Page 148 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

Laughing, Damia threw her head back, just like her daughter had done in the car. They were one and the same, even if not by blood. “I’d love to see the looks on their faces when they arrive back home. It’s beyond time they met their match.”

I straightened my legs, crossing them at the ankles. “I’m not as good as everyone thinks. I’m not a scared little girl who was saved by them. I was kidnapped. I had a plan to crush the Head of Ilasall along with the other Heads and give someone I’d betrayed years ago a chance at freedom. I’m not giving up on it. I know you all have a plan to wait years, but I won’t. I can’t.”

Across the bonfire, Nara shrugged off her jacket and revealed her fully inked arms, only a few inches above her right wrist left unmarked, likely a spot for a future leader’s tattoo.

If she survived that long.

“I trust Gedeon in waiting,” Damia said. “To a point. His compound is the largest and so he has the ability to sway the rest of us one way or another. We’re much smaller but Ardaton and Coriattus are too, so relatively, we have a similar impact on our cities as he on Ilasall.” She unbuttoned her coat and rested her forearms on her thighs. “But I think it’s sometimes hard for him to accept that he is not alone in this anymore. Not like he was during the war. You know the reason we won, right?”

I hadn’t specifically inquired, but assumed the most logical course of events had taken place. “You held off the city’s military, and they retreated.”

“Not exactly. We won because Ilasall’s military was purely black-banded. The toll of their deaths held no significance to their superiors. But such management turned on them. The soldiers figured out we lived without the population control rules they were subjected to. No classification based on the function of your reproductive organs. No determination of your life quality based on your ability to have children. No elite, no commoners. So they tried to rebel against their leaders instead of decimating us. The government dealt with the riots swiftly and harshly, but that’s why they also haven’t attempted a repeat.”

Nara threw more wood into the fire, and the flames simmered for a few seconds before charging higher with renewed viciousness.

“The entire ordeal gave Gedeon the idea to play it out to a much larger extent. You know about the part of us who live inside Ilasall and spread our message in the city’s underbelly, gathering groups opposing the system, so when the time comes, we won’t be alone in launching an attack. It will be them coming to blows with each other.”

A revolution in the shape of a civil war. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because sometimes I think it’s time.” Damia peered over her shoulder, toward the rest of the field glittering in reds and yellows of bonfires crowded by the moving silhouettes of her people. “The cities are changing. And I think they won’t remain dormant for long. But Gedeon won’t listen to me or Conall. You have to convince him. You and Zion.”

Easier said than done. War was a series of battles, a game of strategy. And odds. Lives you’d be ready to sacrifice. Mine,I didn’t care about. I’d lost it thirteen years ago. But Eislyn’s, Eli’s, Ava’s, Jayla’s, Ryder’s, Sadira’s, Ezra’s, Amari’s, Tarri’s, Malaya’s, Nara’s, Damia’s?

Now that.

That beckoned a fog of tears to descend to my eyes.

Gedeon’s and Zion’s?

It was getting hard to breathe.

“You don’t have to give me a response right now,” Damia told me. “Or at all. Just know that he thinks of everyone at the compound as his family. And I’m not sure he is ready to risk it all.”

“War doesn’t come without losses. Gedeon must know that.”

“He does. That’s what is stopping him. After losing everything twice, would you be willing to risk it for the third time?”

“Twice?”

“He didn’t tell you?”

I flinched at the flame shooting high up in the sky. “Tell me what?”

“About his mother. And I don’t mean his adoptive mother. His parents were the true family to him, so I’m not surprised he hasn’t mentioned this.” She studied her leader’s tattoo, the ink practically one with her dark skin. “A heavily pregnant woman had escaped Ilasall and gave birth to him the same night. Only she bled out. Nobody knew who she was except that a green wristband had hung on her wrist. I have a feeling he blames himself for her death. First, he lost her, then his parents and Zi—” She cleared her throat. “The rest of us too.”

He had said that his family was not like I thought. But them dying twice… My throat clogged up.

Damia squeezed my thigh. “It’s a lot to ask, I know. But I suspect Gedeon won’t want to start a war with you and Zion by his side. He has watched his family be tortured and killed fromafar, and he won’t allow a repeat. That’s why you two are the only ones who can talk him into it. Without his compound, Conall and I can’t do much.”

Our bonfire swirled with shadows in between the flames, as if a fight had broken out between the night and the blaze. Its tip reached higher and higher, reaching for the stars, but the gloom quenched it at the last moment, and the injured flame retreated only to make another attempt, its will unwavering.

A gentle voice began to flow, accompanied by an occasional crackling of the fire. The flames transformed into glowing figures dancing in the night, as if called out by Nara’s song.

Death lacesthe night

Blinded by the light

We dance with a smile