The war cry.
I’ve heard it before.
A few times, but no more than that. Not often enough to get used to it.
It claws down my bones like the talons of a beast, it’s a tiger’s thumping snarl, a lion’s guttural roar, a bear’s hollow cry. It’s everything natural and unnatural, and it swallows up the whole fucking town.
My face twists against it.
I curl into myself, my chin digging down on my tucked-up knees.
Somethingshifts, like a switch flicked, and pure animalism releases from the whole unit. It starts as a violent ripple from the general and unravels all the way through the unit, down to the guards who shudder with the pulse.
I think of a whip lashing through the unit, and the moment it cracks, warriors are thrown into movement.
It’s a swell of black leathers.
I lose the cold warrior in the black ocean in the first heartbeat alone.
Warriors are fast to barrel down the smaller roads and lanes, disappear through windows, move as fast as the flames of the torches touched to the faces of buildings. Fires ignite in a sudden breath, like a sharp inhale that comes before a brutal scream.
I’ve never seen anything like it.
Not just the faster-than-what’s-possible fires roaring up the buildings andjumpingto the next, but the fae themselves.
Never been this close before.
Now, I am stuck, stunned, as their brutal chaos spreads throughout this small town, from ripping car doors off their hinges to scaling the buildings, using nothing but short knifes to propel themselves higher, like it’s nothing at all to climb the face of a fucking four story building.
The thunderous crashing of doors cringes the violent slapping of the flames. Fae are booting in the doors and smashing through windows, and ripping through the pickup trucks…
The fae are hunting.
Hunting for survivors.
I wouldn’t think they would find any here, in a town so remote and small, but then a scream rips free from the building to my left.
I jerk back at the sudden crash above—and trace it all the way up to the fourth floor of the building, the window that erupts in a glittering cloud of confetti.
A man, a human, leaps out of the window, caught in the glittering shards of glass. And I know he jumped, because his legs are split into a leap, his arms thrown about as if he can propel himself even further through the air.
But he doesn’t.
He plummets.
His scream carries with him all the way down—
I shut my eyes, tight.
A chorus of winces comes from the captives.
And I turn my cheek to the body that I heard splat, so I don’t have to look at it.
More screams come.
But as I eventually open my eyes, I see only one human taken as a captive, a woman who’s thrown into the circle by a warrior with a twisted, snarling face.
That woman hits the road, hard, before she’s dragged into the fold—by the tattered captives.
