Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
Finally.
That word thrums in my mind, it hums down my aching bones, stings my shin with relief, and I even huff a breath of thank-fuck-for-that, when the torches are lifted.
Problem is… when the torchlight sprawls out over grass, it takes me a single heartbeat to realise that this is no meadow.
Are these brutes taking the piss?
It’s not like I ever held these warriors in high regard or anything, but even for my low opinion of them, this is a whole new level of messed up.
My brows are pinned up with the shock of it and my mouth curls into some kind of pucker.
Torchlight bounces off the wrought-iron gate arching ahead and illuminates the faded metal letters bolted with rust. But it’s the field of headstones beyond the gate that tells me that I’m being led into a cemetery.
Steeds march through the gates, as though this is just another place, another field, another sprawling area of land to make camp on, not a fucking graveyard.
Leading the way, the crowned female holds her head high. Her fiery hair ropes down her back and brushes over the greyish complexion of her steed.
That disgust sinks further into my features, and I’m sure if any fae glanced at me right now, they might smack the attitude right off me.
But I’m of no interest as the unit narrows to march through the gate and deeper into the cemetery.
No hesitation, no shame in them, fae splinter off-path and walk on the frosty grass.
That isn’t right.
Beneath the grass are the graves, the bodies, the skeletons of the dead. And they trample them.
But of course the fae don’t give a fuck about that. They make the dead.
Maybe I’m just being silly. I’ve done worse than trample a grave. Sometimes our safehouses would have bodies in them, especially when we took cover in hospitals, and hey, I moved them if I needed to and no one else would. I’ve pushed a corpse out of a three-story window—for my own comfort.
So, yeah, I’m overreacting…
It’s just, I’ve always had a thing about cemeteries.
I’m sort of spooked by them, sort of intimidated, always respectful, and a little creeped out. A mix of too many feelings.
Back home, when I was younger, and we used to sneak out to drink with guys too old to be hanging around teenagers, a lot of the time the groups would end up wanting to go to cemeteries.
That’s when I dipped.
Went home, every time.
I would only ever go with my mum.
Once a year, she would take me to the cemetery on the hill with the old, decrepit church, abandoned to ruins. We would even travel back to Wales for this day, every year, and stay with mum’s parents in that eternally cold and rundown cottage.
Same day, every year—the anniversary of my sister’s death.
I don’t remember her.
I was a baby when Mari died.
I don’t remember her, but I remember my mum grieving her—and she did, all the way until her own life ended.
Then it was just me.
And Bee.
I’ve had friends, but never one like her.
There’s only one person in the whole world, before and now, that I cherish as much as Bee.
My mum.
I made sure she was buried in the grave next to Mari. Dad paid for the headstone, a wire transfer to my account, but I organised everything.
I did everything, the headstone, the funeral, the afterparty where I had to pretend to believe people’s performative condolences.
And I did it all with Bee’s hand holding mine.
But that hand is gone—
I feel the loss of it, the emptiness of the cold threaded through my gloved fingers, as I tread into the place of the dead.
It’s hollower than I remember.
A silence so sprawling, so empty, that it carves something out of me and leaves a deep ache.
I’m so distracted by it that, when the cold warrior tugs me off-path, I stumble into his arm.
The terse glare he shoots at me is curt and icy, and I read it just fine. He’s so done with me, he can’t take another moment of my presence lingering around him, that patience thinning and thinning and thinning—
But, same, you know?
I don’t exactly love having him with me all the fucking time. I never like anyone around me all the time. Not even Bee. It’s exhausting.
So the look I throw up at him, and his impatience with me, is risky.
It’s met with blizzards.
That whitish frost.
I’ve learned it means danger.
His lip twitches, begging to twist into a snarl before he takes a bite right out of my throat—but he doesn’t, thankfully, and instead he yanks me towards the headstone beside him.
My limp almost topples me over.
I should lean my weight back onto the headstone, sit myself down on it and stretch out my leg—but I don’t.
Because it’s a fucking headstone.
So I just fold my arms, rain jacket crinkling in the murmur of the sprawling unit, and shift my weight onto my good leg.
The carts are left on the gravel path, but most of the warriors are spreading out onto the grass.
It feels different this time, sort of tense and prickled with anticipation, almost.
