Dark Souls

by Quinn Blackbird

  “Is he your dad?” I ask.

  Probably shouldn’t just jump right into it. She’s the type that needs more buttering up first. But I’m impatient, and I still need to take the next step in my plan before I can get any rest.

  Still, it works well enough. Nicole shakes her head. Dark hair rustles over her shoulders. “No.”

  That’s all she says. Offers no explanation, no alternative. But now I’m more than certain that the man tied up is her lover.

  I think of what I would do for Adrianna—what I am doing for her—and she’s just a friend. A friend in this world is baggage, there’s no doubt about it. A lover is a trunk-load of baggage.

  “Who is he?” I pry.

  Her glassy eyes turn dark as she lowers her lashes. “What’s it to you?”

  I shrug, playing it cool. My nonchalant gaze hooks onto hers. “Nothing. I’m just curious.”

  “Be curious somewhere else,” she snaps at me, and she’s found her venom again. “I’m not your pal.”

  Pal.

  Her accent is thick and twangy, but I can’t place it. Sounds mixed. Still, pal is British, and this might help me break the ice that little bit more. I need more.

  I snub her dismissal and crouch down to refasten the laces on my boot. It doesn’t need fixing, but it gives me a moment longer with her. “Whereabouts in the UK are you from?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? Piss off.”

  Great, she’s sticking to her defensive manner. That won’t get me very far. I need her walls to crumble, somehow. Without her as my shield, I won’t be able to keep a safe distance from Caspan. And I need that to avoid him after I strike this deal with him—if he even accepts the bargain, that is.

  “Was just asking,” I mutter and tighten my bootlace. As I stand up, I add, “Looks like we’re both going to lose people really soon. Thought I’d let you know that I know how it feels.”

  She scoffs a horrid sound. “You know how I feel? Please. You barely know Adrianna. She’s a wench. Worse than you are, and you’re pretty fucking shit. I’ve been with Georgi for months. You know nothing about how I feel.”

  She pushes up to her feet and takes a determined step toward me. Our noses are nearly touching, but neither of us backs down.

  How quickly plans go awry.

  I force myself to swallow back my pride, resist the urge to shove her back onto her arse. “Maybe I haven’t known her for that long,” I say, “but I know all to well what it feels like to lose people I care about. Guess it makes it harder to care after a while.”

  Something flickers over her face. Surprise, maybe. Dismay. A reminder of those she’s lost in this new world. Whatever it is, it’s gone before I can blink, and she’s got a face like glass again.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” I say and turn my back on her.

  As I walk away, I can feel her gaze cutting into my back.

  It’s hard to tell so soon, but I think I made progress. Broke down the barrier between us just a little. A bit more, and I’ve got myself a deal. Just need to figure out what she wants now—other than the safety of her lover, of course. That’s a rabbit I can’t pull out of my hat of tricks.

  Now for my next trick.

  I pass by Adrianna as I make my way through the lower camp. She’s sprawled out on her side over the log, asleep. But it’s a ghastly, worrying sight. Her skin glitters with sweat, and her breaths come out in short, choppy pants.

  I start my way up to the tents ahead—the only tents propped up in camp. But before I can leave the human side of camp, a dark-haired fae steps in front of me. His eyes are grey, like sword blades of steel, and he’s fully dressed in his armour. Still on guard duty, I suspect.

  “Back.” He punches his demand with a hard shove on my shoulder.

  It throws me off balance. I stagger a few steps before I right myself.

  “Kuris, there!” He points to the cluster of humans some metres behind me.

  “I need to speak to the General,” I say in a whisper. Don’t want anyone from my group hearing me.

  Last thing I need is the humans thinking I want to be around the General. This is purely business.

  “He’s expecting me,” I add.

  The lie comes effortlessly, easier out than the truth. Funny that, isn't it? How lies can feel like warm butter over the tongue, but truth can feel like a ball of razors forcing their way up your throat.

