Chapter 22 BEE
TWENTY-TWO
BEE
The woman watching from the snow-dusted car keeps her pistol aimed at me. Her mud-brown eyes are narrowed, but they shift over my shoulder to the person behind me.
I don’t make a move.
Not with the blade pressing into the cartilage of my throat, the warmth of a body too close to my back, and the restrained breaths disturbing the air at my earlobe.
I can only stare at her as she asks in a thick Boston accent, “What you doin’ all alone?”
The same thick accent comes from the guy behind me, and I know it’s a guy the moment he adds, “Ain’t safe out here.”
“You got people?” she adds, and it all feels so very fucking rehearsed. “They around here?”
There’s no point talking my way out of this one.
Like I said, it’s rehearsed.
These two have a play they perform for people they come across.
It’s a hostile play.
But I sure as shit don’t tell them I’m alone. That makes me useless, and if they believe me, a quick kill before or after they rob me blind.
So I smile, tight, nervous even, and throw my gaze around the darkness that presses against our pocket of dusty light.
“Oh?” Her dark eyebrow arches, fuzzy and too close to touching in the middle of her forehead. “They around here, your people?”
The stink of the guy’s hot breath on my skin smells faintly of tinned tuna and cheesy crackers with undertones of cola.
My breathy answer comes with a tremble in my voice, “No…”
I fake it.
I fake the nervous lick of my lips, curving them inwards, before I throw my gaze around the darkness again.
“No?” Her grin warps, and even in dusty light, I can see the chipped tooth beside her missing canine. She took a hit, whether a punch or a fall, it cost her. “Then what you lookin’ for?”
“Them.”
Her grin twitches before it starts to fade. Her gaze cuts above my shoulder—and she locks into a silent stare with the guy.
“I saw one,” I add, breathy. “Just back that way. He was alone.”
Still, she’s staring at the guy, but she asks, “Did it see you?”
My mind snags on ‘it’.
But it’s not really the time to get into that.
So I answer with, “I don’t know.”
Her jaw rolls. “Where’d you see it?”
“About two blocks back.”
Her gaze snaps to me. “Two blocks back and you’re just strolling?”
The smile I force isn’t overly kind. “I don’t have much energy left to run. I was there, where the fire is—” She shifts her gaze again, this time to the distant gleam of red on the other side of the city. “I got out and then saw that one alone. He was headed this way.”
For a long moment, she thinks on it. Her tongue drags over her teeth, then tightens with a suck. Her tongue smacks back into place.
But still, she considers the darkness around us, the gleam of crimson in the far distance.
I eye the trail of black dots on her cheek. Looks like they’ve been printed there, so dark that they have a whisper of a navy hue to them.
Three freckles in a crooked line.
To humans, those really are just freckles. Common. Everyone has them. Why look twice?
But I know what they really are.
Those three freckles in that one crooked line, the exact print of Orion’s Belt—the stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—is a mark on a human that means one thing.
That human descends from fae.
She is kuri.
A distant descendent of fae bloodlines, very distant.
And I suddenly understand, fingers snapping in my brain, the humans imprisoned by the dark fae units, the enslaved people—they aren’t picked at random.
If I would have looked closer at them, I’m sure I would have seen each of those captive humans with their own three freckles in that same crooked line.
It will be somewhere on their bodies, whether on their backs, their legs, their arms, it doesn’t matter, and some will have just one kuri mark, while others will have a dozen.
It all means they are kuri.
And so is this woman.
It doesn’t mean she is fae.
Far from it. But when the seams joining the worlds touched that bit more, thousands of years ago, and fae wandered in to lure humans, mate with them, trick them, or my kind—the kintas—were discarded here as babies, swapped over for healthier human newborns, that meant strands of fae in the bloodlines of this world.
Carry it down through generations, wash it out more and more and more, and what’s left is a kuri: A human who simply acclimates better to the fae realm, who lives longer in slavery, who can birth healthier halflings, and easier than a regular human can.
I wish I had the freckles, just so the dark ones would take me back to the realm—and from there, I could maybe escape to the light lands.
As it is, I have more to fear from the dark warriors than this partly toothless kuri does.
But she makes the mistake of not fearing me.
These two fucked up enough to hold a blade to my throat and aim a gun at me.
I am their mistake.
I might look human, but I was raised in Licht. I was raised litalf.
I can fight.
And I can trick.
So the moment it happens, the exact second she lowers the pistol—even if it’s slowly, gradually—and that doubt etches onto her frowning face from the seeds I planted in her mind, and her gaze is turning all over the darkness, I act.
I shove my free hand upwards, slipping it between the flesh of my throat and the sharp edge of the blade.
I shield my precious throat before I throw back my other hand for the guy’s head, and with a grip on his ear, I swirl us around.
The woman is too slow to act.
It’s not her fault.
I’m trained. I’m better.
I’m faster.
And before she’s lifted the pistol and aimed it at me, and her finger coils around that trigger—and she fires, I’ve already done too much.
I’ve already thrown the guy in front of me, a human shield to take the bullets as I drop to my knees and switch off the nightlights.
I roll out of the way, out of the blasts of the pistol that deafen me. And I thud into the car toppled over before moving around its side.
I don’t wait, not to listen to the beautiful song of the guy’s moans, his body bullet ridden.
I don’t hang around, not even to finish her off.
I let her scream, and the shift in her dark voice turns pitchy as she scrambles for her companion, and I use the moment of distraction to run down the sidewalk until another street splinters off—and I take that.
I turn my nightlight back on to guide the way.
Any fae nearby, even a deaf one, would have heard those gunshots.
If Dare is after me…
That was the siren to let him know where I am.
I almost feel stupid for thinking he’s after me. I mean, why would a dark fae would abandon his unit to chase down an old slight? That’s beyond comprehension. The punishment for that, for abandonment, would be severe.
It doesn’t make sense that he would chase me.
And yet, I feel it in my gut, like worms coiling and slapping and writhing, a constant unease.
Rushing through the streets of the city, I veer closer to the river, and I reach down for the CB radio at my hip.
I give Tesni the signal.
It’s time.