“Okay…”
“You’re too young and new to be of any use. But Kya wants to keep you.”
“You make me sound like a pet,” I mutter bitterly.
“Essentially, you are. She misses her sister. She spent years in a cage worrying about her, and it kept her going. Now she can’t be with her, because she doesn’t want her in this fight. Karma isn’t strong like Kya. She’ll die if she goes to war. You’re just a replacement for the void she feels.”
He’s so callous and cold that I feel like I need a winter coat just to be in his presence.
“Are you always so cold?”
He pauses, but no emotion crosses his face.
“It’s rational. Not cold. You’re acting too human to think logically.”
I am human.
I don’t bother arguing that.
“It feels like everyone is fighting to be the most powerful. I’m not even sure who the good guys are right now.”
“It’s not about who or what is better,” he tells me. “It’s about who can fuck the hardest, who can endure the most, and who can kill the quickest. It’s all we’re about. It’s all I know. Welcome to our fucked up world.”
Cold chills break across and pebble on my skin. It’s like he’s just a shell of a person instead of someone capable of feeling anything. I don’t particularly like this fucked up world if that’s how things are.
“Can’t you just kill all the anointed people? You’re supposed to be some crazy big power, right?”
He narrows his eyes as he turns to face me, and I immediately wish I could chase those words and swallow them before they hit his ears.
“Tongues can be cut out if they’re constantly being annoying. Remember that.”
I almost want to hug my tongue and comfort it when it shudders at his threat.
“And I could kill them,” he adds, turning back around to open a book, “but it’s not my mission. All it would do is draw attention to me, and more would come. It’s not smart to announce myself to an anointed’s team. The queen’s mongrels killed one
anointed, and now a team has come. That’s how it works. They’ll steadily recruit more humans, arm them, and even give them protective amulets that handicap some fey power from—”
“Incoming!” A booming voice interrupts anything else he was going to say, and he’s out the door before I can process the sound of roars outside.
In my haste, I fall off the damn stool when I try to get up, but I scramble to the door to see… I don’t know what the hell I see.
Every freaky, gory movie I’ve ever watched couldn’t have prepared me for this.
Pale, sickly-thin, and black-eyed things with sharp fangs and ashy skin are rushing out of the woods and attacking all of them. The sun has just set, so it’s light enough to tell what’s going on, but too dark to fully see it for what it is.
“Hit the lights!” Slade barks.
“They’re not working!” someone else yells. “They’re fucking destroyed.”
Magic! They have magic! Can’t someone just throw a wand toward it, say “el reapairato” or something and fix that shit?
I hover in the doorway, watching in disbelief as everyone uses power I didn’t know could exist. Kya is like a machine, slicing through them and lashing out red beams and… Holy shit… She has fireballs?
Lights finally come on, and the creatures scream into the night and retreat back somewhat. The light doesn’t cover much ground, but the blue streaks swirling out of Slade seem to be slicing through them like a hot knife against butter.
That’s disgusting.
And they bleed a black, oozing, festering type of blood.