Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
For too long, the strikes of bullets on metal ricochets over the bridge, blended with the screams of humans and the shouts of the fae.
But when the commotion starts to die and the onslaught of gunfire turns into lame spitting, I hear it.
The moans.
The wounded.
Strewn all around the bridge.
My cheek is still pressed to the cold bite of the road, and so the boots marching down the highway cut into my line of sight—followed by the occasional human being dragged to the back of the unit.
Some are captives, runaways and wounded. The fight in them is dwindled, as tattered as their clothes and bodies.
But others, I think, are people from the attack. Those are the ones with more fight in them, flailing and kicking and shouting and clawing as the warriors drag them into slavery.
I watch those boots pass me by, pair after pair, until a set halt on the road—
Right at the edge of the pickup truck.
These boots are angled towards me.
The leather glistens with freshly spilled blood.
If I reach out a trembling hand and touch the crimson smears, the blood might still be warm.
But I don’t reach out.
I watch them glisten, my breath bated, and wait.
A boot shifts back over the snow before, slowly, the fae lowers to one knee.
The breath that escapes me is grated. It mists at my face, almost as cold as the frost icing my cheek.
I don’t know which fae this is, which one has followed my scent or heartbeats to the pickup truck.
Dread sways in my gut, heavy and cold—
Then a hand reaches under the pickup truck, palm-upwards, offered to me.
And I recognise it.
Familiar, pale, glossed in blood, but without those fingernails that are sharp as talons that all the other warriors have. This hand has ordinary fingernails, like mine, only dark, somewhere between grey and black.
The relief swells in me with a choke.
The tears didn’t stop the whole time I’ve been hidden here, but something about just the offer of his hand, seeing the unblemished smooth pallor of it, spills more down my face and wobbles my mouth.
It’s a sudden release from that cold, rigid fear that’s had me in its grip for too long.
Weighted breaths escape me as, slowly, I slide my ungloved hand over the cold road.
The rawness of my fingers is an ugly red against the cold, blotchy and blemished, and it’s a stark contrast to the perfect complexion of the offered hand.
Ungloved, I touch my fingertips to his.
A shock zaps between us.
His hand jerks away, fisted.
I freeze.
Breath pinned, my muscles bolt to my bones, and I blink on the sudden distance between our hands.
I felt it, too, that little shock of skin touching, of static charging—then zapping.
His fist relaxes before he reaches it back under the pickup truck. There’s no shock this time, not as his fingertips touch mine, and he stills, as if waiting for it to come again.
I slide my hand over his, until his grip comes around my wrist, a wrist that is raw and torn by the tether tangled around me.
The warrior stills.
For a beat, he holds my wrist and the pad of his thumb presses into a particularly nasty scrape, one I must’ve got in all the falling and screaming and flailing, or even when I was trying to loosen my backpack.
I don’t remember feeling the cut, the scrape deep enough to bead blood over my freckled skin, but it’s not a dangerous cut. It’s all dried up now, congealed and dotted along the scrapes.
The warrior seems to think the same, the cut is not a concern, because his grip firms before he pulls back his muscled weight.
I come sliding out over the road.
The screech of my rain jacket is grating enough to set my teeth on edge, and it goes on until I’m sprawled out in the open.
I melt into the slush. Just lying here, sprawled, my cheek now resting on a padding of snow.
My breathing eases in the sudden security I feel with the warrior standing over me—the one who stops the other fae from coming after me.
I don’t need to throw people under the bus to survive, not with him here.
The relief of it has me too relaxed on the road before, still kneeling, his grip loosens on my wrist and moves up to my bicep.
A grunt is tugged out of me as, unkindly, he yanks me up off the ground, then shoves me to sit against the truck bed.
The bum of my sweatpants is fast to soak, all the way through to the wet and sticky tights clinging to my backside.
But that feeling is nothing compared to the cold burn of his glacier eyes.
My throat thickens at the sight of him.
This bloody, gruesome vision of ice.
The coldness of his voice is always so fucking distant, so detached, “Where is your glove?”
I shrink back into the hard metal of the truck.
That arctic stare of his is too white, too frosty, and it’s serrated with a hint of blame, like it’s my fault my hand is exposed to the winter… or it’s my fault our skin touched and he got a shock from it.
“Got stuck,” I murmur, short of breath. “Under there.” I look down at the disturbed snow edging under the truck. “I need my—”
Before I can finish, he’s tossing something at me.
The inhaler clatters on my lap.
And just as I’ve touched it, he’s leaning around me and reaching under the truck.
He feels around for the quickest of moments, then draws his hand back—with my glove in his grip.
