Page 82 of Hunted By Fae

First, I set the heavy, hand-held torch down on the floor. It’s free use. Anyone who needs it, takes it. And once I’m free of that weight, I reach down to the hip of my belt and flick on the CB.

The faint crackle of static is low, the volume down, and it lulls me into a light sleep.

Maybe I sleep for hours, maybe just minutes.

I only wake when the radio static breaks—and I’m like a new mother who wakes the moment her newborn starts crying, an instinct burrowed in me, but for the CB radio… and Bee.

I listen to the silence that breaks up the static.

Bee uses the code to communicate with me.

One moment of quiet, two seconds, then static. Then another moment of quiet, again for two seconds, then static.

She holds the push-to-talk button on her radio but doesn’t say anything.

‘Are you there?’

That’s what it means.

‘Is it safe to talk?’

It’s not like we can just start talking to each other through radio on a whim. For all we know, the other might not be somewhere safe, and the sound of a voice on radio could put us in some serious shit.

I clammer out of the makeshift bed as I scramble for the radio. I answer with the ‘wait’ code before I take the call in another room.

“We’re going to stay here for a few hours,” she tells me, her voice sheathed in crackle. The wind might be interfering with the transmission, but I manage to make out the location she gives me.

I spread the map out over a patient bed and circle the apartment block she’s taking refuge in.

“We’ll get some rest,” she goes on, “see what we can loot—and we’ll head back the moment we see any signs of them.”

Signs of the dark fae.

This is what we do, part of Bee’s masterplan. To get back to the other realm. Her lands. Her home.

We stalk them, the dark fae, their units made up of about a hundred or so warriors, moving and shifting around the continent.

We watch them, track them.

And learn them.

Each unit is led by a general, and the units don’t intercept, not since they came back for theirGreat Returntwo months ago, now.

It was strange. Their disappearance.

They marched by us, headed west to the coast, then a whole month passed before they came back.

And they came back to destroy.

Each of the units we’ve since tracked and stalked have their routes, their paths to follow. It weaves them through towns and cities and villages and farms, and they burn their way through them all.

Nothing is left alive or still-standing in their wake. Even stone burns with their flames.

Their way of doing things is… organised.

It’s meant to destroy—but flush out the survivors, too.

Two months we’ve been stalking them, and we’ve learned that each unit sticks to a section of a city or a town—like the charred northside of this city—and they burn it to rubble and ash, then hunt the blaze for any humans pushed out of the flaming buildings.