- EIGHTEEN
Jasper
It was complete and utter fucking chaos for almost an hour. See, the funny thing about work camps is, the guards get a little too comfortable with their power. When Cece let the women go and the women let the men free, yeah, they weren't just itching to leave. They were thirsting for blood.
And fuck if they didn't spill a whole goddamn river of it.
It was brutal, vicious, horrific. The screams were enough to deafen you, blood-curdling, inhuman screams as guards were literally clawed, bit, and torn limb from limb.
By the time the screams died and the silence fell, every man or woman still capable of standing, stood at once.
Each and every one of us literally dripping with blood.
Some of the men and women had it dripping from their mouths like fucking vampires.
And as sick as that was, I understood that each and every last one of the Dark fae guards had whatever they got coming to them.
"Jasp," Doyle's voice called to me, flooding me with relief. I hadn't had eyes on him in at least half an hour.
"Jade?" I asked immediately, spine straightening.
"Gone. I saw Onyx tear out of here like his tail was on fire, Jade clinging to his back. They'd be at Baba Yaga's by now."
"Thank fuck," I said, taking a deep breath, the first I had been able to since I first found out Jade was missing.
"Jasp... where's Cece?"
The breath got caught in my lungs, burning. "What?" I asked, looking around a little frantically, taking in the dead and dying bodies around us, men and women and guards, heart in my throat that one of them could be her. "She wasn't with Jade and Onyx?"
"No. I didn't see her anywhere."
"The girl in the ripped dress?" a woman's voice asked and I looked over to see she was one of the ones with the horror-movie bloody mouths.
"Yes."
"She came out a minute after the girl and the dog. But..."
"But what? Did a guard get to her?" I asked, my throat constricting at the idea.
She shook her head. "No. It was weird. It wasn't guards and I've never seen them here before..."
"Who was it?" I snapped, cursing myself when she shrank away from the sound, trying to remind myself that she had been brutalized for God-knew how long and didn't need my anger.
"Redcaps," she said with a head shake.
"Redcaps? Here?" I asked, looking over at Doyle who looked equally confused.
"They don't leave the Dark Court," Doyle said to the girl.
"I know what a redcap is," she snapped, shaking her head at him like he was dense.
"They were redcaps and they were swarming toward her, chanting some crazy shit like they do.
Then she just... hauled it up over the fence.
A couple of them followed her, a couple went to wait for her on the outside.
She jumped and fell. I think she hurt herself because she was limping as she ran with some weird glowing stone in her hands. "
"Did they catch her?" I asked, jaw clenched tight.
"Not that I could see but they broke into the woods and I couldn't see her anymore. She saved us," she said a little sadly. "I hope she got out."
I had to do more than hope.
I had to find her.
Before even communicating my plan with Doyle, I took off.
I looked and looked and fucking... looked. For six goddamn days. In The Green and out. She was nowhere.
Eventually, on the seventh day, I made my way back toward Baba Yaga's, my heart a shriveled thing in my chest.
"Jesus," Doyle said, greeting me. I wasn't surprised to find him sitting outside Baba Yaga's property line.
I figured that was exactly where he would go when he left the camps- right to Jade.
"You haven't washed that blood off?" he asked and I looked down to still see it dried all up and down my arms, legs, clothes, everything. I looked like a fucking serial killer.
"I can't find her," I admitted, falling down onto the ground beside him, head in my hands. "If the fucking redcaps got her..."
"Jasper?" Jade's voice called, a little tentatively, not the usual gushing, excited greeting she usually gave me.
I looked up to see her in one of the drab brown dresses all of Baba Yaga's women wore, our biological mother's arm around her waist. She was Jade, but she wasn't. There was a sadness there that had never existed before, not even a trace of it.
There were bruises in various states of healing on her arms and ankles, her face.
Her hair was cut short. Her hands were cut and calloused.
The feeling then was a strange mix of relief, regret, and fear. Relief, because she was safe. Regret, because I didn't get her sooner. And fear that she would never be the same Jade again, happy, loving, open, unafraid.
That thought was another knife to the gut, a sensation I was getting way too fucking used to.
"Hey sis," I said, giving her the best smile I could muster.
"I met Mom," she said with a confused little head shake.
"Yeah, ain't that some shit?" I asked, snorting a little.
