They all just go on as though the cold warrior didn’t just rip out an animal’s throat.
If I’m the only one who feels something about what he did, if I’m the only one who doesn’t forget it, he knows it.
The sheet-white stare turns on me before his steps do. His advance comes steady and threatening, a beeline right for me.
A grunt catches in my throat, a guttural sound that maybe should have been a word, aplease, ano, something, but all it became was a pathetic sound of the panic suddenly alight in me.
I shift my hand from my bloody shoulder to the dirt, and I push.
It does nothing.
I push again—and nothing.
The strength is leaving me.
Whatever strength I had, it’s drifting out of me, seeping out of my pores like drugs after a night out.
I try to move away from his advancing bootsteps, I try to get far back from his glaring frosty eyes—
But all I manage is a writhe of my legs before he’s on me.
Ice snatches my wrists.
A cry hitches through me as he pins my wrists together, then winds a slick, black rope around them.
I cringe from his touch, my back pressing into the frozen earth, as though I can slip through the cracks between the soil and disappear.
Undeterred, his hands abandon my wrists and he snatches the collar of my jacket. He yanks it so hard that the zip tears with arippppand exposes my wound.
The cut of his jawline tenses, tight.
He considers the wound for a moment, then his glacier eyes swerve to me—my face. He takes it in, the sheen on my brow, the furrowed line, the weight of my lashes.
I wonder if he sees death on my face, coming for me. No, not coming. Here. Now. Hand on my heart, ready to tear me away.
Whatever he sees feathers a muscle in his jaw.
His grip on my jacket remains, and it holds me up, sagging against the air, as he reaches for his thigh.
I look down the upturned curve of my nose, and watch, dazed, as he fishes through a pocket on his leathers.
He only fingers through it for a moment before he tugs out a tiny jar that gleams blue, luminous blue, and it makes me fleetingly think of the fish that glow at night.
What’s that called again?
My mind is slipping…
It is slipping far and fast.
The fight is drifting, too.
My body is falling with the descent.
I feel the pressure of the earth against my skull as I sag further and further back.
The fae releases his grip on my jacket.
I thump to the earth, limp.