  The look of disgust on the fae is unmistakable. It’s hard to say whether he’s disgusted by me, or by the information that his dark fae leader is expecting a human to come to his tent. Either way, he looks like he’s just stuck his head inside and sniffed the guts of a week-old carcass.

  Looking me up and down, the fae’s face twists into a snarl and he points his finger at me. His fingernails are pearl-white, and sharpened to rip out throats and eyeballs, I’m sure of it.

  “Stay,” he commands.

  I just nod, then watch as he stalks off to the massive, looming black tent at the higher end of camp. He’s gone for a short moment before I see him coming back towards me. His armour glows a rusty-orange colour and I think of dried blood.

  “Go.” He gestures behind him to the tent, and the disgust hasn’t left his face. “Now, kuri.”

  I rush past him before he can change his mind and stop me. Not that he would—he’s on orders by the General to let me pass. That sends chills all over my body. Mind, I need the General to be open to seeing me for my plan to have any shot of working. And he already ignored me while we were in a village during the raid. Now, he’s going to hear me out. But that doesn’t mean I’m not worried.

  Why would a dark fae General be at all interested in what a measly human captive has to say?

  I must have more power than I thought. And that can only mean good things for my plan, but dangerous things for me.

  6

  I peel apart the tent flap and slip inside.

  Compared to last time, the tent looks gutted. Nothing is inside. Not even the air mattress is set up. All it holds are some fur blankets on the ground and those glass jars of glowworms plotted along the dirt.

  Caspan is spread out over the blankets of fur.

  My cheeks burn with flames the moment I spot him, and I’m finding it difficult to swallow back the sudden saliva in my mouth.

  He’s propped up on his elbows, as if just disturbed from sleep (maybe he was), and he’s half-naked. His chest is bare, his clothes discarded on the ground, and he wears a pair of leather pants—that’s all.

  Bared on his chest are those odds scars I noticed back when I first saw him. Then, I only noticed the stretchmark-like scars on his big arms and neck, but now it’s clear they spread much farther than that. They spear all over his body, like pearl-white tree branches forking off in their own directions.

  There are markings too. Ink, like mine. Only his ink isn't faded—the foreign shapes that mark his body are etched with the darkest ink I’ve ever seen. So dark that the ink shimmers like it’s still-wet.

  The flush on my cheeks burns hotter than flames. I might have once had a girlfriend (one I cared a lot about), but that doesn’t mean the male body doesn’t have an effect on me. I swing both ways, and Caspan’s body is enough to clutch my insides with dread. Never good to fancy your captor, is it? Even if it’s just a physical appreciation.

  His lashes are drooped low over his inky-black eyes, as though he’s just been woken up from a deep sleep. He watches me lazily, but even with his tired gaze on me, I feel the danger creeping up my spine.

  “You have no clothes to collect, kuri,” he tells me darkly. But I get the feeling he knows that I already know this. Doubt he let me into his tent just to tell me that. “What brings you to me?”

  “I need your help,” I say.

  Best just to dive straight into it. With dark fae, I doubt it’s wise to dance around motives for too long.

  I take hesitant steps closer to him.

  I stop halfway in the tent, beside a cluster of glowworms-jars. The l
ight shimmers around his strong chin and turns the rosy touch of his full lips to a faint pink that shines. The rest of his porcelain-like face is shrouded in shadows. Darkness. Where he belongs.

  “My friend,” I start, but my words quickly fail me, and fear bottles up in my chest. I shift my weight from foot to foot, looking down at the fur blankets he lies on. Can’t bring myself to meet his dark gaze. “She’s sick. Dying, really. She was shot a few towns back and—well the wound ... it’s infected—”

  “And?” There’s no feeling in his tone at all. It’s flat and blank, like white paper ready to cut flesh.

  I keep my gaze downcast. “And,” I say, “you can help her. If I could get some of that black powder the healer used on me, I could save her.”

  He’s quiet for a moment. The moment stretches too long, and I finally look up at him.

  He’s considering me with a hint of curiosity. His eyes look more awake than they did before, but there’s still that faint disinterest he carries with him.