"Jade," Doyle called, his voice soft and her eyes found his automatically. He held out a hand and she shuffled away from our mother and over the protective border, getting down on the ground and folding herself into Doyle's arms, her head buried in his neck.
Knife. Gut.
I was fucking gutted.
"Take a walk with me," Alex, our mother, as odd as that still was to think, suggested, moving across the border and walking away, leaving me to follow behind.
I made sure we were outside of earshot before speaking to her back. "Tell me she's going to be okay."
Alex stopped, exhaling hard as she turned.
"She'll be okay. Eventually. I think we both know what happened to her in that camp, Jasper," she said and I fought back the bile that rose in my throat.
"And I think we also know that that is bad enough to happen to a strong woman.
Jade was sweet, soft, trusting, loving. This just all...
" she waved a hand, not able to find the words.
I understood that feeling. "That man, though," she said, her eyes a little wet.
"Doyle?"
"That man," she said, nodding hard. "That is a good man, Jasper.
He's been here since right after she showed up on that barguest. He left once.
Once. Right after I told him what happened to her.
He turned a shade of green I have never seen before and told me he would be back by morning.
He was back by morning and hasn't left since.
Jade has needed him so much, needed someone familiar, needed the touch of a man who didn't want to hurt her for a change. "
"Where did he go?" I asked, thinking he went back to make sure all the fucks at the camp were good and dead.
"Apparently he and your sister were deeply in love until his... urges got the better of him," she said, telling me things I already knew. "Well, he went to see a Dark witch."
I felt dread pool in my stomach. "What the fuck did she do?"
"She ripped every last shred of nymph out of him. I don't think I need to tell you what that must have felt like."
Like death. Worse. Worse than death. He would have been in the kind of agony that would kill a lesser man.
"So he's just, what, now?"
"He's still fae. His father was something Light. But who knows what." She paused, taking a deep breath. "He did that for her."
I nodded. "He'd do anything for her."
"She deserves that. Especially now," Alex said.
"What about you? Where is Celestine?" At my look that I was sure betrayed the depth of anger, guilt, sadness, and confusion I felt swirling inside, she sighed.
"Jade is fine here. She has people who love her here.
Doyle, especially. And she has women here who understand what she has been through.
She will heal here. Slowly but surely. You need to come and see her, but you need to find your girl too, Jasper.
You need to do what it takes to make sure she's okay too. "
"I've looked..." I said, waving a hand out helplessly.
"Look. Harder." Each word was a sentence. Her tone was steel. It was right then that I saw, despite all her own heartbreak and bitterness, she was still a hopeless romantic. "Bathe," she added with a small smile. "Definitely bathe first. Then look harder."
So that was what I did.
I bathed.
I visited Jade.
I searched through the Light realm. I fucking tore through the Dark. I skirted every human town The Green touched.
I looked for months.
It was goddamn mother fucking months of no leads, no hope, no nothing.
Finally, I went back to Jade's apartment for the third time.
That's when I saw the jasper and I knew that she wasn't being tortured in a redcap dungeon. She had found her way out of the Dark. She had gotten herself back to her town and set herself up, leaving me breadcrumbs.
I almost wanted to laugh when I followed them all the way to a train yard, right to an old iron train that being anywhere near was giving me a wicked fucking migraine.
But all that mattered was I found her.
I found her and she was okay. She was alive. She wasn't hurt.
She was just waiting for me to find her.
But when I pulled that door open and saw her, I decided maybe I had been too quick to think she was okay.
Because she wasn't okay.
She was thin, thin to the point of almost being skeletal. Her hair was less thick. Her eyes were haunted, red, swollen from lack of sleep. She had scars I had never seen before and some kind of invisible weight pressing down on her shoulders, making her slump.
Fuck.
--
Cece
"Jasper?" I heard the disbelief in my own tone, like maybe the isolation was making me see things that weren't there, like maybe there was some kind of fae magic at work.
Anything, anything but a real life, flesh and blood Jasper in my doorway calling me honey with sad eyes when I had been mourning his death for weeks.
"Interesting little place you have here."
"Did they see you?" I asked, charging toward the window and peeking out of the the tiny spots I kept clean to look through.
"Did who see me, Cece?"
"The redcaps," I said, small-eying him.