moment he staggers to his feet and fucking tramples me.
The pain is an instant bolt of splintering ice the moment his damp sneaker comes crashing down on my shin.
The strangled scream rips out of me, wild.
My legs thrash and kick out, the cotton of my sweatpants tugging out from under his flattened sole.
But I’m a fruit fly to him, a mild bother in the face of a panther prowling closer.
He kicks into a run—and it lasts just one step before the guard is on him.
The man hits the ground with a grunt. His fall is face-down, and in a mere blink, blood starts to melt the snow around his head.
The faintest of moans rinses him.
My heart is slingshotting through me, over and over. It pulses in my head, violent, as the heels of my boots dig into the road.
I kick myself back, until my spine is pressing against something hard and cold. The metal side of a pickup truck.
I bolt in place.
But my heart hammers, wild and untethered, in my chest. It strikes my throat, cutting off my uttered moans of pure, icy terror—and I can only watch as the guard comes down on the man.
His hand slams into the nape of his neck.
A cry rips through me.
My hands slap to my face, muffling my shouts, but my gloved fingertips only brush my under-eyes, and so I see everything.
I see the fae’s strength crush the bone of the man’s spine; sharp, black fingernails cutting into his flesh until it’s mush; and I watch, horrified, as the fae literally rips out the spine.
Blood splatters.
It splashes onto my hidden face, chunks of blood and muscle and flesh slapping over my gloves.
Then the guard, hunched over the corpse, lifts his buttery gaze to me…
My cry juts into a wretched groan.
The bile is rising in me, twisting my gut.
My mouth moves with garbled words, muffled by my hands.
Eyes on me, the fae rises.
My watery gaze follows him up and up, until he’s a tower of dark threats looming over me.
The breath that utters from me is nothing short of cowardly, like the tears spilling down my face.
He takes a step towards to me, and I cringe into the pickup truck.
The hard, sheeted metal digs into my spine, crushes into the back of my head. My boots worm over the road, pushing snow in small piles away from me, but I can’t force myself back any further.
I’m trapped in his slow advance.
His bootfalls sink into the slush of the human, the spatter that slicks the melting snow, the blood pouring too freely.
My hands lower from my face, slow, trembling, like the wobble of my wet lips, “I-I-I’m—”
My teary gaze finds a dart of movement over the other side of the bridge. My wide eyes latch onto it, the shadow dashing down the length of the metal barrier.
A man, a captive, running.
Hope ignites in my fluttering chest.
His gaze swerves here and there, panicked eyes searching for any fae who might be hunting him, noticing him, as he makes a break for it—and he runs for the slope down the side of the bridge, the one that should take him to the riverbank, the same one I was headed for.
The idea snaps in my head, and maybe it’s one I should be ashamed of, but I honestly don’t fucking care, and before I can think more than a heartbeat on it, my hand shoots out.
On instinct, my finger points with stiffened determination, absolute sacrifice, and my words come stronger:
“He’s running! Over there! Look—he’s getting away!”
The guard’s cheek turns to me.
The buttery silk of his eyes flickers in the dim light, the battle of flames and darkness thrashing all around us.
I don’t watch the fires engulf cars or bodies, torches fallen at angles leaning on bonnets and motorcycles.
I watch the guard.
His stare locks onto the runaway—the one who disappears into a pocket of darkness, beyond my sight, where the firelight doesn’t reach, and in the moment of a strangled heartbeat, the guard is bolting after him.
The snow kicks up behind him before he’s gone, a dusting that sprays over my quivering legs, and I stare at the bloody spot where his boots were planted.
Boot prints, settled into the bloody snow that’s turned into a pinkish slush, just an inch from the toes of my own shoes.
It takes a moment for it to click in my mind. The guard is gone… but the remains of his threat linger in me, those icy prickles cascading down my insides.
I don’t know what that guard meant to do with me, what fate he chose for me, despite that I’m under the guardship of the cold one, but I know it wasn’t good.
I was that close, an inch close, to something really fucked up.
The breath I loosen is guttural.
It’s fast followed by a retch.
My hands find my chest, the ribs that rattle with the racing heartbeats battering against them.
