Atieran turned back toward me, a baffled look on his face. “You think I like this? Do you think I condone the kidnappings?” He scoffed and shook his head. “You know nothing about me, girl. If you really knew the truth about us, your kind would not persecute us so much.”
“Let me go, and I promise I will dedicate myself to understanding the faeries. We can learn from each other. This… imprisonment… this forced servitude, isn’t good for either of us. We need to learn to coexist.”
Atieran scoffed again; he didn’t appear impressed by my promise. “Oh, darling, you only say that because you’re the one in the hole, not me. What if it were the other way around? Would you be so willing to compromise then?” His eyes gleamed in the lantern’s light, shining like fireflies in the darkness.
Looking away, I drilled my anger into the ground. He couldn’t understand what I was going through. He was too invested in his faery clan. As a prince, how could he care what a mere human wanted or needed?
My eyes skimmed over the lumps of sacks he’d dropped down to me. Or maybe he could understand. Deep down inside, he was struggling to, I could see that now. Why else would he help me? I couldn’t climb out of there by myself, and there was no one except Atieran who could help. I had to get him on my side somehow.
But was he only on my side because we were betrothed? Oh, god. Why did I have to get into situations like this?
I flicked my gaze back up at him and found him studiously eyeing me back, watching my every move. Creepy? Maybe. But he wasn’t a creepy guy. At least, he didn’t come off as one. In fact, his lack of inhibition made my skin tingle, and I had to turn away from his constant stare.
He was fae. I’m human. It would never work.
“I need to get out of here.” Hot tears streamed down my cheeks, and I hoped he couldn’t see them in the darkness. The lantern sat by me, and I realized too late that my tears were probably shining like beacons on a shoreline.
“I know.”
“Will you help me?”
Silence answered me as the calls of the wild things echoed through the vast forest. They were louder than I’d ever thought. Birds, nocturnal animals, and those seeking prey were all out tonight. Trapped in my hole, I felt like bacon served up on a plate. What kept all the predators at bay? How did the faeries keep them from invading their camp? Enchantments? Magic? Traps? There were other things just as bad as faeries roaming in the night. There had to be something keeping them away.
“All right. I’ll help you.”
I jerked my head up. “Really?” I swayed, feeling better but still woozy.
He tilted his head, his lips pressed tight. “Yes, really. I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“I have one condition.”
I stopped the giddy little two-step shuffle I was unconsciously doing and eyed him again. “You can’t be serious.” A myriad of horrible requirements he could possible tag on to this ordeal flashed through my mind. I scrunched up my nose, wary of what he could ask. “What sort of condition?”
“You take me with you.” k`1~2
My mouth dropped open. “But you—you’re fae. You don’t even look human. How can I take you to the human realm? You’ll be isolated, studied. Dissected. There’s no place for you there.”
“Yes, there is.”
He dropped the rope into the hole and climbed down to me. I watched his descent, hard yet smooth muscles flexing with ease from years of use. He kept himself well-conditioned, and I couldn’t help but admire his athleticism.
I refocused my thoughts. “How?”
He landed onto the pit’s floor and turned to look at me as he dusted off his hands. “I’m human.”
“You’re fae. Even if you were once human, there’s no way for you to change back now. You’re trippin’.”
He lifted an eyebrow, not getting my jest. “Trippin’?”
“It means you’re crazy. Out of your mind. Losing touch with reality.”
“Oh, right. No, I am not trippin’. I’m serious. There are almost none left in the clan who remember, but my brother and I, we’re human. We were taken as children and assimilated into the fae culture quite young. Unlike the others who are brought into our clan, I still remember my human life.”
My eyes widened. If I wasn’t catching flies with my mouth, I probably could. And I had thought nothing surprised me anymore. So wrong.
“You remember being human?” I walked around him, taking him in from head to toe as my shock set in. “But I thought… I thought the faeries wouldn’t have a human as a leader. You’re all of a hive mind, right?”
