Chapter Twenty-Five BEE
TWENTY-FIVE
BEE
I’m rooted in place.
Bootsteps thud on the old, groaning porch, and I feel every step, like a strike to my bones.
“Hope you don’t mind that I left a gift for you at the entrance,” his smooth, polished voice snakes through the gaps in the wooden slats. “Suppose I threw it a touch too hard…”
I reach my shaking hand down to my belt, then fumble with the switch on the CB. I turn it off—and the static dies, silenced.
Like that’ll help.
Like he hasn’t already heard it.
Like he doesn’t already know I’m in here.
His mocking tone comes light, playful, but it’s as menacing to me as a loaded gun dipped in glitter. “Who knew it took so little to crush a human body?”
My lashes flutter with a startled blink.
Lips parted around uneven breaths, I am stagnant, stupid, and his words are taking too long to process.
That’s what shuddered the building.
That’s what collided with the exterior wooden wall and rattled the whole brewery so violently that my boots are white-dusted with roof debris and my arm is locked around my mouth to protect my lungs from the filthy air.
A body.
A human…
I pin my breath to my chest—and feel my heart slowly sink down to my wormy gut.
Thud
thud,
thud.
The floorboards outside groan under his weight.
That’s all I hear. No cries or whimpers or screams.
The human he’s thrown at the brewery is either knocked out, or dead already.
My mind flashes with images of Tesni’s face, mouth agape, blood pooling out of her.
Who knew it took so little to crush a human body…
I see that as I shut my wet eyes.
Tesni, pulverised.
“Don’t fret,” his whisper comes with enough of a growl that it snakes and crawls and scratches through the gaps in the walls. “I still have the head. That, at least, is intact.”
A grimace twists my face.
Huddled up on the floor, I wrap my arms so tightly around my knees that the bones of my shins ache.
Instinct is an unreliable thing, because right now, it has my eyes clenched shut as though it will somehow turn me invisible if this dark fae decides to kick in the door and enter the abandoned bar.
But he does no such thing—yet.
For now, he’s toying with me, tormenting me.
Thud,
thud,
thud.
Those bootsteps follow the length of the porch, all the way around to the grimy window overlooking the bar—and if he pauses to look, he will see the toes of my boots.
Each step is punched with purpose.
He wants me to hear them.
Each one of them, every thud, every groan of a wooden slat under his weight, even the song of the dagger he scrapes over the wood—
It’s a game to him.
“I have enjoyed this chase more than I expected,” his softly spoken words come in his barbed accent. “You left me little presents along the way.”
Tess.
Nausea spurs through me.
No, no, no, not Tesni.
Please, not her.
I pray, I pray to you Mother, that he found anyone but her, that he traced my scent to the hospital and found his presents there.
I pray for the blood of thousands to be spilled before hers.
Thick with tears, my throat squelches as I force down a whine.
It’s my heartbeat that gives me away. It thumps with the wild thrashings of captured prey; a rabbit caught in a snare as a hunter approaches.
I am trapped.
And he knows it, too.
It’s what keeps him playful, his tone light, his hunting instincts subdued. He’s already got me.
“I thought it only right I return the favour. Would you like the rest of your gift now?”
I sink into myself.
His words might trick someone a tad duller than me, his mask of gentleness might lure out a human sillier than me, if he chose to crank up the charm—as I know fine well he can do easily.
But this male…
Dare’s troubles with me are more than predator and prey, they stretch beyond his orders from a general and his homeland. This is more than invasion, annihilation, colonisation—even extermination.
This is personal.
This dark fae wants his revenge on me.
And he has abandoned his unit to hunt me down for it.
The thuds stop, bootfalls suddenly quiet.
My throat bobs, the gulp of balled nerves louder than my thrumming heartbeat. My lashes flutter, the breath trapped in my chest, and I stare at the dusty glass door of the beer fridge opposite me.
The reflection looking back at me is a silhouette of mousy hair and red cheeks and wild eyes—but I stare as though, somehow, it’ll help me listen for his next move.
Still, no sounds come.
That means one of two things.
Dare—this ruthless assassin of darkness—has stopped at the wooden door that stands between the porch and the brewery.
He stands there, just one kick away from booting in the flimsy door and capturing me.
