That tug is the only command he gives, silent and unspoken, before he turns on his heels, turns his back on the rising city, the block buildings, the streets, the windows shimmering with the advancing torchlights.
The cold one moves fast down the unit, his pace brisk and determined all the way to the drop-off point, like I’m a child for minding.
My creche is the captive group, my minders are the guards whose gazes turn on me with our approach.
Something about their eyes, the eyes of the dark fae, unsettles me. The hues are deeper, the colours brighter, like the intense gleam of amber eyes burning from the predatory stare of a black panther.
Those instincts flicker back to me, tense my shoulders as if I can make myself smaller under those stares following my reluctant steps.
The cold warrior doesn’t give a shit about my reluctance. Never does. He still lugs me to the guards every time and thrusts me into the group by the swing of the tether.
This time is no different.
My boots scuff over the road as I stagger into the circle. Before I’ve even righted myself, the look I throw back at the warrior is pleading.
His returning gaze is cold, uncaring, as he threads the rope from his weapons belt, then tosses it to the ground.
I don’t know why I even bother with the plea in my gaze. It won’t work, it never does.
This is the pattern.
The unit makes camp, rests, eats, whether it’s for a short few hours or what feels like a couple of days. Then the unit moves. Walks and walks and walks, and it feels like it’ll never end,until it does with the rise of the torches, the rise of light over a town, small or large, or just a street in some middle-of-fucking-nowhere settlement. The fae attack, burn, destroy. They watch the flames eat away at the evidence of human existence. Then they walk again. Make camp.
It goes on and on like that, never changing.
Another thing that doesn’t change is that, before the unit attacks a settlement, the cold fae leaves me with the captives and the guards.
Since I was struck down and my mouth was burst for just trying to get back to the cold fae, the guards all around me haven’t exactly put me at ease.
Not at all.
Not with the gleaming, unnatural stares wandering over me, head to toe, and I just look at the cold one, an unspoken plea untethering between us.
Slowly, he looks me up and down, a flicker of annoyance, before his leathers ripple and he turns his back on me.
My heart sinks.
Disappointment deflates in me like a balloon, and I fall one step back.
I don’t know what else I expect him to do with me while he attacks the city, but I also don’t trust that fucking guard, the one eyeing me up, the one who has spilled my blood once before.
The cold one abandons me here, but only makes it to the car, just a few steps ahead, when the air fractures.
I jerk against that sound that was both like a whip cracking down the unit, but also somehow a blast, an echo…
Everything is suddenly motionless.
A crack in time, a second that freezes.
All I can do is gape ahead at the spray of black blood in the distance, a small spatter in the dim crimson firelight.
A warrior on a steed reels from the strike of a bullet, and it seems to happen slowly, gradually, like time itself has decelerated, and I can make out the spray of ink that erupts from the curve of his neck.
I watch dumbly as his weight sags to the side, like he’s about to fall off the steed, and then I blink—
And I blink into chaos.
The second gunshot barely cracks through the air before my legs are collapsing beneath me, arms throwing over my head, and I’m flattening myself to the road.
