Page 89 of Hunted By Fae
My throat bobs.
I gently slide the map into the backpack, then brace myself. Bones and muscles cringed, I glide the zipper shut.
The cold air mists at my face with each fractured breath.
I sling the backpack straps over my shoulders. Can’t risk buckling it around my midsection. Too noisy. So I loop the strap of the binoculars over my head and lift my chin.
I give a final sweep of the street below as my legs tense, ready to push up.
And just as I’m about to move, a glimmer of gold and blue aims right at me through the smog.
I squint to sharpen my sight through the billowing ribbons of smoke thickening in the street below.
No.
My heart drops. It hits my gut, hard.
No.
My grip tightens on the ledge.
No. No. No.
Gold and blue, gilded metal and a pale diamond. The moment I realise what that is, and why it is aiming at me, my stomach turns.
The gleam of eyes, one golden, one pale and struck with a scar.
A burn of nausea unfurls through me.
The dark warrior stands in the mouth of a lane.
Lean with muscle, his marble-toned chest is shielded by a inky vest and bound with weapon-straps. Leather trousers blend seamlessly with his soft-soled boots. Weapons glint from all over his person, the belt around his hips, the strap around his bicep, the holsters on his thighs.
The dagger in his bloodied fist is slick with crimson, and so I know it is human blood.
The body of a man is crumpled at the warrior’s boots, but the dark male has his chin lifted and his dual gaze fixed up at the roof of the high-rise…
And he’s looking right at me.
SEVENTEEN
DARE
The blade slips out of the man’s chest with ease. His final, weak heartbeat thrums up the black metal of the dagger, all the way to the hilt in Dare’s grip.
He watches death steal the man’s face.
It starts with the face. Muscles relax, features slacken, the jaw slips to the side.
Then the eyes fade.
Life has a certain spark. Even the ugliest of lives wear that gleam in the eyes.
This is Dare’s favourite part of the kill—when that spark dwindles.
Lifeless legs slump from under the man’s weight. He’s slow to fall, as though still clutching onto a frayed thread of life, but like all the other humans that the unit has found in this concrete jungle, the man falls to the ground—
And nothing.
