Chapter 18 BEE
EIGHTEEN
BEE
The stillness clutching me snaps like a tether, and without another second wasted, I’m barrelling through the solid metal door to the stairwell.
I’m loud, too loud. The backpack bounces off my back, the thick soles of my snow boots come raining down on the hard steps, and my breaths are too grated.
The racket echoes around me, bounces off the concrete stairwell walls.
I cringe against it and pray to the gods that the dark fae don’t follow the sound, that they haven’t gotten high enough in this building to hear it yet.
But they will be in the building already.
They are faster than I am.
So I’m not wasting a breath as I crash through the door where the roof stairwell ends, and I come lurching into the top floor.
Darkness has its home in this hallway. No electricity to power the fluorescent white lights that should be blinding me from above. Instead, all I have is the band of three nightlights wound around my wrist.
I flick them on with trembling fingers, boots swift over the concrete floor, then rush for the main stairwell.
But I falter at the door.
Hand hovering over the cold, metal handle, a sudden stillness ripples through me and my breath pins to my throat.
I’ll be heading right into the very stairwell I climbed to the top floor.
The dark fae will take this very stairwell, and follow the traces of my scent all the way to me, here, now.
Slowly, I turn my chin to the side and eye up the second door down the corridor. Beyond it are the stairs I didn’t climb to reach this high in the apartment tower; the one not laced with my scent.
That’s all I need to realise before I’m racing for the emergency door.
My gloved hands smack down on the push-bar, and I throw my entire weight into it. My shoulder smacks, hard, against the door before it groans open—then snags.
I shove into the door again.
Doesn’t budge.
Doesn’t open any further than a foot or so, and I’m left staring at the darkness beyond the narrow gap.
Before the blackout, there’s no way I would have fit through this gap. But hunger and a never-ending trek has narrowed my hips and eaten through the shape of my body.
I turn to the side, then reach my boot into the dark. I slide through the tight wedge—but snag at the meat of my backside. “Fucking fuck shit.”
My murmur is a huffed breath through grated teeth as I grab onto the edge of the door, lean my weight into the stairwell, then pullllll myself out—until I stumble out of the gap.
My staggered bootsteps catch on something.
I look down, and see in the faint rinse of nightlights what was blocking the door.
Bodies.
Three of them, stacked, but not intentionally.
Looks like they were running, fleeing, and were shot down.
Their limbs are tangled, or what’s left of them. Dead for a while.
I step over them.
With the glow of the nightlights strapped to my wrist, the darkness in the stairwell flitters all around me. I’m in a bulb of dusky red light that stretches out about one and a half metres ahead of me.
I aim my arm out in front of me, my other hand touching down on the railing, and I descend the stairs.
Each step has my stomach in a flurry. It’ll be all too easy to miss the next one and go tumbling down to the landing.
That kind of fall on these concrete steps means a broken arm, a sprained ankle, a snapped neck, a cracked skull.
It means being maimed enough that the dark ones will catch up to me if I’m unlucky enough to survive the fall.
But what else can I do, take my time?
If this dark fae catches me…
A shudder runs up my spine at the thought.
Those sickly sensations lash in my stomach like vipers striking at their prey.
I am the prey.
I scramble down the steps, swing myself around the landings, then keep on going. I can’t afford to waste a second.
Stairs, so many stairs.
All this running and chasing and surviving has strengthened me; the muscles in my legs don’t waver anymore when I take on an eternal staircase.
But the fatigue weakens me, the hunger of survival has slimmed my weight, and I’m only swinging myself around the landing of the twelfth floor when my legs are starting to wobble.
The echo of my pounding bootsteps floods the stairwell.
It’s loud, so fucking loud.
The fire in my chest is turning my breaths ragged. Strands of mousy hair whip my cheeks like the chill of the frosty air lashes at me. I burn hot and freeze cold; the fever of racing against winter itself.
But when I stagger down the steps to the eighth landing, I fall back with a sharp gasp.
Arms out, my hands splay against the air in an instant act of surrender—
Because I am looking down the barrel of a rifle.
For a long moment, all I see is that round chrome chamber just inches from my face.
My lashes flutter on the lethal promise.
Slowly, I lift my startled gaze to the other end of the weapon.
A scrawny man—maybe still a boy, in his late teens—holds the rifle as steadily as a monument erected in the centre of a small town.
Unwavering, he looks down the length of the gun, finger hooked around the trigger.
Punching against my chest, my heart is in a panic. I try to soften my ragged breaths as I choke out, “They’re coming.”
It’s all I can manage.
I don’t know if this man—boy—took refuge here to escape the fae outside, or if he was already hidden inside to survive a snowy night, and he awoke to the destruction.
I just know that my best chance of getting away is to offer something, help or compassion or a shared fear. It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s something that will lower that fucking rifle.
But it stays steady—and aimed at my face.
I’m not so sure that if he pulled the trigger, I would die right away. Maybe half my face would be blown off and I would writhe in pain and choke on my own blood before death came to claim me.
“They’re in the building,” I heave out the words in a rushed whisper, hands still lifted in the air. “In the other stairwell.”
