Chapter 31 TESNI
THIRTY-ONE
TESNI
The nightlight gleams over the shape of a car. It’s slick with ice, inches thick, and it spurs that uncertainty through me again.
That car is sheathed in such a thick layer of ice, just like the road is, but there should only be snow and slush.
As far as I can see, black ice sprawls over the asphalt, from pavement to pavement, wall to wall.
I’m not a meteorologist, or whatever profession specialises in the effects of the weather on the fucking street, but this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, especially not when the other side of the town is packed with slush and snow.
The strangeness of it sets my shoulders, stiff.
There’s something about it I don’t trust.
It just feels wrong.
The leather boots fastened to my sock-padded feet, they are born of the same unease flittering through my gut. The soles slip with every other step. I’m first to slow down.
Emily slinks by me, rifle tucked to her chest.
Bee glances over her shoulder, and her frown lingers on me for a beat before it drops to the slight slipping of my boots over the ice.
Her mouth tightens.
She slows down, her steps softer over the slick road.
Emily takes point.
A faint flicking sound comes before a blast of white light—and her torch illuminates the cars iced over.
I keep my hands splayed as if to better help my balance, and I slowly slide my boots over the ice.
Doesn’t help that the chill is nipping at me.
The air bites the way an icy wind would, but there is no breeze, just a stagnant air, colder than the fucking Arctic.
That unease thrashes in me.
It feels as though I’m stepping further into an unnatural pocket of space, and every part of my body knows it.
I fix my stare on the back of Bee’s head.
No indication in the way she moves, nothing that tells me she feels the same trepidation as I do, that niggling that echoes in me, turn around, go the other way, go back.
Her ponytail sways, soft, with her slinking steps.
The faint red of the nightlight stretches up the side of her face. She turns her chin to her shoulder and looks down the thick darkness of a street we pass.
I almost trace her gaze.
I almost look down the dark abyss where the torchlight doesn’t reach.
The thought just touches my mind—before the eruption of gunfire.
My heart bolts in place.
A breath cuts through me before my legs give out from under me. I flatten myself to the road just as a cry rips overhead.
The blasts of the rifle cease as suddenly as they started—and the sound to replace it is Bee’s shout, “Emily!”
Flattened to the road, I lift my wild gaze.
Emily isn’t where I last saw her, at the front, flashlight aimed down the road. But that light is shining down on the road…
I lift my gaze higher and find a swaying black net above—and Emily is in it.
Rifle tangled around her limbs, she’s a human pretzel caught in a net.
I blink, in that moment, I understand the chaos that erupted from nothing.
A net must have been flattened to the black ice, camouflaged, and the moment she stepped on it and it swept up to snare her, her finger on the trigger tightened in a panic—
And that explains the bullet holes running up the side of a car, the door hit at least thrice. The rest of the bullets struck a brick building.
But I don’t give a shit about that.
The echo of the rapid shots pulses in my ears, as if printed into my actual eardrums.
That gunfire might as well have been a foghorn to anyone and anything within earshot, a announcement that, ‘hey, just your average ragtag group of human survivors over here!’
The glare that hardens me is bitter.
Bee is crouched some paces ahead of me, her locked arms falling away from their protective hold over her head.
She gawks up at Emily swaying in the net.
“Jesus, fuck,” Emily grunts, breathless, like her knee pressing into her chest is cutting off her air supply.
Bee bolts into action.
I watch her push into a slipping run, then barrel into the car’s bullet-ridden door before clambering onto the hood. She drops the shotgun. It hits the hood of the car, right at her boots, before she’s fishing out a hunting knife and bringing it to the net.
She grabs a fistful of the net and starts to saw.
Still, I haven’t moved.
Not more than a lift of my chin from the icy road. I am flattened.
Roadkill.
It’s not the fright of the gunfire that keeps me pinned down—but that the net is here at all.
Someone put it there.
Laid it out perfectly, blended it into the darkness of the ice over black asphalt.
“It’s a trap,” I echo my thoughts, my voice pitched with the fright. “It’s a trap.”
I scramble to my feet, boots slipping and skidding, until I slam into the nose of the car.
I crane my neck.
