That’s how many I count.
But Connie puts too much faith in me.
I won’t protect her from the dead or the living.
The white beam ghosts over the corpses, from face to face, and I linger the light over broken necks and torn throats and gutted insides.
No sign of campfires, no embers and charcoal.
There was no camp here.
These are strays.Were.
I don’t want to know who, or what, had the ability to slaughter their way through that many fae warriors. Strays or not, a half-dozen or a hundred, it seems utterly impossible.
A shudder runs down my spine.
But I steel myself against it, against the echo in my head that’s telling me not to go to the town.
I continue on the trail.
“What—” Connie’s boots scuff over the packed dirt. “What was that?”
I turn a plain look on her—then slide it, with the torch, along the forest. The trail is clear, but we’re bordered by foliage and tree trunks, moss and boulders.
There’s nothing to see.
Butthat.
The light snags.
Tangled in shrub, like he fell over, like he was running, is a human. A man, whose face is all wrong. Twisted, frozen in a death scream.
I consider the greens and browns streaked onto his cheeks. Not dirt. Not natural. That’s fucking face paint.
He camouflaged himself in the forest.
Still died, but I wonder if this man had anything to do with the dead fae back up the trail.
“It’s just a body.”
I don’t risk getting closer, even if the spine is ripped out of his back and dangles over the back of the shrub.
I glance at Connie over my shoulder, the pallor of her complexion, the worried and pinched gaze she swerves around the forest.
“That guy is super fucking dead—and has been for a while. Don’t worry about it. Let’s go.”
Before I can turn my back on her, Connie breathes the words—
“No, not that. I heard… I heard…”
I arch a brow. “Heard what?”
“I—I don’t know… It was…” she falters, that panicked gaze still swerving around from tree to tree, bush to bush.
The thicket is dense around the trail.
So dense that, if we have to go off-path, and out into the forest, we’ll need a machete to hack our way through.
