Chapter 12
TWELVE
BEE
Of all the safehouses we’ve taken shelter in over the months, none have been as quiet as this one. But each time we’ve sourced safehouses, made them our temporary campsites, not homes, never homes, there hasn’t been so few of us.
We arrived in quarantine with five.
Lost Louise and Ruby there. Gained Emily.
Now, Ramona is gone, too.
The sight of her gaping throat is seared into the grooves of my brain.
I squeeze my eyelids, tight, as though it’ll banish the imprint from my mind.
It won’t.
That will stay with me for the rest of my life.
And all the time she was alive, no throat, just simultaneously bleeding out and suffocating, I couldn’t help her.
Couldn’t do anything. Not even reach out and hold her hand.
It’s not that the warrior would have skewered me for it. It’s that, to let go of Tesni for even a moment, and risking her instincts taking over to run or scream or do something stupid like Ramona did, means I would be without her now.
Ramona is proof of instincts overruling reason.
Those warriors were just passing by, filing down the road, the occasional curious glance at us, but no break in formation.
All she had to do was wait it out, like the rest of us. Emily stayed hidden in the backseat of the car. Tess and I were out in the open, huddled together, waiting.
That’s all Ramona needed to do stay alive.
Instead, a moth to a glimmer in a blackout, a glimmer of light that danced over her face, and she let her terror reach too high, her anxieties twist her mind, and once that pure, unfiltered panic really struck her, she attacked.
In Ramona’s mind, it would have been a reaction, a move of self-defence. The moth was an attack. Her mind worked against her, and the price was her life.
Now, there are just three of us in this musty apartment.
I swear the windows haven’t been opened since the blackout struck.
Tesni slipped into the bathroom a good twenty minutes ago, and the opening door wafted in the stink of mould and mildew to the living room.
That door is closed now.
It has been since she disappeared into the bathroom, but the stench lingers, and it faintly reminds me of the smell I would wear after I swam in the lake near my home as a child, and Mother would chide me for not bathing the moment I returned home.
I shut the thought out.
Can’t afford my mind to linger on memories.
Tucked up on an old leather armchair, I bury my mouth and nose into the crook of my elbow.
Emily is unbothered by the smell.
Since we got here an hour ago, she hasn’t moved. Still there, on the rug, in the foetal position. Every so often, her lashes flutter, or her breath hitches with suppressed sobs, and so I know she’s awake.
She maybe blames herself.
It was her hand on the torch beam, her fractured light, that stretched over Ramona’s face—and that drew in a moth lost in the dark.
I don’t even know how it happened, how the light escaped Emily’s firm grip, if she was shifting further back into the car and that slipped her hand or spread her fingers.
She must be wallowing in it now, mulling over and over.
I should comfort her, maybe. But say what?
Everything I need to say is fucking insane to the human ear, and Tesni is my priority.
It’s Tesni who needs to learn the truth.
Maybe I stay tucked on the armchair to avoid it—the moment that niggles at my mind, over and over, tell her, tell her, tell her.
Easier to think than to do.
I mean, how exactly do I go about telling my bestie of a decade that I’m not like her, that… well, I’m not human.
This could go any way, in any direction.
She might boot off, throw shit, shout, scream. She might cry, sob, wail.
But the worst reaction from Tesni is silence.
That’s what it looks like from the outside. To those who don’t know her, she is pensive, cold, uncaring.
But I know better.
Those times she suffers like that, detaches from herself, she’s practically comatose—and I worry about her in those moments.
If I could avoid telling her this, the truth, then I would. I have avoided it. Five months of this blackout and not once have I shared what I know.
But then they came.
The dokkalves. Dark fae.
Their warriors, their armies.
Not like I can hide the truth much longer.
She’s figuring it out for herself now, anyway.
I have to get ahead of this.
Still, my muscles are weighing me down, sagged and unwilling, as I slowly unfurl myself from the armchair.
The urge to twist around and make for the kitchen is strong. It’s the gargle in my gut, an acidic hungering for food, a distraction and delay from what I need to do.
I drag myself towards the bathroom door—and possibly my own funeral.
Emily doesn’t stir as my boots thud softly over the rug. Comatose, basically, huddled there, arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the scuffed leg of the coffee table.
