Chapter 43 A Slow Breaking
A Slow Breaking
MARIGOLD
So much death.
I was sick with it. Haunted by the broken bodies, the bloodied, lifeless forms all across the hilltop. People bent at wrong angles. Men and women and children with the life crushed out of them. And so much blood…
I’d never seen a dead body before. Even the handful of funerals I’d attended in my life had been closed casket. And anyway, this was…different. Horrific in a way I’d never even fathomed before. And so viscerally real, a nightmare made flesh before my eyes—
I was nauseated. I would have been sick if there’d been anything left in my stomach. I tried to help—tried to shift debris out of the way, pull people from the wreckage, but for the most part, I wasn’t strong enough to lift much.
My uselessness just made everything worse.
Eventually, Ring-Around-the-Hill’s healers set up a tent on a cleared area of the hilltop as a sort of triage station.
I made myself busy by helping the injured—those who didn’t need to be carried, anyway—to the tent.
It was a small thing, and less than I wanted to do, but it kept me busy.
Kept me from looking too closely at all the carnage around me.
Or listening too closely to the screams and wails that continued even now.
Or thinking about Octavian, Radven, and Alastor, facing down the person responsible for all of this. If they didn’t have access to their full abilities, then how could they ever hope to stop someone so powerful?
I jumped at every sudden noise, bracing myself for yet another attack. But none came.
But the brothers didn’t return, either.
The little boy I’d rescued stuck to my side through it all, refusing to let go of my skirts.
He hadn’t spoken at all, except to tell me his name—Jex—when I asked, in a whisper so small I wasn’t even sure I’d heard him correctly.
He refused to answer any questions about his family—his mother, or anyone else who might be looking for him.
I didn’t mention his father at all. And I kept him far away from the side of the Hill where he’d fallen.
I’d just passed a woman with a broken arm over to one of the healers when someone appeared at my elbow.
“Hey. Goldie.” Even Ary was rundown, her cheerfulness lost behind a layer of exhaustion and grief. I couldn’t decide whether the streaks on her cheeks were grime or dried tears, and I didn’t ask. “Talon sent me to take you back to the nest.”
I didn’t have to look past her shoulder to know how little progress we’d made. How many bodies still lay buried, how many injured still cried out for help. There was still destruction everywhere, still people sobbing in pain and fear, still so many families looking for their loved ones—
“Talon has organized several teams of people,” Ary said, as if she understood my resistance. “He has most of them hunting for remaining survivors. He wants us to rest up so we can help with the other cleanup in the morning.”
I nodded, nauseated and exhausted and—a little numb.
“Come on,” she said. “You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“But I’ve hardly done anythi—aargh!” I recoiled in pain as she grabbed my arm.
On my other side, the boy whimpered and buried his face in my skirt.
“What’s going on? I hardly touched you.” Ary frowned, her eyebrows drawing together. “Were you hurt, too? Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“No, no, I wasn’t hurt,” I assured her. I didn’t tell her that her sudden touch had triggered a violent shiver through my skin, that since the attack that shiver had been trembling inside me, rising and falling in waves, as if I were absorbing the remains of whatever essence Mordren—or whoever was responsible for this—had blasted at us.
The pearls around my wrist probably saved me from the worst of it—for the most part, the shiver was just an incessant buzz in my body, distracting and uncomfortable but not painful—but every once in a while, a little surge would hit me, or someone would touch me suddenly, and that buzz turned into a jolt.
Like I’d stuck a fork into a light socket.
I need to get rid of this, I thought. Find some way to eject all this essence before it built into something completely unbearable.
As it was, I was starting to feel a little like I’d felt before the one and only panic attack of my life—jittery, and off, and one small trigger away from falling apart.
Ary could clearly tell I wasn’t telling her the full truth, but she didn’t push it. She probably just assumed that I wasn’t dealing with the present situation very well—which was also plenty true.
“Well, come on then,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed for a little while.” She tilted her head, eyeing the boy. “Is he…?”
“His name is Jex,” I told her. And then, softly, “We don’t know where Jex’s family is right now, so I’ve been letting him stay with me.”
She nodded. “Talon will find them.” She stepped in front of me, crouching down so she was at eye-level with him. “Don’t worry, Jex. You’re safe with us in the meantime. Do you want to come back to our home for a little while? Get some food and some sleep while we look for them?”
The boy glanced up at me with his big, innocent eyes, almost as if he was silently asking for my approval. I’d never had anyone look to me as any sort of authority figure before, so I hesitated a moment before saying, “You should come with us. Of course.”
And that was all it took.
Somehow the three of us made it beneath the Hill to the crew’s lodgings without any of us collapsing from exhaustion. I told Jex he could sit on my bed while we found another mattress for him, but the moment he hit the blankets, he passed out, collapsing into what I prayed would be pleasant dreams.
“It’s all right,” I told Ary. “There’s plenty of room in the bed for me, too. Go get some sleep.”
She didn’t need to be told twice.
And I curled up next to Jex, brushing his dark hair out of his eyes before pulling a blanket up over us both.
But despite my exhaustion, sleep wouldn’t come.
Every time I closed my eyes, I just saw those dead, broken bodies. Heard the screaming and the weeping.
And the shiver inside me was relentless. I felt jittery. Like I’d just had half a dozen espressos. I couldn’t lie still.