Above, Bee is hacking and sawing at the net. It doesn’t so much as fray.
“It’s a trap,” I breathe the words as though they are weighted. “We need to go!”
“Fuck you,” Emily grunts, and with a glare at her, I realise she can’t raise her voice much more than that, not with her leg bent back and her knee digging into her chest.
“I’m sorry.” I turn my wide eyes on Bee. “But you know I’m right—we need to go.”
Bee throws a tight look down at me.
Her grey eyes glisten, her mouth twisted.
She knows I’m right.
She knows, and yet, she hesitates.
“No,” Emily’s plea comes out hoarse. “No—Bee? Bee? Don’t listen to her. Cut it! Cut the net!”
Bee lets her eyes shut, tight.
Hand still fisted in the net, she swallows, thick, then shakes her head. “It won’t work—it’s not like our ropes… I… I can’t get you out.”
Not like our ropes…
I throw a bewildered look at the net, the black ropes weaved together, fine and silky—and where she sawed the serrated knife, it is entirely smooth. Not a frayed thread in sight.
Bee draws back a step, the metal roof of the car bowing under the shifted weight.
A switch goes off in Emily.
She blinks and, suddenly, she’s thrashing in the net, a wild animal caught, and her shouts are screeches that will reach too far in the darkness.
The flashlight is trapped in the net with her, bobbing with her flailing panic, a gust of white light glaring over the road.
The noise cringes me to the bone.
I reach out for the hem of Bee’s trouser leg and tug, once but firm.
A sniffle comes from her before she tucks the knife away. And when she meets my gaze, there is bitterness in her quiet tears.
She jumps down onto the road and her snowboots smack down, firm, on the ice.
I reach out to steady her.
She keeps her cheek to me, the wobble of her mouth worsening with every shriek coming from the thrashing net above.
I don’t look.
I can’t bring myself to look.
Bee runs her hands down her face. She doesn’t meet my gaze as she twists, then leans over for the car—for the shotgun nudged up the side, clinging to the gap between the hood and the windshield.
Her fingertips graze the smooth metal—but before she can get a grip on it, a sudden hot sensation strikes my shoulder.
I stagger back a step.
A hiss escapes me. “Fuckkk.”
I startle, tucking my chin to my collarbone, and look down at the silver knife flickering in the torchlight.
My face furrows.
Blood falls down my arm, a fresh wound pierced by a strange silver blade. The hilt is etched with peculiar curls and harsh lines, like an ancient language—
Oh, fuck.
“Oh, fuck,” I echo, gaping at the knife that seems to have just appeared in my shoulder. “Fuck, fuck—Bee!”
Leaned over the hood, Bee twists around and her gaze lands on the knife protruding from me.
The blood drains out of her slack face.
Before she can move for me, a whizzing sound spears through the darkness. And a second blade strikes at us. This one sinks into the metal of the car’s hood, a mere hair’s width from Bee’s knee, like a warning.
Bee flings herself off the hood.
She lands with a thud between two cars, the screaming, thrashing net above her, and I just stand here, on the road…
My legs quiver beneath me.
I reach my hand for the blade. My fingertips touch blood, the threads of the gloves quick to wet with crimson.
The moment I see it, that glistening red staining the gloves, a sudden dizziness waves over me, and my legs give out.
I hit the road, hard, and the impact sears up my spine.
Legs splayed, knees bent, and my palm upwards, I’m a fallen doll too startled and too stupid to do anything. All I can do is lift my gaze from my bloody gloves to the darkness ahead.
The torchlight swaying from the net, it stretches over the road, all the way to where the knives came from—and where that noise is coming from.
Clomp. Clomp. Clomp.
The slow, threatening sound of a steed drawing closer.
The jingle of metal comes with it, faint and soft, but not unlike chains rattling, or… armour and blades clinking together with movement.
A warrior, advancing.
My lashes flutter, wet.
I expect to the see the one I shot into the lake’s depths. But the warrior who emerges from the dark, the one who sways with the slow, casual steps of his steed, that is not him.
He is another warrior entirely.
And he’s advancing on me.
It starts with ice.
I am surrounded by the harsh winter of Canada, of frozen lakes, frosted fields, snowy winds—yet I only feel the ice from him.