I hold, firm, and let the harsh jolts rinse through me. It’s not a shudder that has me in its grip, but a violent jerk that batters me every other second.
It comes with another retch, one that reaches all the way down to my cramped stomach.
I breathe through the stirs of nausea and the jutting of my gasps, in through the nostrils, out through my trembling lips.
The bile stirring in me has reached my throat.
I swallow back the singe and, tears clinging to my lashes, twist around to look ahead.
And I see destruction.
The bridge melts into the city, but I can hardly make out the snowy road through the smoke billowing up from the flames. Black, thick smog that clouds ahead, but it hasn’t reached all the way up the high-rises yet—
And so I see them.
Like a swarm of locusts, the warriors are scaling the high-rises, a race to the windows where the gunfire is spitting from.
But not all fae are up there, chasing down the humans who waited for us, who waited until the unit was trapped on the bridge before they opened fire.
Some warriors have stayed on the bridge. Those fae are darting all around me.
So many captives have made a break for it.
I squint down at the end of the unit, where the cold one discarded me—and now, just a handful of people remain. Kneeling on the snow, huddled together, trembling like leaves in a blizzard. But more than a dozen, gone.
They are still too out in the open, too exposed. So the thought of rejoining them isn’t one that crosses my mind for more than a split second.
I just need to hide out from the gunfire and wait for the cold warrior to return.
This pickup truck is my best option.
There’s no way I’ll make it to the riverbank, or off the bridge, or into the shield of the rubble and debris flanking the road. Not without getting caught by a bullet or a fae.
I take the shelter closest to me.
I roll to flatten myself on my front.
Snow pushes against my cheek, instantly chilling me. I shimmy my way under the truck, until I’m flat on my front, shielded by the metal—and I snag.
My backpack hooks on something, something in the mechanical guts of the pickup truck.
Whatever it is, it catches too tightly and stops me from worming myself all the way under.
I’m still too exposed.
I reach around my trembling hand for the bag.
The horrid screech of my gloves comes, scraping over something like torn metal, before my fingers latch onto the edge of my backpack.
I tug—and tug and tug.
But it doesn’t come free. Doesn’t loosen.
I fumble for the strap around my shoulder.
My breaths are crushed, subdued in the crammed space, but I can’t get my fucking backpack off.
It’s stuck on something—the something that feels, against my gloved fingers, like loose bolts and undone screws, like someone has been here already and looted parts from the truck and didn’t fix it back up once they were done.
Now I’m caught in it, stuck with my cheek smooshed against the frost.
A grunt is burrowed in my chest, suffocated, as I try to tug my hand back to the ground.
My elbow juts, my shoulder aches, but the edge of my glove is snagged on something, one of those screws, a bolt that is loose.
Fucking, fuck, fuck!
This isn’t good.
This really isn’t good.
The panic is building in me.
It’s sinking into my head, spinning, and it’s times like these I really need Bee.
Maybe we’ve been friends too long, and I’ve become too dependent on her, the way I used to depend on my mum, but fucking hell I need her right now.
I know what she would tell me.
‘Breathe.’
‘Just breathe.’
So I that’s what I do.
My nostrils flare around my restricted inhale, suffocated by the sandwiching of the truck, the road and the pressure of my backpack.
Still, I force the breaths through me before I move onto step two. It comes to my mind with Bee’s familiar voice.
‘Now get your hand out of the glove.’
If I could nod my head in this crammed space, I would. Instead, I just start the long process of shimmying my hand out of the glove—until my fingers finally slip free.
My bare hand smacks down on the cold road, right at my cheek.
‘That’s good,’ her voice returns. ‘Now wait. He will come back. just slide your legs and your hand undercover—and wait.’
My breaths shudder through me, too chopped, too shallow. I’m rigid against the snow, the cold, the icy panic that’s too solid in me.
But I listen to her, the figment of my imagination that I grip onto with bullet spitting all around me and the boots of fae smacking down on the road, racing all over the bridge.
I tuck myself under the truck just that bit more, but with the snagging of the backpack, it’s no more than an inch.
I wait.