“I am fae, yes, in this form. But I believe I can sever my connection to the clan and become human once more since the power of the hive never took my memories away.”
“How do you know this?”
“I don’t. I dreamt it once.”
The guy was seriously losing it.
“You’re going off a dream? You can’t seriously be contemplating this. We’ve transitioned those taken by faery clans before, but there’s no way in hell you can transition. After two weeks, it’s too late. It’s too painful and harmful to the subject. You’d go insane until you’re either killed or returned to the clan.”
“Yes, I understand your perspective, but I’m old. I’ve been alive for centuries. I don’t think the same thing will happen when the magic is already part of every cell of my body. Those past two weeks and integrated into the clan would suffer permanent changes and couldn’t tolerate it, but not me. The magic makes all of us immortal—we can be killed but don’t die of old age—but somehow it has also made me… stronger. I am no longer affected by things that affect the younger ones.”
I took in what he told me, processing it as I stood there.
“Look, your memories were returning as you ran, right? When I venture too far, mine get crystal clear. I can remember my mother’s face, my father’s… everything. I can still connect to the hive thoughts and know what everyone is thinking, but I can also block them out.”
“I do remember some… I’m some sort of scientist or soldier who deals with faeries, aren’t I?”
He grinned, a smile I was starting to like a bit too much. Looking away, I felt the rush of heat on my face.
“Don’t look away. Do I disturb you that much?”
I shook my head, not knowing what to say to that. “Of course not.”
“Then why do you avoid looking at me?”
“I—I’m not sure. I just can’t sometimes.”
He inhaled slowly before straightening up and nodding. “We have a lot of ground to cover, and we need to get moving before the night is through and my brother wakes from his slumber. Are you okay to do this? Your head was badly hit.”
I nodded. “Yes. It’s now or never. I’m not letting any more time pass me by. Let’s do it.”
Chapter Eleven
Jay
The faeries attacked near dawn. Taking heavy fire, we were trying our best to keep from getting hit by not only arrows but also magical orbs which exploded when they smacked into the surrounding tree trunks. If residue from it fell on the skin, it stung like a mother. If it got anyone on their main torso, it could shut them down faster than a bullet to the heart. They were made from the stuff of nightmares.
Ridley kept her cold demeanor, staying calm while shouting orders to all the team and ordering Tinker to set off his traps. They were already being detonated, taking bunches of faeries with them or getting set off by faeries on the hunt for them. All of us were busy shooting off guns and spraying all the iron we could into the air. Noxious fumes from the metal, which were irritating to humans, were fatally poisonous to the faeries. It spewed from the gas bombs some of us threw around in a semi-circle. Unfortunately, most of the battle was being fought with airborne weapons, and neither group had gotten close enough to really make a dent in the other. The only thing we had going for us was that the faeries were getting pummeled by the traps before t
hey could get any closer.
I glanced around the group, knowing we were now surrounded, but the agents held modern weapons more fatal to the faeries than their weapons were to us. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t come out with any kind of crazy magical spells or curses which could wreak havoc on our weapons’ functionality. Only time would tell.
Ridley yelled out toward Tinker, motioning for the gadget specialist to join her. “You got the bag?” she asked.
He nodded and held out something he’d unclipped from his bag. I threw them curious glances as they kept popping off shots into the forest. What the hell were those two up to? I shifted my position, taking the opportunity to make it around the others and get closer to Ridley. Whatever was going down, I was going to know about it.
The bag Tinker held out toward Ridley was too tiny to hold anything large except maybe some iron powder bombs. She pulled it open enough for her hand to slide in and fumbled through it. Her forearm disappeared into the blackness of the bag, like it had been sucked into another dimension. She pulled out something I’d never seen before. Based on everyone’s faces, no one else had seen it either. Everyone eyed it between shots.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, unclipping a grenade and tossing it as far as I could. It probably didn’t have any effect on the faeries—they weren’t that close—but the sound of it might send them scattering to stay away from the flying iron shrapnel. It gave the team a generous radius to prep for the next wave of attack.
