With the torches upright, and the gleam of the unit’s advance, the fae push into step again.
An unease uncoils through me.
From the lenses of binoculars, I have watched the dark fae from afar, carrying their burning torches into cities—before destroying them.
So I know what’s about to happen here, in this little town whose decrepit, faded welcome sign arches up the side of the road, before it’s touched with the flames of a torch, and erupts in an immediate, consuming blaze.
I hold my pinned wrists to my chest, a lame attempt at a shield, as I’m led up the road.
We breach the edge of the town.
Bordering me are the old, lovely faces of buildings built some hundred years ago, architecture lost to greed and concrete.
Soon to be ash and rubble.
The unit marches on, until it’s a spiralling rope of dark warriors spilling down the main road, beginning to end, and only then does the cold warrior remember my existence.
Without a look at me, he unfastens the rope from his belt before he drags me down to the tail-end of the unit, where the captured humans are encircled by armed guards.
My boots scuff over the road, an unwillingness tensing in me the closer we get to the humans. It’s not their gaunt faces that warn me off, or their washed-out pallor, their torn and dirty clothes, or even the way they cringe back from the guards. It’s that some stare at me—directly at me with more curiosity than I’m comfortable with, with more frowns and dark looks than I want to get close to.
I throw a look at the cold warrior, a silent and dumb question, but I hardly land my gaze on him before the shove of his hand smacks into the small of my back.
That one push propels me past a guard, right into the huddle of captives.
The pain that shoots up my spine is instant, and it fucking chokes me.
My legs tremble under me as I throw a stunned glare over my shoulder—
But the cold warrior is already gone.
He’s moving up the unit, back to his position.
My face crumples as I bend my arm back for my sore spine, as if I can reach it, rub it, soothe it.
I give up when my elbow starts to scream at the bone—and a guard curls his upper lip at me.
“In with kuris,” he barks, sharp. “Sit!”
I stagger back with the gasp, the fright bolting through me, until the heel of my boot knocks into something firm.
The guard turns his cheek to me, looking up at the rest of his unit, and just as his attention is drawn away, there’s a rustle of movement behind me.
I look down at the ground—at the Converse that my boot knocked into and is now pressed against. I trace the shoe up a pair of jeans, then a winter parka, cheap and so obviously polyester, until I find myself face to face with a woman.
Maybe around my age, maybe younger.
Sort of pretty, sort of not.
Average, like me.
And like me, she just stares.
Her hazel eyes are too doe-like, they annoy me, and there’s a bushiness to her brows that would’ve been plucked to death in the 90s.
Her rosy lips part—and then nothing. Like she wants to speak to me, maybe ask me something, but thinks better of it.
I frown at her, not a kind look, before she huffs a drawn-out breath then drops to the road.
