Page 63 of Hunted By Fae

Yet here he is, towering over us, eyes blazing, and he doesn’t so much as fucking stagger as he turns and marches back to the waiting, watching warriors.

I lose sight of him.

Stuck to the nose of the van, he’s out of my line of sight—and Bee doesn’t let up. Her hold is a cage trapping me… or protecting me.

I don’t fight it.

I just tremble, a leaf in a violent storm, barely holding onto a frail branch.

I don’t move.

I hide.

I hide from the glaring truth, that these… thesefae… these warriors are invading us in secrecy, in the shrouded shadows of a blackout, in complete silence—

And I don’t think we’ll survive what’s to come.

TWELVE

BEE

Of all the safehouses we’ve taken shelter in over the months, none have been as quiet as this one. But each time we’ve sourced safehouses, made them our temporary campsites, not homes, never homes, there hasn’t been so few of us.

We arrived in quarantine with five.

Lost Louise and Ruby there. Gained Emily.

Now, Ramona is gone, too.

The sight of her gaping throat is seared into the grooves of my brain.

I squeeze my eyelids, tight, as though it’ll banish the imprint from my mind.

It won’t.

That will stay with me for the rest of my life.

And all the time she was alive, no throat, just simultaneously bleeding out and suffocating, I couldn’t help her.

Couldn’t do anything. Not even reach out and hold her hand.

It’s not that the warrior would have skewered me for it. It’s that, to let go of Tesni for even a moment, and risking her instincts taking over to run or scream or do something stupid like Ramona did, means I would be without her now.

Ramona is proof of instincts overruling reason.

Those warriors were just passing by, filing down the road, the occasional curious glance at us, but no break in formation.

All she had to do was wait it out, like the rest of us. Emily stayed hidden in the backseat of the car. Tess and I were out in the open, huddled together, waiting.

That’s all Ramona needed to do stay alive.

Instead, a moth to a glimmer in a blackout, a glimmer of light that danced over her face, and she let her terror reach too high, her anxieties twist her mind, and once that pure, unfiltered panic really struck her, she attacked.

In Ramona’s mind, it would have been a reaction, a move of self-defence. The moth was an attack. Her mind worked against her, and the price was her life.

Now, there are just three of us in this musty apartment.

I swear the windows haven’t been opened since the blackout struck.