Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Against the soft material of my sweatpants, the headstone is slick with cold, with ice, with frosty air—but not snow.
The cold is eating at me. All the way to my muscles, my bones, my fucking cartilage, the sort of chill that takes an hour in a hot bath to soothe.
I welcome it.
There’s pain in the frost reaching my flesh, nipping and scratching at me.
It doesn’t distract me from the screams still ringing in my ears, or the blood I can taste in the air over the familiar burning wood of the campfires, or the images etched into the insides of my eyelids.
But it grounds me, keeps me rooted in some scrap of sanity, while I fight off the violence of my mind.
I don’t think I can move, even if he dragged me, and not just because of my aching shin. It’s that the tortures are seared into my mind.
I close my eyes—and I see it.
The detail of it.
My eyes spring back open.
‘Watch.’
I did.
I wish I didn’t.
But if I didn’t, who knows what would have happened to me?
All the fae watched, stood on ceremony to witness it all. The humans, too. So if I had closed my eyes, or turned my cheek, or hid behind my hands, maybe that would’ve put me outside of the warrior’s protection.
Would it have been such a disregard of the rules that it would have landed me at the mercy of the general?
The mere thought of it burns my mouth with bile. The grimace of nausea tightens my face.
Captives are dragging the corpses away, camp is being made, and the general’s speech in her garbled language has ended.
But it doesn’t feel over.
The bile burns in my throat as, with a faint moan, I drop my head into my hands.
All around, the camp is settling. I don’t watch them, but I can’t tune them out, so their faint murmurs and echoed laughs grate down me like spidery, metal claws.
How relaxed and unbothered they must look, sprawling out over the grass, perching themselves on headstones, or like the fucker at my boots, digging through their bags.
I dig my fingernails into my scalp, hard enough to dent crescent shapes into my skin, and I stare down at him through the mists of my cold breaths.
Kneeling at his satchel, he spreads a balm onto his wounded hand, a greyish sort of oil. The scent of root beer wafts up from the small jar opened on the grass right at the toe of my boot.
The pad of his thumb is pressed into his palm at the edge of the bullet wound, and he circles it, around and around and around, and with each circling, the hole just seems to get that bit smaller.
A frown digs into my face.
The flesh…
His flesh…
It stretches like hot caramel from one end of the wound to the other, like it’s regrowing or knitting shut.
His thumb still goes around and around and around—until the wound closes over.
It isn’t completely healed. It’s raw and red, stretched and scraped, but… it’s not a hole anymore.
My frown crumples to an ugly sneer—and that is quickly wiped free from my face the moment his hands move out of my line of sight, and the tether is tugged against my wrist.
I drop my hands with a huff.
And ice strikes me.
His gaze is nothing less than that. But he holds my stare for only a moment before he looks at the rope tied around my wrist—where my flesh is torn and scraped.
He considers it for a long moment.
I almost think he’s going to use the balm on me, on my wounds. But before the thought can take root, he’s grabbing the jar and screwing on the lid.
He tosses it into the satchel, then pushes up to stand.
For a moment, he looks down at me, lettuce eyes returned to that soft barely-there green hue. Then, he’s tossing the tether aside.
A slender hand catches it.
I turn a dark look on Glass’s fist, firm around my rope, and in that heartbeat, the cold warrior has grabbed his satchel from the ground and stalked off.
She doesn’t look at me.
Neither does Shark.
Not once in the time it takes a quivering captive to come and build the fire on the soil, and Shark kicks down headstones to make space around it, do they acknowledge me.
Glass just holds onto my rope like a leash.
I stay on the headstone I’ve sat on since the slaughters, the one burned into my mind.
The residue of fear is cold in my chest, like brewing pneumonia, and I rub the ache as though it’ll do anything. Spoiler, it doesn’t.
I would take some air from the inhaler if the cold one was around, but he’s gone, vanished beyond the camp, into the darkness. And even then, it would be a waste of the little that’s left.
No, what I would do if I could is smoke a cigarette, throw back too many shots, maybe take something to really fuck my mind up.
But what I need is dissociation.
I need my mind to separate from my body, to flitter away, out of reach, and for me to exist in slow autopilot mode.
It’s strange that it hasn’t happened already.
I don’t do well under pressure, never have, and I sure as fuck don’t cope with these kinds of horrors. So why the hell am I still here?
Not here, in this unit, or here in this world…
Here in my mind, in my soul, all my awareness and cognition intact.
For the first time in my whole life, as far back as I can remember at least, shit has really hit the fan—
And I’m still here.