And ice strikes me.
His gaze is nothing less than that. But he holds my stare for only a moment before he looks at the rope tied around my wrist—where my flesh is torn and scraped.
He considers it for a long moment.
I almost think he’s going to use the balm on me, on my wounds. But before the thought can take root, he’s grabbing the jar and screwing on the lid.
He tosses it into the satchel, then pushes up to stand.
For a moment, he looks down at me, lettuce eyes returned to that soft barely-there green hue. Then, he’s tossing the tether aside.
A slender hand catches it.
I turn a dark look on Glass’s fist, firm around my rope, and in that heartbeat, the cold warrior has grabbed his satchel from the ground and stalked off.
She doesn’t look at me.
Neither does Shark.
Not once in the time it takes a quivering captive to come and build the fire on the soil, and Shark kicks down headstones to make space around it, do they acknowledge me.
Glass just holds onto my rope like a leash.
I stay on the headstone I’ve sat on since the slaughters, the one burned into my mind.
The residue of fear is cold in my chest, like brewing pneumonia, and I rub the ache as though it’ll do anything. Spoiler, it doesn’t.
I would take some air from the inhaler if the cold one was around, but he’s gone, vanished beyond the camp, into the darkness. And even then, it would be a waste of the little that’s left.
No, what I would do if I could is smoke a cigarette, throw back too many shots, maybe take something to really fuck my mind up.
But what I need is dissociation.
I need my mind to separate from my body, to flitter away, out of reach, and for me to exist in slow autopilot mode.
It’s strange that it hasn’t happened already.
I don’t do well under pressure, never have, and I sure as fuck don’t cope with these kinds of horrors. So why the hell am I still here?
Not here, in this unit, or here in this world…
Herein my mind, in my soul, all my awareness and cognition intact.
For the first time in my whole life, as far back as I can remember at least, shit has really hit the fan—
And I’m still here.
NINETEEN
Rows of stone memorials sprout up from the earth behind us.
No actual bodies are buried under the stone towers with names carved into them, but with the headstones kicked down around the campfire, the memorials feel more like a privacy partition between us and the summit of the camp.
At least, it feels a bit safer to me, like my back is protected from the massacre that happened up there—and the fae who performed it.
Now, a lull has draped over the camp.
The cold one isn’t back yet from the darkness he went off to, and I’m stuck with the others.