“It’s a bespelled sack I acquired from the last faery pack I was sent to exterminate,” Tinker explained. “It has magical qualities and can hold something a thousand times its size. I brought it in case of emergency, to hold my larger toys.” He smiled, flashing teeth full of metal caps. He thought he looked awesome. Most thought he looked like a ghetto superstar.
“It’s full of anti-faery weaponry we’ve developed against their magic,” Ridley explained further. “Some of it is still in testing, but I had Tinker bring us some just in case we needed it for backup.”
“I’ll be damned!” Craig yelled out, grabbing his empty magazine and tossing it on the ground before reaching into his bag for another one. “I could use one of those bags myself. It’d be the definition of endless ammo.”
I shook my head. “This isn’t a videogame. These are real creatures out here, some who used to be humans. This is getting out of hand, Ridley.”
Craig threw me a sidelong glance before focusing his guns on the perimeter again, muttering under his breath. If anyone questioned Ridley, he usually caught them with a fist to the jaw, but not me. He tolerated my inquiries only because we were brothers.
“Anything that’ll stun them and make them easier to catch and imprison would be better. We don’t have to kill them,” I said.
“These suckers need to die.” Becca was still chewing on some gum and sending out shots with her sniper rifle as she concentrated on each target. None of us could be sure she was hitting anything except by the look of concentration on her face. A slight smirk every time she shot off a round, accompanied by a haughty chuckle, confirmed each of her kills. Her eerie joy was disturbing. She was getting those faeries out there without a problem and thrilled to be doing it too.
It made my blood run cold.
“What if Amy’s out there? I hope you have something more humane in there that’ll freeze them all at once, because there’s no such thing as endless ammo and no honor in killing innocents.”
“Well, if this doesn’t work, it’ll at least buy us some time to get back home,” Ridley stated.
“Home? We’re not leaving without Amy.”
Ridley refused to acknowledge my protest as she began to assemble a new weapon, a small round cylinder connected to a disk. Once she clicked everything into place, it lit up with blue lights. It didn’t look fancy or even magical. It looked futuristically robotic. She was about to use it when a loud resonating noise slammed into the group.
Bam!
All of us, including Ridley, went flying to the side as a blue orb sped by, grazing her shoulder and setting her jacket on fire. She tried to shake it off, wincing in pain and fighting hard to stay conscious.
“It’s burning! Take it off!” she screamed as Tinker and Craig jerked off the material. They tossed it to the ground as the rest of the blue orb consumed her jacket. Ridley stared at her arm where it had charred her skin. Blackened streaks burned through her undershirt and onto her shoulder, leaving deep lesions. She frowned but could still move her fingers. Her face screwed up in pain.
“Get me the med kit,” she demanded.
Becca didn’t hesitate and ripped open the kit, heading over to work on Ridley’s arm. Tinker finished putting together whatever contraption Ridley had pulled out. He reassembled the mechanisms easily, fitting together the pieces while Ridley got treated. She mumbled curses, leaning against a tree trunk as Becca pressed ointments onto her blackened skin. She appeared relieved as Becca finally wrapped her arm and pulled out a sling for her to use.
“Okay, you’re good. The cream will numb it. The Silvadene should neutralize any infection too. You’ll need a rejuvenating laser treatment when we get back to the agency, or you’ll scar badly.”
Ridley nodded, tightening her mouth as she pressed her eyelids shut. She was pale and sweaty.
“How do you use that thing?” I hollered as another rush of blue orbs and arrows flew by, missing everyone but keeping us on our toes.
“Tinker!” Ridley nodded as she breathed hard through the pain. “Press the yellow button on the remote and it’ll fly. Get it over the largest concentration of faeries in the direction we need to go to get out of here, then once it’s in position, press the red button, and it’ll explode. It’ll send liquid iron raining down on anyone nearby. The iron will burn through the faeries’ skin and flow through their veins, killing them almost instantly.”
