Page 111 of Hunted By Fae

Just what anyone would picture when thinking of a cactus.

But the other…

The one that stood taller that the two flanking it, looked bloated somehow, as though it’d eaten a hearty meal that pulsed in its belly,pulse, pulse, pulse—but if that was thepart that froze, then the part of the cactus that sent me running back to the camp was that it was black.

Pure, inky black. Glistening, liquid-like.

The nettles were a dark hue of poisonous purple, no other way to say it, really. I was looking at a cactus that had no business looking the way it did.

I’ve mulled that over for months and months. I come to the same understanding each time. It’s not a deformity.

It’s evolution.

We, the people, areadaptingto the dark. But the earth isevolvinginto it. We survive in it, the earth is changing, thriving—and in time, this will be a world we don’t recognise.

Any humans surviving out there, the ones that maybe, just maybe, might escape the blazes and the swords of the dark fae, what sort of world will their survival be in?

A place they don’t know.

A place that isn’t for us.

The dark warriors aren’t just invading our world. They aren’t just taking it. They are changing it.

It’s an understanding that sways in my gut.

Even now, I feel that hollow, carved sway of anxiety in me as I hike the road, the snow crunching beneath my boots, Emily at my heels, my light washing over the rusted remains of a highway; I felt it all the times we stopped for the night, or what we think is night, because we are tired, and I am meant to find sleep as easily as the others do; I feel it even when Bee makes me promises I’m not so sure she can deliver, because at the end of it, who are we to stand againstthem?

That anxiety has lived in me since the blackout first came—and it hasn’t gone anywhere, not for a moment. I get no relief from it.

No matter how I might look from the outside, my stomach is a constant storm at sea. It is a plague that crawls up my insides, over my tense shoulders, even tingles in my fingers.

At some point, that breaks a person, right?

If it wasn’t for Bee…

If it wasn’t for Bee, I wouldn’t be walking in silence with Emily for hours—

Until we’re far up the highway, and Emily stops to slump against an abandoned car.

Folded over, she rubs her legs, up and down, up and down. “How much longer?”

“Sore or cold?”

She huffs the word in a cloud of mist. “Both.”

I reach down for the CB latched onto my belt. The edge of my thumb flicks the speaker button.

Bee’s voice is an instant relief. “You ok? How far out are you?”

I spread the map out on the hood of the car.

Emily shoves herself up to perch on the edge. “We passed that,” she says and taps her gloved finger on the church landmark.

I nod because I know.

I’ve been tracking everything we passed to this point, every street sign, every sign towering over the highway, and the highway checkpoints.

“We’re passed the university,” I speak into the radio, a more accurate position than the church an hour back. “Looks like we’ll be coming up on the lake soon—yeah, the Woodsdale turn off.”