Page 76 of Hunted By Fae

I toss a dark look her way.

She’s leaning over her folded-basket-legs for the duffel parked on the edge of the rug. She reaches into the unzipped gap, then tugs out the plastic packaging that steals me back to the raid at Costco, when I so easily snared these off the hooks on the shelves, not knowing my entire reality was moments away from collapsing.

Bee brings the pair of CB radios to rest on her lap, then threads out a knife from the sheath on her belt.

I turn my cheek to her as she starts cutting through the packaging—and I watch Emily, eyes shifting behind her eyelids, deep in sleep.

“Can you make a deal?” I whisper.

Bee stills beside me for only a moment before she wrangles the CB radios out from the plastic sarcophagus.

“With the warriors,” I add, soft, as though to speak too loud will mean waking Emily up, but since she slept through the ruckus of the plastic packaging being cut up and warped, exhaustion must have too tight a grip on her. “Can’t you speak to them, and get them to take you back to that world?”

“Us.”

I swerve my blank gaze to Bee.

“Takeusthere,” she corrects.

“You won’t ditch me?”

Her grin is lopsided, lazy. “Not even on your deathbed.”

Her thumb flicks over the mini booklet, reading the instructions for the radios. Fair. Neither of us have a clue how to use them.

Emily murmurs on the armchair.

The frown on her brow has stretched all the way down to her twisted mouth, eyes still shut, and her legs are twitching beneath the pile of blankets.

Nightmares.

So many nightmares in this dead world.

Bee says, “I can’t bargain a way home with them.”

“Why not?”

“I told you how kintas are viewed by the fae. The dark ones are…” Strands of mousy hair fall into her face as she softly shakes her head. “They will kill me just for being what I am.”

Silence takes her for a moment.

Still, Emily’s eyelids flicker with the swerving of her eyeballs, a dream that has her as tight as the fever clutched us in quarantine.

I keep checking, just to make sure she doesn’t overhear anything that might put Bee in danger.

It takes Emily echoing this to the wrong person in the wrong moment, or the wrong person in the right moment, and that’s Bee’s death warrant.

One thing I have held true to my heart my whole life is how fucking ugly people are. That truth has really revealed itself in the dark.

“We need a plan,” Bee says. “And a lot of backups.”

I consider the radios on her lap. “Let’s start with what to do if we’re separated out there. We already use our last safehouse as a checkpoint if we’re separated, and we use codes… but I think we’re going to need more than that.”

Beside me, Bee nods, faint.

“We need strategy,” I add. “We need solutions for every possible way things can go wrong.”

The dark ones add a whole other problem to this world and how we survive it.