Chapter 28 BEE
TWENTY-EIGHT
BEE
The scrape of a parka over stone disturbs the silence.
I falter and throw a glare back at Emily.
The nightlight is quick to follow my direction, a gleam of red sweeping over Emily’s weary face.
But it wasn’t her who made the noise, it’s not her who stands that close to the wall.
I turn on Tesni.
And I hesitate.
Her pallor is sickly, like she might pass out any moment, and she can’t find the strength for words.
Slumped against the stone wall, she flurries her hand at me in a ‘wait-a-minute’ gesture, then fishes through the pockets of her parka.
I watch, grim, as she tugs out an inhaler and brings it to her mouth.
The patience I grip onto is a frayed thread, but for Tesni, it holds.
I take the moment and, with a step closer to her, speak as soft as the lights bound around my wrist. “That didn’t kill him. We need to put as much distance between us and that lake as we can.”
Emily’s voice comes, croaked, “Who is he?”
I throw her a side-look, swift. “A stray.”
Tesni draws in another breath from the inhaler to flood her lungs.
Emily challenges me, “No, she said he recognised you.” Her finger points at Tess, sagged against the wall. “He’s more than a stray. He was talking to you.”
Fair point.
The dark fae don’t make a lot small talk before they slaughter us. Makes sense that she noticed, that it stood out to her.
“Now isn’t the time to dig into it,” I tell her, and it’s the truth. I turn my cheek to Emily’s suspicious, narrowed eyes. “We need to get far away from here—and we’ll worry about finding another unit to track later.”
The look Tesni lifts to me is warped in faint red light. I see it etched all over her. The fatigue in her lashes hanging low over sharp blue eyes, the downturn of her mouth as she tucks the inhaler into her pocket.
I read her like a book I have read a hundred times before.
She doesn’t think she has it in her.
Not just the now, the present mission of pushing onwards and escaping the dark warrior she sank into icy waters, but the whole journey—moving and moving and moving, until we locate another unit, keep our distance, track from afar, and follow them for more months to come.
And it might be months.
Might be less.
But the whole thing, even to me, is starting to feel like a lifetime of chasing our own shadows.
I see that in her.
“Can you walk?” I ask.
The corners of her mouth pin to her cheeks. She drops her gaze to the narrow street, a foot-lane between city roads.
Her jacket crinkles against the wall. “I have to,” she says—and it pangs my chest.
Tesni needs rest.
A lot of it.
The plague harmed her too much; it deteriorated the strength of her lungs and weakened her in a world where only the strong survive.
I’ve never pushed her to her limits, then beyond. Not once has she done too much before I have stopped for her to have her rest.
This can’t be one of those times.
I don’t know what happens when she’s pushed beyond that point—if the lungs inside of her will collapse, if her heart will fail, if her life will give out beneath the weight of it all.
It’s not a risk I want to take, but I don’t see any other way out of this.
Dare is fae.
More than that, he is hybrid.
Born of both light and dark—and he’s one of those rarer hybrids threaded from the best of each.
Dare is survival, he is predator, he is danger sheathed in muscle, marble skin, and pure skill.
We don’t stand a chance against him.
“You don’t think he drowned?” Tesni asks, her voice a hoarse, stretched sound, ebbed with inflamed lungs.
The look I lift to her is guilty. “You did good. It bought us time.” The slight shake of my head is grim. “But it didn’t kill him.”
“What makes you think that?” Emily’s boot is soft on the slushy lane, a mere step closer. “He went under the ice. How’s he getting out to the surface before he drowns? That doesn’t happen.”
“You need to stop thinking of them as humans, or a derivate of them.” I turn a stern look on her.
“You need to see them as the originals, the first, the strongest—and we are the weaker replicas, not the blueprint. Any human would drown in that lake. But a fae? It would take them longer than minutes to drown, and that’s forgetting their strength to swim back to the surface and blow another hole through the ice. ”
I am as sure of it as I am the darkness around me. There is no way the waters beneath the ice killed Dare.
I glance around the darkness, the walls entombing us, the slushy stone lane beneath our boots, and… I double take on a grate.
A metal lid leading underground…
“How do you know—” Emily starts, but Tesni is quick to cut her off.
She pushes from the wall. “Shut up, Em,” she sighs. “We don’t have the time, and I can’t be fucking bothered with it anymore.”
The look Emily throws at her glares like a drawn sword.
Tesni meets it with a dark look of her own. “I’m the one who shot that warrior into the lake. Fuck me for not wanting to hang around and let him find us. At least you’ll go quick. I doubt I can say the same about me.”
My smile is small, and I bite down on it.
Tesni’s deflection comes smooth. I know that’s not the reason she interrupted Emily’s questions.
Predictable, Tesni always calls her.
She sure predicted the direction of her line of questioning, and she spared me from it, from the incoming interrogation.
But she is also right.
Tesni won’t go softly, quickly, kindly if Dare finds us.
Emily might be in the way. A quick death on his dagger, a snap of the neck.
But after seeing Carlos’s head rolling over the floorboards at my boots, an image seared into my mind, I have a new layer of fear creeping through me for Tesni.
Before they can start down the lane, I tap my boot into the slush. “Look.”
They do. Both gazes land on the drain lid.
“Manhole,” Emily says with a shrug, a what-about-it.
Tesni frowns. “Does that lead to water… or a sewer?”
So she’s following my line of thought.
And the dread is blatant in those hollow eyes she lifts to me.
I smile. “Guess we’ll find out.”