  Finally, he asks, “Her life is of value to you?”

  “She’s my only friend.” I shrug, then hug my arms around myself, as though they are shields made to protect me from his hungry gaze.

  “This is no concern of mine,” he says, his voice a low growl, rough with sleepiness. “If she dies, she dies. There will always be more kuris.”

  Rolling my jaw, I run a hand down my tired face.

  I lift my pleading gaze to his. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. In return, I’ll tell you about my scars, my tattoo—whatever it is you want to know about me, I’ll tell you.”

  His lashes lower into something dangerous. Shadows of his long eyelashes stretch down over his pale cheeks. For a long, quiet moment, he studies me.

  The silence presses down on me like a pressure cooker.

  Then, he pushes up from his elbows until he’s sitting upright. He brings his leg closer to his body and rests an arm over the raised knee, freeing up space on the furs.

  His fingers move slightly, and it’s clear he’s summoning me over to him. My muscles fight me every step of the way, but I force myself over to the blankets, then slowly lower myself to sit at his bare feet.

  I’m stiffer than a statue on his furs. Feels too much like sitting on his bed, and that’s a level of interest I’m not keen on exploring with him.

  “I offer you a bargain, kuri.” His eyes are as dark as his tone. “You answer my questions truthfully—and I will provide you with the means to save your friend.” His eyes level on me and a chill runs through me. “I will know if you are lying to me.”

  Best tell the truth, then. Don’t want to risk it.

  Besides, what harm will it do to tell him a little about me? Once he gets his answers, he’ll lose all interest in me and—with Nicole as my shield—I can avoid him for the rest of my miserable life.

  I nod firmly. “Deal.”

  “Deal,” he echoes with a faint, dangerous smile playing on his lips. “You must accept. No less than that.”

  “I accept your bargain,” I clarify, and this seems to appease him.

  His dangerous smile slips away, and returned is his darkness.

  “So I guess it’s true,” I add. “What the old stories say about your lot. Bargains and that.” I think on it a moment, folklores running through my mind, before I ask, “Can you lie?”

  At this, he smirks—and the sight of it seizes up my muscles. I’m in freeze mode instantly.

  “My kind are under no limitations,” he tells me. “We may lie as much as your kind do.”

  My mouth flattens into a grim line. That makes it a bit harder to trust that he’ll come through on his end of the bargain. And makes it a hell of a lot more difficult to gauge him when I need to.

  “I always thought—”

  He cuts me off, sharp. “Your stories are of the litalves.”

  I blink. “The what?”

  “The litalves,” he echoes darkly. Whatever that means, he doesn't like it—he spits the foreign word as though it’s bitter and slimy on his tongue. “Other fae. The light ones, in your language.”

  A frown creases my brow.

  Guess it makes sense that there’s more of them, different kinds of the fae. We come in different races and, long ago, there were the Neanderthals. Suppose it’s not so different for them.

  I ask, “And what are you? Your kind?”

  “You are dealing with the dokkalves now,” he warns. “The dark ones. Your stories will not help you with us.”

  I nod. He turns his dark eyes down at my arm. I think of another question before he can redirect back to the bargain.

  “What does kuri mean?”

  He looks at me from beneath his long lashes. Pools of darkness encompass me, his eyes like black holes made to devour and destroy.

  Ignoring my question, his hand snakes out for mine. A shiver seizes me as his fingers coil around my palm, and he draws me in closer to him.

  I shift forward, my bent knees a whisper away from him.

  He turns over my arm until my scars and ink face upwards.

  “Tell me about this first,” he demands, and scrapes his sharp thumbnail over my tattoo.

  “I dreamt it.” It’s what I told him the first time I confessed it. But this time, he’s looking for more answers than I have given him, more than I want to give.

  Think of Adrianna, I remind myself.

  “My parents were going through a separation. About to divorce, really. On the verge.” I swallow a loud gulp and try to gingerly remove my hand from his loose hold. His grip tightens, and I give up. “They sent me to my grandparents one night—they wanted to go out for dinner, see if they could save what they used to have.”