She closed her eyes, and everyone glanced toward her with concern. She was going to pass out before we got out of there. Norstrom grabbed the remote from Ridley as her head bobbed down and she lost consciousness.
“Tinker, since you know how this works, you’ll be the one to set it off.” Craig spewed out commands like a natural-born leader. “Jay, help me carry Ridley out of here, Hanley, you’ll provide backup to Tinker as he gets the drone in position. Becca, grab the rest of the supplies, whatever you can carry. Norstrom, you’ll be point man, and I’ll take the rear. Once Tinker hits the red button, run like hell, got it?”
We all nodded and moved into position. Tinker turned on the remote and sent the drone into the air, heading toward the direction of the faery tribe near our escape route. He scanned the area, hovering closer to the ground to avoid the blue orbs still pelting through the air. The little disk had a small force field that kept the arrows off, allowing them to bounce right off, but each hit took some of its reserve shield power. He was going to have to detonate soon.
“In position!” he hollered out. The group was ready to run, but he waited for Craig to confirm.
Ridley’s pallor increased as moments ticked by, but we managed to drag her to her feet and wake her enough to move her forward, sweating profusely as she leaned on Craig. She was struggling to stay awake from the poisonous burns on her arm, and I could tell from Craig’s stoic face that he was worried.
“Let’s go home,” she whispered, cradling her head onto Craig’s shoulder as he hoisted her into his arms.
“I got you.”
She nodded before her eyes fluttered, and she lost consciousness again.
“All right, fire when ready.” Craig motioned toward Tinker. The gadgets expert held the remote up before pressing the large red button on the detonator. An earth-shattering whoosh sounded out as the trees lit up, sending a downpour of iron fluid spraying out of the disc and into the forest, soaking the trees, ground, and air, coating everything with a fine iron aerosol. The whole place reeked of metal, along with a kind of coppery smell which normally clung to the scent of blood.
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The forest erupted into a chorus of feral screams, and we raced out of there, running for our lives as we held our breaths through the light metallic mist.
The noise was unbearable, piercing through my ears. With our guns and equipment in hand, none of us could clamp the sounds out of our heads. We all groaned as the cacophony of yells and screaming tore through our brains. It was agony, but we continued to work through the underbrush, slicing it away to form a trail home, even though it’d been cleared when we’d first arrived there.
The forest took it all back, growing at an alarming rate over our previous tracks and making the trek back home more difficult. It was a living creature, this forest. Unrelenting and unforgiving. It reeked of wild magic and fought us the whole way out. Faeries constantly popped in and out, running wild like they were on fire, their skins melting under the iron spray while screaming like lambs being slaughtered.
I tried my best to ignore the inhuman noise as we made our way out, watching the melting faeries scurry toward water to wash the burning metal away. But it was too late for them. The iron was manufactured to travel deep into their skin and tarnish their blood, spreading across their bodies until there was nothing left but ash. Many had already fallen lifelessly to the ground, no longer moving or breathing.
The entire scene was like something out of a horror movie. We rushed out past the bodies and into thinner woods where the underbrush didn’t grow back quickly and the trees didn’t protest at our presence. We were lucky the iron didn’t affect us; we were all coated with a thin sheen of the stuff, making us look almost like robots as we made our way out of the forest.
Part of the assimilation process to turn humans into fae included removing the iron from the blood, detaching the hemoglobin. That was why our blood was red and theirs was a sickly green-blue. It was also why the process of transitioning was permanent after two weeks. Return a faery to the human realm, and it would die from the lack of iron in its blood.
It was why time would soon run out for Amy if she didn’t get out of the clan’s clutches. But this… it was unprecedented. How to retrieve her from these deadly lands? How to do it without suffering the same fate or worse? The iron spray helped, but it wasn’t a good solution to rescue her. It could even harm Amy as she transitioned.