I suck the medicinal mist out of the inhaler, watching as he tosses the glove at me. But he makes no move to draw away.
He stays kneeling there, right in front of me, the frost of his stare sweeping over me.
“Are you injured?”
He doesn’t ask out of concern. It’s just duty. Any life-threatening wounds I have, it’s a problem for him and his place in the deals he’s made.
Handing back the inhaler, I shake my head. The tickle of a strand of hair wrinkles my nose.
The ice fae considers me for a long moment.
I’m stagnant under that gaze.
The glove is left ignored on my thigh, the inhaler is loose in his grip, and he just looks at me.
I’m tumbled back in time to the road, the trap, and he cornered me against the hood of the car and looked into me.
All around us, fae are returning to the bridge. Some hike up the slopes from the riverbank, others return from the highway, dragging humans along with them, but most return from the city, covered in blood, much like him.
Still, he just stares into my fucking soul, rummages around in me, and I’m braced against the intrusion.
Then, finally, he blinks, a flicker of his lashes that casts shadows down the stark pallor of his cheeks—and a muscle feathers in his jaw.
I look away first.
The moment my gaze lands on my lap, something loosens in my chest, a breath that utters out in a rush, the softening of muscles bound too tight.
But the thickness in my throat doesn’t go anywhere, it sticks, lodged, as I fumble with the glove, forcing my fingers into it.
I flex my hand until the glove is snug, then I just sit here, feeling the scrape of his stare running over me.
I keep my gaze down—and notice something.
A small hole in the centre of his palm, big enough to thread a pencil through.
A perfect bullet hole, as though, up there in the battle, he held up his hand to stop a bullet, or slow it down, or catch it—or just to mentally fuck with the people he obviously took great care in dismembering, the way he fucked with us when he loaded and cocked the shotgun.
But his blood is what snags my attention.
His blood is different.
Not just different from mine, red, normal. But different from the black liquid that spills with the texture of tar from the other wounded fae, the warriors returning with burst mouths and bullet holes in their chests, their shoulders, their legs, their arms, and some even their faces.
All of them are bleeding black tar.
So… why the fuck is his blood white?
I stare at it.
For as long as he studies every inch of me, I stare at that small hole in his hand.
It bleeds freely.
No move to stop it, to wrap it in a cloth, or even to hold it through the thrums of pain. Seems like he hardly feels it at all, like he’s not aware of it.
But I am.
White, thick blood trails down his fingers, then drips onto the road.
A film flashes in my mind.
Alien.
The injured, evil android who spews white fluid, like paint.
Disgust is quick to rattle my shoulders.
The shudder utters from my parted lips before they twist with blatant repulsion.
I lift my darkening gaze up at him, this creature, this beast, and find his wintergreen eyes boring into mine.
I blink—and my breath shudders in the air.
Still, that cold gaze drills into me, as though he can tell my disgust, read it on me.
That’s what it is.
Maybe I just had longer to get used to the black blood, or maybe it’s that the white reminds me of an old horror film I used to watch on tape, or that I forgot about the colour of his blood because the first time I saw it was back on the road when Ramona died, and all the fae were marching by us, but he was shot—
And I can’t fucking believe that my mind got so tangled up and stagnant that I forgot just how unlike the other fae this one is.
I get the unsettling feeling swaying in my gut, he is worse.
A gasp cuts through my lips as he moves for me, and he moves like a blizzard in a windy storm.
Fast, faster than I can see, his face is suddenly so close to mine that I can feel the iciness of his breath on my cheekbone.
I cringe into the edge of the truck, braced for an attack, for the end of the borrowed time I’m living on. But the graze of his breath is curt before he’s tugging away from me… and in his fist is a torn strap of my backpack.
The midsection belt is ripped right down the fabric.
So that’s what got caught.
I only just think it when he flings the strap at me.
My hands flail for it, but it still strikes me right on the chest like a whip.
Before I can even think about throwing a dark look at him, before the instinct can even set in, he’s snatching me by the arm, fingers digging into my flesh and creaking against the bone—
I stagger to my feet, stumbling into his chest.
He shoves me away from him.
A grunt jolts me as my spine hits the door of the pickup truck.
His lashes lower over his piercing stare.
The twitch of his mouth gives away his annoyance—maybe his disgust at how close I got—before he drops his gaze to my lifted boot.
It’s only now that my weight slammed down on it, now that the bone is screaming behind my flesh that I’m reminded of the man trampling my shin.
The lift of warrior’s icy stare chills me. But what shrinks me harder against the door of the truck, what curves my shoulders and silences me is his growl—
“You lied.”