Or—and this is the worst one, the one that pebbles my skin and shudders my spine—he has softened his movements so I don’t hear him, so I can’t track him out there.
He wanted me to hear him before.
Now, his skills, his talents for hunting, have turned him as silent as a blade of grass in a breeze.
And I can’t pinpoint the location of his voice as he teases me, “Why not come on out, see what I brought you?”
I feel the smirk in his voice, that half-smile that lifts the corner of his mouth and parts his rosy lips just enough to bare some of his sharper teeth.
There is no chance of me going out there. Even if I’m trapped. He’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming and stabbing and biting.
This is my end…
Such a shitty way to go after all this time.
I managed to evade all the dark fae units blasting through the lands for so long. But then I stumbled onto the wrong unit. His unit.
This dark male—this fucking beast—left his fellow warriors for the thrill of the hunt, I’m as sure of it as I am my deadly fate in his hands.
Silence is my answer.
Maybe I’m foolish enough to hope he hasn’t determined my exact location in the abandoned brewery, or he’ll give up and wander off. Maybe it’s that the fear won’t let me speak, just as it doesn’t let me move from my curled-up position.
Whatever it is, Dare accepts that no answer will come—and he moves. The creaking of floorboards growls outside like a beast’s warning.
Thud,
thud,
thud.
My breath bolts to my chest.
Stuck under this bench in the brewery, the register above me, all I can do is brace myself for him to punch his fist through the wooden door that’s rotted and frosted.
He could rip that door off its rusty hinges without breaking a sweat… but no fist splinters the wood.
All I hear is my blood rushing through my eardrums like river rapids, and it faintly reminds me of when I was a youngling and I would duck underwater too long to see if my mother would notice, think I was drowning, and would save me.
She never did.
She would only ever look away with a faint touch of exasperation on her sharp face.
Trapped in my boots, my toes curl as the tingle of dreadful anticipation creeps through me.
Silent tears are streaming down my cheeks.
Through the thin wooden door, the dark fae sighs a soft sound that, in the dead of the silence, I hear as though it is right at my ear. “You are right, Bee.”
The sound of my name on his lover’s tongue is enough to flush my cheeks hot, and I wonder if this is one of his many tactics that work for him, how easily he can lure a stupider human into his open arms—making it all so easy for him to snap her neck like a twig, then brush a kiss over her cold, dead lips.
“What sort of male would I be if I let you come to me? I should be the one to bring your gift to you.”
Horror slackens my face.
Slowly, I lean forward and press my hands onto the sticky floor. I slip into a crouch and crane my neck to peer around the bar.
The dread that fills my eyes is aimed at the grimy window stretching up the wall—
I don’t get a moment to shield myself before the single panel of murky glass shatters like a fucking glitter bomb.
A scream catches in my throat.
I throw myself to the ground. Arms twisted, my hands slap to the back of my head.
The glass shards rain down on me, a wretched burst of confetti made from cuts and bites.
Something hits the ground with a thud before a wretched sticky sound follows it.
Distantly, amongst the panic dizzying me, I think of a muddy bowling ball being thrown through the window and landing just in front of me.
Cringed against the glass settled all over me, I brace my arm against my face and look back at the window.
I blink through the clouds of dust between me and the panel where the window was just moments ago—
But he isn’t there.
I expected him to be standing there, out on the porch, that wicked and lethal smile of his fixed on me; or even stepping into the brewery, twirling a dagger in his hand.
But nothing is there.
Nothing more than the disturbed cloud of dust, the frosty chill of the winter air, and the pure darkness I have lived in too long.
No human can see in this darkness.
No light fae can see in this pure blackness.
And the only reason I can strain enough to see just an arm’s reach ahead of me is the pathetic band of nightlights I have bound to my wrist like a watch.
This dusky red gleam, no better than a lantern in the dead of night, illuminates just enough that, as I turn my back on the shattered window and look to the bowling ball—
I see it for what it is.
Frozen, my lashes flutter before a guttural sound crawls up my throat, and whether it is a moan of horror or a retch that I can’t fight back, I don’t know.
All I know is that is no bowling ball that he hurled through the window.
I brought you a gift.
I lean closer to it and, hand trembling, reach out my nightlights to get a better look at the features… and I instantly wish I didn’t.
