On instinct, my finger points with stiffened determination, absolute sacrifice, and my words come stronger:
“He’s running! Over there! Look—he’s getting away!”
The guard’s cheek turns to me.
The buttery silk of his eyes flickers in the dim light, the battle of flames and darkness thrashing all around us.
I don’t watch the fires engulf cars or bodies, torches fallen at angles leaning on bonnets and motorcycles.
I watch the guard.
His stare locks onto the runaway—the one who disappears into a pocket of darkness, beyond my sight, where the firelight doesn’t reach, and in the moment of a strangled heartbeat, the guard is bolting after him.
The snow kicks up behind him before he’s gone, a dusting that sprays over my quivering legs, and I stare at the bloody spot where his boots were planted.
Boot prints, settled into the bloody snow that’s turned into a pinkish slush, just an inch from the toes of my own shoes.
It takes a moment for it to click in my mind. The guard is gone… but the remains of his threat linger in me, those icy prickles cascading down my insides.
I don’t know what that guard meant to do with me, what fate he chose for me, despite that I’m under the guardship of the cold one, but I know it wasn’t good.
I was that close, aninchclose, to something really fucked up.
The breath I loosen is guttural.
It’s fast followed by a retch.
My hands find my chest, the ribs that rattle with the racing heartbeats battering against them.
I hold, firm, and let the harsh jolts rinse through me. It’s not a shudder that has me in its grip, but a violent jerk that batters me every other second.
It comes with another retch, one that reaches all the way down to my cramped stomach.
I breathe through the stirs of nausea and the jutting of my gasps, in through the nostrils, out through my trembling lips.
The bile stirring in me has reached my throat.
I swallow back the singe and, tears clinging to my lashes, twist around to look ahead.
And I see destruction.
The bridge melts into the city, but I can hardly make out the snowy road through the smoke billowing up from the flames. Black, thick smog that clouds ahead, but it hasn’t reached all the way up the high-rises yet—
And so I see them.
Like a swarm of locusts, the warriors are scaling the high-rises, a race to the windows where the gunfire is spitting from.
But not all fae are up there, chasing down the humans who waited for us, who waited until the unit was trapped on the bridge before they opened fire.
Some warriors have stayed on the bridge. Those fae are darting all around me.
So many captives have made a break for it.
I squint down at the end of the unit, where the cold one discarded me—and now, just a handful of people remain. Kneeling on the snow, huddled together, trembling like leaves in a blizzard. But more than a dozen, gone.
They are still too out in the open, too exposed. So the thought of rejoining them isn’t one that crosses my mind for more than a split second.
I just need to hide out from the gunfire and wait for the cold warrior to return.
