Page 87 of Hunted By Fae

I should have stayed with Gary in the apartment. But when I peeked through the curtains and saw the crimson flames in the distance, I couldn’t climb the stairs fast enough before I came staggering out onto the roof.

I meant to track them.

I meant to circle their position on the map, trace their path, their direction, then get the hell out of here. But by the time I made it up to the roof, those thirty floors of stairs, and forced the locked door open with the help of a crowbar, the flames were closer.

Too close.

I don’t know how long it took me to get from the apartment on the first floor, all the way up here to the short cement ledge at the end of the roof—but it was long enough for the dark unit to reach the streets below.

I crouch behind the wall, hidden from the destroyers swarming the streets.

That is what they are.

Destroyers.

I watch them steal what’s ours, lift their flaming torches to the walls of buildings, and even stone erupts in sudden bursts of fire. Others weave through alleyways and wind though smaller streets, hunting for humans to give them a good fight, hoping for a challenge in their prey.

The warriors on hairless, skeletal steeds splinter off from the road to patrol the borders of their section.

Crouched at the short wall, I study them.

I haven’t gotten this close to the dark fae in a while. Never this close in the invasion.

There’s somethingearthyabout their movements, the way their muscles slink beneath their skin, a quiet, lethal power lurking under the surface.

I think of wild, regal beasts that hold power even in soft, quiet strolls—because no predator can stand against them.

Even the humans in all their arsenal and weaponry… nothing more than rabbits baring teeth in the face of a beast.

What’s one human with a gun against a unit of a hundred dokkalves, a race of fae sculpted from pure muscle, powered by the kill and the hunt and the blood and the death?

It’s best to adopt my strategy.

I am not foolish enough to face them.

I hide in the darkness that they unleashed upon these lands. More than the darkness of night with stars and moons, a pure blackness, thick and blinding.

In this new, dark world, everyone is blind.

Everyone but the dark fae.

I watch them down there in the streets of this dead city. And I can only see them thanks to the fires they set—fires that devour the buildings, the cars, the concrete paths and lampposts.

The red gleam of the flames rises to the smoke starting to gather and billow in the air. But I don’t watch the flames that jump buildings and inch ever closer to the high-rise apartments I’m on.

For now, I study them.

Too many surviving humans have banded together in groups. Dozens of survivors hoping there’s safety in numbers. But the truth of survival is the exact opposite.

The dark fae are hunters. Their senses are sharper than any human’s, sharper, stronger, better than any species in existence in any of the worlds, and so I know my chances.

I have a bigger goal in mind than just surviving this extermination.

I have no choice but to track them.

Plague.

That’s the word thrumming in my mind as the dark warriors scale buildings with nothing more than their solid black metal daggers to propel themselves up, slaughtering the few humans they find, howling their war cries into the air, inhaling the smoke like it’s their life source—