I inch past it, stepping over the toppled remote controls and mugs. There are brown stains on the rug, and I guess that the people who lived here were enjoying coffees when the blackout hit.
I step over a minefield of fallen things, remotes and mugs, sure, but also the shards of a broken plate, mouldy food stuck to the hardwood floors beyond the rug, sneakers and boots strewn about, socks and underwear, a coat and, strangely, a heavy-duty padlock.
That one earns a faint, dubious glance from me before I step over it and reach for the door handle. My other hand lifts to give a soft knock before I slip into the bathroom.
The light is dim.
Just a couple of candles lining the shelves, dusky red flames doing their best to pierce the darkness. But my eyes still strain against the shift, from Emily’s flashlight abandoned on the rug to some wisps of tiny flames.
I shut the door behind me and fall back against it.
Tess stands at the sink, stripped down to a fresh set of underwear. She wipes her body with a soapy cloth. Her hair is a wet, lathered mess down her back.
Crystalline eyes find me in the dusty mirror.
She considers me for the shortest moment before her gravelly voice comes, wrecked by all the sobs that plagued her earlier, “You aren’t telling me what you know.”
The glassy blue of her gaze in the reflection is so fucking hollow that my heart twists in my chest. I almost look away from the shame it brings me.
“I wait and wait and wait for you to come to me,” she says and throws me a pained look over her shoulder, like I have betrayed her, and maybe I have in trying to protect her, “to tell me what the truth is behind one of those lies. But you never come.”
The sweatpants in the tub stink of her urine. It’s a bubble of ammonia and soap in here.
I don’t blame her, though.
If I didn’t know what the dark fae are, then I would have pissed myself, too. Even knowing, I almost did.
Tess turns back to the mirror. She considers the smears of toothpaste staining her pale, freckled complexion.
For a beat, I just watch her rinse the cloth, then bring it to her face.
My lips part around a murmur, “I see the way you react to things. I only tell you what I need to—to protect you.”
“From myself,” she adds in a mumble, then scoffs. “I thought, when the blackout was coming, that you recognised it—or you knew what it was. Then… those things. Those… others… You do know what they are.” It’s a weathered statement, no rage, no tears, no sharp glares. “You do know what’s happening.”
She holds the cloth under the tap, then gently lets the water stream out. Some places have running water, still, and others have none at all. Gas works, too, which comes in handy, but not all places run on gas.
Sunken against the door, I’m quiet as Tesni lathers up a bar of soap onto the cloth, then turns off the tap. The smell of shea butter soap is strong, but not strong enough to conceal the ammonia.
“So why don’t you tell me the truth, now,” she says, and it’s no suggestion, it’s a command. The cloth slaps to her cheek, then moves in circles, like she’s buffing out all the filth from this dark world. “And that way, we might be able to survive whatever the fuck is happening to us.”
The truth.
It’s what I came in here for.
I loosen a weighted breath.
“You’re right… I did recognise it,” I confess. “But I didn’t know they would come with it.”
Not a lie.
At first, I feared that the dark ones would come with the black air. But know?
And time went on.
Weeks, quarantine, survival, deaths—and then months had gone by with no dark fae.
I let myself hope.
That was stupid.
Tesni’s response is a murmur, “Where did they come from?”
“The same place as the darkness.” I watch her, closely. “From another world.”
For a beat, she’s motionless, then her throat bobs once, her lips turn inwards—and she bites down on them.
Without a word, she peels her damp hair into four sections, clips them, then leans over the sink.
She lets the cloth slap to the basin before she turns on the tap, then rinses off the sections.
Water is quick to splash on the tiles and spray over the toes of my boots.
Tesni’s voice echoes off the curves of the sink, “But it’s a world you know of.”
I breathe the answer, a reluctant sigh, “Yes.”
Tess expected it. There’s not even a flicker of surprise to pause her.
“The others—” Her fingers comb through the last section of her wet hair. “—you know what they are, don’t you?”
I reach for the rail and tug off a towel. I hand it to her as she gradually lifts her hair out of the sink.
Tess snatches the towel then turban-wraps it around her head.
The quiet in the bathroom is disturbed by the droplets of water leaking from the tap over the bathtub.
