Weeks that I’ve been inhiscaptivity.
So it doesn’t make sense for the air to still be as chilled as a walk-in-freezer.
Unless we are moving north. But that’s just a guess. There is only one absolute.
Canada is fucking huge.
Likebeyond-my-comprehensionmassive.
Before, with Bee, she took charge of mapping out our stops, our distances, our travels, everything.
I was a part of that, I pulled my weight, but… I know now that I never would have been able to keep my mind right in this blackout without her.
I would have panicked at the wrong moment, gotten myself turned around in the dark, or worse, in the forest…
And then I’d be gone.
People vanished all the time in the Before.
National parks lost a whole load of people year after year, all around the world.
That really strikes me.
This tether that cuts into the flesh of my wrist, scratches and tugs at my bruised, raw skin, might be the only thing keeping me safe.
Safe from the other fae.
Safe from wandering off, a misstep down the edge of the road beneath my boots, a slip down a hill, getting turned around at an abandoned car—and that would be it.
Gone.
Vanished.
The shudder that strikes me is too violent.
I reach out for the cold warrior in the dark—a hand feeling around the obscurity in front of me, angled to the left.
Then I feel it.
His fingers, light on my gloved ones.
The breath that releases from me is curt.
I needed that, to know that he’s there, that he hasn’t wandered off and left me behind to die.
Just a heartbeat’s moment, our fingertips pressed together, before his hand is gone, and though I can’t see him right there beside me, I sense the silent snarl he’s aiming my way.
I touch my hand to my mouth, a silent gesture for the return of the inhaler, then hold out my palm upwards.
It’s all practiced now.
Weeks, and he has learned my gestures, just as I have learned the meaning behind each tug of the tether, learned to feel the air shift with the chill of his dark looks.
So it’s only a moment before the familiar curved plastic of the inhaler presses into my hand, returned to me.
I shake it first, a way to track how much of the medicine is left.
And now I know, not much.