Horror widens my teary eyes.
But I can’t look away from it.
My gift.
A decapitated head.
It looks right back at me with bulging eyes, a shredded neck, a twisted, horrified expression forever frozen in time.
I recognise this face.
Carlos.
My apocalyptic fuckbuddy. My fall guy.
A walking, talking human—with my scent all over him.
In the horror that fills me, a bud of relief blooms in my lungs, and I breathe just that bit easier knowing that the body Dare threw at the brewery, and the head that came with it, is not Tesni.
But the relief doesn’t hang around, not once I drop my gaze to Carlos’s neck—and see that the flesh is torn, as though Dare used nothing but brute force to tear his head off.
And… did… did he jam something in there, into that bloody, meaty mess of a neck?
Something is poking out.
My brow pinches and I shift a bit closer to the frozen, decapitated head. Thank Mother it’s so cold that the flesh isn’t quick to decompose, and so the stench hasn’t come yet.
Still, it’s not a sight I’m used to, so my face wobbles as I inch closer to the torn neck—and the round, black metal ring that seems to be sticking out of it.
The neck itself looks like it went through a paper shredder. But there’s a round metal handle poking out of it.
I push my nightlights closer and, with a quick glance at the shattered window, check for Dare.
Still not there.
I don’t hear him out there, either.
That doesn’t soothe me.
I shift my stare back to the handle.
The rust is so thick, so layered and brown that it blends in with the old floorboards it rests on… but with my nightlights glowing over it, I see it as plain as I would see a moon in this empty darkness…
It’s not in the neck. It’s under it.
It is a handle. It’s… a latch to a cellar.
An escape.
Teeth bared, a sudden surge of fight bolts through me. I creep closer to the handle, then gently guide the decapitated head out of the way.
Sorry, Carlos.
My gloved hands are firm on the handle.
I wait, one heartbeat, two, then brace myself for the noise of the hinges. With a rusted handle like that, in the cold like this, I know it won’t be quiet.
So I rush it.
I lift the cellar door just a few inches off the ground with a single, hard tug. Then I still.
The groan was swift and loud, but fast to end.
If he, somewhere out there in the dark, wonders what that sound was, he will come find out.
I don’t give him a moment. I have none to spare.
I fumble my way through the gap as quickly as I can manage, balancing my boots on the rickety steps of a ladder.
The moment I find my footing, I gently lower the door above my ducked head, then shove the bolt into place for good measure.
Dare is a dark male, he can rip this latch open with about as much effort as a human swatting a fly, but I somehow, stupidly, feel better with it latched.
I scramble down the ladder into the cellar.
Aiming my nightlight bracelet ahead of me, I inch through the darkness.
Above, the floorboards creak.
Dare has entered the brewery.
He will figure it out in a second if he hasn’t already.
I spot a short, narrow window above a row of shelves. I’m not so sure I’ll fit through it, but what other choice do I have? There are no doors down here that I can see, and just the same narrow windows down on the other wall.
A murmur escapes me, “Fuck.” Bitter and twisted, like my face as I move for the shelves. No time wasted, I start climbing them the moment I reach them—
And I’m halfway up when the cellar door rattles once.
The rattle pauses.
I don’t.
I haul my tired body up the shelves to the window.
A thunderous noise booms through the cellar, the clatter and clang of metal thrumming with it.
I don’t need to look over my shoulder to know that Dare has ripped the cellar door clean off its hinges and thrown it back into the bar.
My hand fumbles with the window latch, breath tight in my pained chest, and I shove my weight into it. The shelves hold my weight with a loud creaking noise rippling over the wood—then it silences as I hoist myself up onto the window frame.
The wrist of nightlights is first through.
Then the slam of boots down on the cellar floor.
He’s in now.
Jumped down the length of the ladder like it’s nothing more than a step, not a drop to wreck the knees.
I drag myself through the open window onto the porch, then roll onto my side, and I kick the window shut. Not like it’s big enough for him to get through anyway.
I don’t wait around for his next move.
I scramble to my feet—and charge into the darkness.
Fumbling with the switch of the CB, I ignite the static again, and race in the direction of the lake—the way to Tesni and Emily.
But as I run into the dark, my bobbing nightlights moving with me, I know he’s already chasing after me.