I watch Tess fold her arms over her chest, then lean against the sink. The porcelain basin must be cutting into her spine, but she doesn’t so much as flinch as she reclines—and meets my gaze.
My mouth tugs down at the corners.
That disconnect has happened already.
If her soul and body were stitched together, those stitches have already started to come undone.
The unwavering blue of her stare lures out the answer. “They are fae. They are the dark fae, the dark ones, the dokkalves.”
For a beat she just frowns at me.
“Dokkalves,” she mouths the word, pink lips morphing around a word entirely foreign to her.
“There are a lot of different kinds of fae, but there are only two races that rule, the light ones and the dark ones. The light ones live in the light… the dark ones live in the dark.”
Tess just stares at me.
The droplets drip, drip, drip into the stagnant bathwater.
If those threads between her soul and body were unravelling before, they have disintegrated now.
This, right here, is what held me back from telling her everything. I knew the time would come. I never intended on keeping it a secret forever. It needed to be said, but…
Tesni is fragile.
She is strength in many ways.
I have seen her throat-punch a fully grown man—the kind of man who has no hesitation in knocking down a woman—because he stepped on her shoes at the bar and when she demanded an apology, he told her to fuck off.
So she throat-punched him, then brought her glass down on his head.
But I also saw that, immediately after, she ducked into the crowd and bolted.
She ran.
Because underneath it, Tesni is afraid. She’s not brave, she is reactive.
The fear lives in her, it is constant but hidden. It lurks behind a mask. One look at her, and that pale, oval face might seem cold and uncaring.
A mere glance at her, at the constant pucker of her mouth as though she judges everything and everyone around her, and one will not see that it is just Tess biting down on the edges of her tongue or the insides of her cheeks because it helps her ground herself in an uncertain environment surrounded by uncertain people.
I see the mask, I read it, and I consider the cracks in it—and it cracks now.
Her face twists as she tugs away from the basin. Her back turns on me as she moves for the folded clothes on the stool.
Her denial comes with no words, just actions, and she dresses herself as though I didn’t speak at all.
But there is more to tell her.
So, as she drops onto the edge of the tub, and snatches off the leggings from the clothes pile, I explain, “The light fae, litalves, are the ones of lore. They use bridges—gateways between the worlds—to visit this one. The dark ones don’t come here.”
Tesni doesn’t look at me as she gently unrolls thick baseball socks over her feet. “Apparently they do,” she murmurs.
I nod, faint, contemplative, and my mouth tucks inwards. I consider her as she snatches the jeans from the pile, then wrestles and shimmies them on.
“Yes. They are here now. The blackout is the darkness from their world—and the dark ones came with it.”
Tess throws a dull, lifeless look up at me before she pulls on a woollen sweater.
“The light fae have never sought to end all of humanity,” I tell her. “The same can’t be said about the dark ones.”
Her hands slap to her face, fingertips pressing into the ridge of her brow, as if to push against a growing headache.
Then she drops her hands, and they slap to her lap. The look she throws at me is accusatory. “How do you know all this?”
My tongue darts over my chapped lips. Hesitation grips me for a moment, a moment of quiet that lures a frown onto her features.
“Tell me,” she demands and pushes up from the edge of the tub. Her stares hollows out into pits of nothingness. Her upper lip curls to bare her teeth before she snaps into a hiss, “Tell me right fucking now, Bee—what the fuck is going on?”
I cut my gaze down at the water puddled on the tiles.
Can’t bring myself to look at her for this one.
“I am fae.”
My heartbeat is thumping in my chest and the ice-burn of Tesni’s hollow stare pierces into me like shards of glass pressing into the curve of my eyeballs.
The steady drip, drip, drip of the leaky tap water into the tub is all I hear—
Until Tesni loosens a harsh breath.
It sags her chest, and she staggers back a step. Her heel knocks against the edge of the tub.
The look I give her is pleading, and the shame is in the flush of my cheeks.
But the look that Tess aims back at me is wary, like I am not me but that I am a stranger standing before her.
My lips part around words that don’t come.
I had so much to say, so much to tell her.
Now I have nothing, and I can only watch as she pulls away from the tub and snatches her backpack from the floor. Her shoulder knocks mine before she’s storming out of the bathroom.
The door swings shut behind her.