His eyes are the faintest greens I have ever seen on a face, blades of wild grass, frosted over with winter.
The hairless, grey-skinned steed beneath the dark male should be the root of my horror.
The sight of that creature, a horse without hair, thin greyish skin pulled tight over muscles, a tail that is a weapon in its own right, a fencing sword that no one can convince me isn’t poisonous, this creature should be the reason I am frozen on the icy road.
But it’s him that has frozen me.
He sways, gentle, with the steady advancing steps of the steed.
I am mesmerised in horror. In terror.
I have seen the dark fae from afar more times than I can count. I have peered through binoculars at their burning cities, the blaze of fires illuminating them, and I have seen scarred faces, feral faces, beautiful faces, bloodied faces.
But this one is different.
His dark leathers glisten like ink, and it’s a striking contrast against his flawless porcelain complexion. Chiselled from marble—a statue in a cold room of a grand palace, smooth and polished, but come to life.
Faint streaks of blood darken some strands of his pale hair, too pale to be blond, too soft to be silver, but somewhere in between.
The dark ruby stains speckle him, down the curve of his cheek, splattered over the inky blackness of his leathers, staining the blades sheathed to his belt; and his hands, pale, gloveless, are streaked in blood and scratches.
Ice.
That is what he is, just as that is what spreads through my chest at the sight of him. A dread colder than winter, a fear that tightens my lungs and shudders my breaths into mists at my face.
The only warmth I am given is the tear that falls down my cheek. It is silent, afraid, and lingers over my parted, trembling lips.
The breaths shuddering through me are serrated.
My lashes are fluttering over wet eyes.
I should run.
Run, run, run.
The only thought thrumming in my mind.
But I’m frozen.
Stuck to the black ice of the city road, I can’t move. I can only weep, silent, as the steed advances—and the ice fae has his sights locked onto me.
A warmth spreads through my jeans, and I know I have wet myself at the sight of him.
Fine leather reins looped around his ungloved finger, he tugs once—and the steed halts.
His eyes are unmoving from me as he presses one hand onto the beast’s back, then dismounts in a fluid move.
His boots hit the ice, hard.
It jolts me, curves my shoulders inwards.
I am pinned by his stare, those icy green eyes that somehow flare like lights of their own—and I can’t fucking move.
My twisted mouth trembles with each bootstep closer. The soles flatten on the ice without the slightest slip or sound. It’s his armour, his weapons that clang through my bones.
Clink, clink, clink.
I cringe against the sound, the wobble of my mouth salty with my falling tears.
Still, Emily is trapped in the net.
He spares her no look at all; and Bee might be knocked out between the cars, I don’t know, but he doesn’t bother with a glance her way.
He is locked in on me.
I shrink back, my shoulder blade pressing too hard into the nose of the car. The aches spring through me, but like the torn, fleshy sensation burning from the knife buried in my shoulder, it’s nothing compared to the ice searing at me from this fae.
His boots stop at mine.
Then, slow, he lowers to a crouch.
Forearms braced on his leather-sheathed thighs, his gaze burns from beneath long lashes—and he considers me.
I swallow, a thick, wet sound.
His gaze shifts to my throat, the bob of it, then drops to the wet patch on my jeans.
His head tilts.
Pale hair falls over his knitted brow—and he lifts that look to me.
There’s something in that look…
A short breath cuts through me.
The pale green of his eyes gleams, like faint lights in the dusty blend of torchlight and darkness. His lashes are low over those piercing, cold eyes—and his stare is spearing into me.
I remember him.
The ice fae wears some speckled dots of white on his face, peppered along the sharpness of his cheekbone—and I find the source, fast. On the arm of his leathers, a hole is carved. A bullet hole.
I have seen him before on the road, when the fae marched by us, and only stopped because Ramona fired at them. This one was on a steed then, too.
And I remember him because he bled different.
The cold fae with sharp green eyes, like frosted blades of grass, bleeds white. It’s thinner. It seeps out of the wound on his arm—the one he seems to be ignoring, no hand pressing against it, no attempt to stop the flow—and it spills like milk.
And he remembers me.