Page 7 of Hunted By Fae
I straighten to sit against the door of the truck, my gaze piercing into the red one opposite me, and I feel nothing, not a bite of pain, not a nip or a whisper.
Lips trembling around shaky breaths, I run my hands over myself, head to shoulders, down my sides, all the way to my boots.
I’m not hurt. Miraculously.
If Tesni hadn’t put herself at risk to jump off the truck and run to get me, to drag me out of the push and pull of the crowd, then…
I shudder at the thought, the image of my mangled body out there on the dirt.
But I’m here, safe.
My rescuer stirs beside me.
Tesni starts to peel away from my side. She feels over her own body for any hint of injury.
Like me, she’s unharmed.
Her breaths are wobbly as she angles her chin to look at me.
Those faint, beige freckles that usually dust her cheeks are distorted beneath a raw crimson flush and tear streaks. If I didn’t see the evidence of sobs on her cheeks, the reddened hue of her piercing glass eyes would betray her.
It’s only now that I’m looking at her, at the panic of her complexion and the tremble of her damp lips, that I feel the thickness in my own throat, the wetness on my own cheeks.
Words should come. We should speak. Say something. Anything.
But we just stare at each other, eyes brimmed with horror, glossed with silent tears.
The stampede has passed, but the dirt was too disturbed, kicked up in all the chaos, and it’s still a reddish mist clouding us.
Tesni loosens a trembling breath, and it sounds an awful lot like, “The girls.”
The girls?
What girls?
Oh.
Fuck.
It takes my mind a shameful moment too long to remember them.
Ramona, Louise, Ruby.
The urgency should strike through me. It should drive me to my feet and push me into a run. It should even ring my throat with a call for them.
It doesn’t.
I’m stuck.
Frozen against the truck, listening to the haunting quiet that drapes over the earth.
A quiet that is disturbed.
Gone are the charging beasts, the flocks of birds—and now, all that is left, is a gentle symphony of moans that could pass as the song of the wind moving through the creases of the desert. But now that I listen, I know what those moans are.
Not everyone got out the way.
Some people out there—beyond this safe nook between two tightly parked trucks—were caught in the stampede. And they were left behind in the panic of the fleeing mob.