  I give a lame shrug because it’s something I never understood. They hated each other for a long time. What’s there to be saved in a toxic, dark relationship like the one they used to have?

  His thumbnail presses hard against my palm, and I wince. A bead of blood is drawn and it rolls down my middle finger. He’s not letting me hesitate, not for a moment.

  “I wasn’t well at the time,” I explain.

  His dark brow arches perfectly above his smouldering eye. “You were ill?”

  I make a grim face and shake my head, noncommittal. “Sort of. I wasn’t well mentally. They didn’t know what was wrong with me back then—it was years ago. Now I know it’s depression, but it was a long time and a lot of doctors before I learned what makes me feel this way. Anyway, I slept a lot because of it. And leading up to that night, I kept seeing this—” My gaze fleetingly cuts to my tattoo. “—shape whenever I slept. In my dreams, I would be drawing the shape, or chasing it, or it would be chasing me. It would snake around me and try to drown me, or be my anchor when I was lost in the ocean. Stupid dreams, but it was a constant. Always there.”

  “It hurt you?” Curiosity burns in his feverish eyes. He’s hanging on my every word. No pity or confusion, pure interest. I hope this doesn’t mean it’ll be harder to shake him once I get what I need.

  “It hurt me and it saved me. It was always there.” I pause to lick my dry, cracked lips. “That night—the night my parents went for dinner—they died in a car crash. In my dreams, this ... this shape killed them. It wound around the car and completely crushed them. When I woke up, police were at the door, and... Well, my parents had really died. A truck flipped over in the winds, and the load crushed my parents’ car. They died, and I ... I just always remembered this shape killing them...”

  I trail off.

  I try again to pull my arm away from him, to feel my skin without his touch burning me, but he doesn't let me go. His grip is tighter on me, his nails digging into my flesh.

  “It’s stupid,” I add. “I know the shape didn’t kill them—but after that, I always saw it as a warning, you know? Like it was trying to tell me something. I had it tattooed on me the next winter. My grandparents weren’t too happy about it.”

  He watches me for a while, silent. The quiet is deafenin
g. I can hear my own heartbeat punch against my chest, and the quick shorts of my breathing.

  “And these?” He finally breaks the air with his words, and slides his thumb along my tattoo, up to the start of my scars.

  “I kinda already told you.” I shrug and my face falls flat. “The doctors said it was depression—and I still have it. I’ll always have it.”

  His eyes darken. “I do not want to know what your healers told you. I want to know what this—” With his free hand, he presses his palm against my chest, and my heart pounds against his touch. “—has told you.”

  “My heart?”

  He draws his hand back. “What does it tell you?”

  I blink, feeling a ball of emotion start to tangle in my throat. The early threat of tears. I fight it back fiercely, and shake my head, as if to shake off the feelings surging up inside of me.

  “I don’t know.”

  His free hand shoots to my face and grabs, tightly. He grips my chin with a hold so fierce that it makes my jawbone ache.

  His threat is a dangerous whisper, like a snake’s hiss before the strike, “Do not lie to me, Vale, if you want to keep your tongue.”

  Can’t hold them back anymore. Tears well up in my eyes and sting. I blink them away until my lashes are wet and his grip loosens slightly.

  “My heart,” I start quietly, “tells me I’m alone. Even when I’m with people, I feel alone, and like no one really knows me. And ... if they did know the real me, they wouldn’t like me.”

  I swallow back a ball of tears and sniff. But words gather in my throat and, before I can stop myself from speaking, it all falls out—

  “I always think about that saying, the calm before the storm. Everyone’s afraid of the storm. The chaos. But I’m afraid of the calm—because I feel like that’s what I am. I’m the calm.”

  The truth keeps spilling out of me. I can’t stop it.

  It’s him. Caspan. He’s doing something to me to make me talk. His powers of the bargain are forcing truths out of me.