There are stacks of people on the carts, tied up, bound to the wooden slats by rope. There are runaways and new faces. And there are wounded warriors on some of the carts too, propped up against sacks of grain and rice.
The doctor fae moves from one to the next, assessing their conditions, seeing if any of them are worse since leaving the bridge.
I wonder how many times in the dark, with torches down, he checked them over. Because he reaches the cart beyond us, further up the path, curiously stacked with canvas bags and clasped chests decorated with dark and golden swirls.
The warrior slumped against the stacks of chests is dead.
The doctor runs his hands down the warrior’s slack face—then turns to the general.
He shakes his head, slight.
Her face is firm, her mouth slightly moving around a murmured order that propels another into step.
Like the cold warrior, this one wears that chain-link armour over his shoulders, so fine and delicate that it could’ve been weaved by spiders. He wears a matching cufflink that clinks with his bootsteps.
The clink of him is faint through the cemetery, all the way down the path—towards the captives.
My frowned stare is interrupted.
Glass and Shark cut through my line of sight.
Glass sports a hell of a bruise on her bloody temple, and Shark, who follows at her heels, fixes his hungry stare back at the guarded humans, the new faces.
I don’t see Rainforest anywhere.
Might be dead.
Could’ve died in the city, like a few other fae did, or he could be on one of the carts—but I don’t see him on any.
I turn back to the captives—just as the fae with the chain-link cuff snatches up a woman…
Erin.
I mean, the one who reminds me of Erin.
Connie’s face is twisted, ugly, and she’s quick to hide it behind her hands as she drops to her knees. But she doesn’t try to stop him, the cufflink fae who throws Erin out of the guarded circle…
And before her boots can even firm on the soil, he’s on her, and I blink, and she’s down.
I blinked—and I missed it.
But I fucking heard it.
The violent snap of her neck.
Now, she’s limp on the grass of a grave… and I’m just standing here, staring, because what the fuck?
Really, what was that?
That hasn’t happened before.
The people who are killed are the runaways or the new ones we come across, the ones in the cities and towns to be flushed out in the flames, or the ones for fun, like when the warriors are drinking too much in big camp, and they start throwing knives for the joy of it.
Now, it’s random captives, one of the better kept women, plucked out of the group and killed—for what?
The fae on the cart died, the doctor told the general, the general gave an order, and all of that ended up with Not-Erin’s neck being snapped?
Something isn’t adding up there.
My frown flickers to the chain-link guard as he stalks back up the path, then I look down at Connie, on her knees, jolting with her quiet sobs.
No one moves Not-Erin’s body.
It’s crumpled out of my sight, behind the gravestones between us, but I can make out part of her hand and boot.
Was it the cheekbone thing?
She was shot in the face back at the city. But what would that have to do with the warrior who died on the cart?
The question is bumped out of my mind—
The cold warrior nudges his marble solid arm into me, then he spits a curt, cold command, “Sit.”
Still, his cheek is turned to me, stroked with a harshly tensed muscle.
I turn my dazed look on the curve of the old gravestone, but my mind is snagged on Not-Erin, on the snap of her spine that I can still feel cracking through the air.
The cold warrior doesn’t give me time to dwell, not before he snatches me by the arm, harsh, and throws his lethal stare down at me.
My heart slingshots through me, and I tense under the flaring ice of his eyes.
The faint pink of his lips twist around the firmly echoed word, “Sit.”
I don’t want to sit on the headstone.
I don’t want to pretend Not-Erin wasn’t just executed for whatever fucking reason.
But I also don’t want to end up like her.
I cringe back from him, shrugging off his grip, before I shuffle back a limped step for the mossy headstone.
I lower myself onto the edge, slow, then lengthen out my leg.
That throbbing in my shin is quick to turn dull.
The cold one turns to face me, the frost of his gaze sweeping the cemetery before he tugs the satchel strap over his head.
He lets the bag drop to the grass—and he’s quick to follow it, to drop into a crouch, and rifle through his perfectly organised things.
Behind him, Glass and Shark loiter. She perches herself on a taller grave post, swinging her legs in the air, while he sinks to the ground and shuts his eyes, like this is the perfect time and place to catch some Z’s.
I drag my gaze along the unit.
My face is still crumpled with a frown, a blend of exhaustion and moodiness and still clinging onto the what the fuck thrumming through me.
But what snares me is that the usual order of camp isn’t happening.