How do I get rid of this? I fingered the pearls on my wrist, but I wasn’t going to risk taking them off and releasing some sort of uncontrolled blast.
Eventually, the shaking was so unbearable that I climbed out of bed. I needed to move. To walk it off, or…I didn’t know. Just do something.
I paced back and forth across the small room, shaking out my hands in front of me.
I made ten laps, twenty, fifty…but it didn’t work.
Nothing worked. The shiver still rose and fell in waves, rarely reaching true pain but remaining consistently, agonizingly uncomfortable.
Like the handful of times I’d experienced restless leg syndrome—only this was throughout my entire body.
I didn’t know how much longer I could bear it.
And just when I was about to scream with the relentless agony of it all, I heard familiar voices in the corridor outside.
The brothers.
I raced to the door and threw it open.
“If either of you even consider—” Octavian’s rumble cut off the moment his eyes landed on me.
Something’s wrong. I knew it the moment I looked at them. I could see it in their eyes, their stances…
My gaze raked over them—Octavian, Radven, Alastor—searching for injuries, for some physical indication of what had gone wrong, but they were all in one piece. Disheveled and bruised and even a little bloodied in places, but otherwise alive and whole.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did you find him? Did you…” I couldn’t even bring myself to utter the word kill, not after all the death I’d seen tonight.
“We found Mordren,” Radven said.
“We should have killed him.” Octavian was practically growling. “We should have cut the bastard down before he even had a chance to open his mouth.” And I saw it, then, brief though it was—the glare he shot his brothers. Like he was mad at them for some reason.
“What happened?” I pressed again.
“Mordren has gone to make trouble elsewhere,” Radven said. “It’s out of our hands now.”
“He just…left?”
A glance passed between the brothers. Even now, with this weird…tension between them, there was still a unity there.
But when Octavian twisted towards me again, I could see the anger still raging beneath his skin. And once again I wondered if that beast inside him was truly gone after all.
“Mordren offered us a deal,” he said, his voice a low, lethal earthquake. “But none of us is going to take it.”
“Precisely,” Radven agreed with a shrug. “So now we have to decide what our next move will be.”
I glanced at Alastor, who was watching his brothers like an older sibling who expected a fight to break out any moment. I noticed the furrow in his brow got deeper when it came to Octavian.
“You guys aren’t telling me something,” I said.
Before any of them could answer me, though, there were footsteps at the end of the corridor.
It was Talon. Despite the sheer exhaustion he must have been feeling—both physically and mentally—he looked nearly as chipper as the first time I’d seen him, just a bit worn around the edges.
A couple of his birds were with him, one on each shoulder, and they looked a little worse for wear themselves.
Talon’s kohl-rimmed eyes went to Octavian first, then his brothers, then finally to me, where I stood fidgeting at the bedroom door.
“I told Ary to make sure you got to bed,” he told me.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“You’re shaking,” he commented, his eyes flicking down to my fidgeting fingers.
The brothers all twisted to look at me, and I felt a flush rise to my cheeks beneath their scrutinizing gazes. I knew I needed to tell them what was going on with the shiver, but I didn’t want to say too much with Talon here.
“It’s… Stress has a tendency of building up,” I said. “And sometimes it has nowhere to go.”
I hoped that was obvious enough, and Radven gave me an almost-imperceptible nod to show he understood. Octavian, meanwhile, was looking a bit stricken, as if he was upset he hadn’t noticed my condition earlier.
Not that either of them could do anything.
“Ivo has some herbs that should help you relax and sleep,” Talon said. “I’ll have him bring them by your room.”
I had a feeling I was being dismissed.
I looked to the brothers, hoping we could continue our earlier conversation, but Octavian—who’d calmed down quite a bit since Talon’s appearance—said, “Go lie down. I’ll come by and check on you as soon as I can.”
Well, that was clear enough. I wasn’t going to get any more answers out of these guys. Not right now, anyway.
Obediently, I stepped back into the room, shutting the door behind me. But I stayed right next to it, ear pressed close so I could hear what they were discussing outside.
“No need to update me on the situation,” Talon said. “My little ones told me everything.”
“And I’m sure you have plenty of thoughts on the matter,” Radven said, with an exasperated edge to his voice. “But may I suggest we move somewhere more private before you regale us with your opinions?”
“Whatever you wish, of course.” I could hear the teasing smile in Talon’s voice, as if he were equal parts amused and annoyed by the other man’s dislike of him.
And then four sets of footsteps retreated down the corridor, apparently with little sympathy for curious eavesdroppers.
Why can’t anyone ever just tell me what the hell is going on?
I was too restless to lie down, and there was still no way I was ever going to fall asleep—even if I wanted to risk the nightmares I was sure I’d find.
I can’t take this anymore. I had so little control over anything here—and I was tired of being in the dark. Tired of things happening to me, instead of the other way around.
Tonight—with all the death around me, and my sheer helplessness in the face of it all—was a wakeup call. I couldn’t just put blinders on and pretend this was a game, or a real-life Ren Faire. The truth would always catch up with me.
Which meant actually learning the truth, once and for all.
So I did what any restless, desperate girl would choose to do in this situation. After a quick glance at Jex—who was still slumbering soundly on the bed—I quietly slipped out of the room, following them.