Down the rifle, his focused brown eyes dilate. His short lashes lower before lines form on his brow.
My words sink in.
Realisation steals him.
If you shoot that rifle, they will hear it—and they will find you. We will both die.
It’s what I offer.
And it’s an offer he accepts.
Leaning his weight back, his sneaker squeaks and he lowers the barrel.
A heartbeat passes—and we just stare at each other.
Then, finally, he steps aside. But he makes no move to run… and it takes me a moment to realise why.
There, in the corner of the stairwell, tucked beside the door to the eighth-floor apartments, is a boy.
This man’s younger brother, I guess, by their resemblance, and the boy is no older than thirteen.
The ghastly shade of grey that has washed out his brownish complexion and the glaze of sweat on his brow tell me that he’s drowning in the depths of infection.
I hesitate.
I should run for the stairs now, leave these two behind to their grim fates, and save my own ass.
Normally, I would.
I have no problem with leaving people behind.
I’m planning on it, in fact. Gary is in the apartment on the first floor, if he’s still where I left him, sleeping on the couch. I won’t risk the time to go find him, warn him.
But the boy…
My mouth twists that horrible human compassion that sometimes claws its way to the surface.
I turn my chin to him. “You should run. You won’t stand a chance.”
Not even with that rifle.
He knows it, too. That’s why his jaw clenches. But he only stares at me, and with that look, I get it. They can’t run.
That boy is on the verge of death.
So he will stay with him.
And he will die with him.
I spare them no more of my precious moments before I’m fleeing the eight floor—and I make it all the way down to the bottom of the stairwell when a sudden thunder rumbles the air.
Eyes wide, my hands are pressed flat against the fire door that will take me outside to the rear of the building.
I freeze, boots rooted to the concrete floor.
That rumble from above, it is not thunder.
It’s a roar.
A deep, gravelled shout of pure animalistic rage.
And I know in my bones, it is Dare.
I throw my back against the door as though I’ll see him standing there on the steps opposite me.
But that roar didn’t come from the stairwell.
It echoed down to me.
Must have come from the top floor.
In less than a heartbeat, he’ll chase my scent to this stairwell—and the rifle won’t hold Dare off for long.
Those boys up there are already dead.
I am not.
With a grunt, I throw my back into the push-bar.
The fire door shudders with a groan against my weight, but it shoves open enough that I can stumble out into the darkness.
Hands out in front of me, I move through the blackness of this conquered world. The nightlights are weak against the dark, but as I crouch down and sweep my arm, the nightlight bracelet illuminates enough to show me where I am.
Not in a street, not out in the open. In a dingy alleyway.
A small lane curves around the side of the building, but that will lead me out into the glowing red of the main street, where dark fae hunt and fires blaze through concrete and steel.
The wall opposite me is short and glazed in a slippery layer of ice. The only way to scale it is by climbing the green dumpster pushed up against it, one of the lids torn off and the sour stink of rot wafting from it.
I advance on the dumpster, and the closer I get, the more pinched my face is against the stench. I grab onto the edge and hoist myself up onto its latched lid. The plastic warps beneath my weight—and I slip on the sheet of ice.
My gloved hands smack down on the edge and grip, firm.
Behind me, my legs kick against the air as though that’ll help drag myself over the slippery frost coating the plastic. But all it manages to do is catch my boot on the loose strap of my backpack.
Something spills out from the bag.
I feel the weight dip, then hear the flutter of fabric fall down the icy air.
Whatever it is, a t-shirt or a sweater or a glove, it lands on the ground.
I wince at the sound.
A faint thump, so faint that I doubt any nearby human would hear it, but to the dark fae it could be a foghorn announcing my position.
I heave myself up the dumpster, then crawl for the wall. No time to care for balance or to angle myself just right, not when the sudden blast of a gun splits the air.
I throw a wild look over my shoulder at the door, as though I can see through it and up to the eighth floor, and the weight of silence presses down on me.
My breath pins to my throat, choking me—and I only release it when the rifle fires again.
Dare has found the boys.
Now, he’ll be hunting my scent down the stairs to this alleyway—to this fucking dumpster.
I swing my legs over the wall and push.
I drop down the other side. The moment my boots land with a loud slap, there’s a tug at my neck—the snap of the binoculars falling away.
Midair, I grapple for them, the string falling in the darkness, but then I hear the plastic clatter to the hard ground.
A wince cuts through my gritted teeth.
Abandoning the binoculars, I shift my nightlight in front of me and take off down the lane. It leads me out to an untouched road where chocolate wrappers rustle in the breeze and evacuation fliers dance through the air.
The units haven’t made it to this street yet.
Still, I bolt up the road, dodging abandoned cars and fallen bicycles.
Maybe, just maybe, I might make it out of here to live another day.
And I need that day. And more after it. Because I need to get home. Not home in London.
Home in Licht—to the light lands.
Back to my fae mother. My fae brother. And maybe, if he did the smart thing and fled in the dark to the light lands and my mother offered him sanctuary, then my dad, too.
I just need to survive if I’m ever going to see them again, if I’m ever going to find out whether or not my dad is alive, or if the light lands are safe from the darkness, too.