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He knelt down next to it and beckoned for her to join him. Her mouth tipped into a skeptical frown, but her knees met the pavers. Noel’s shadow painted the ground beside them as he took her hand again and began knitting her skin back together.
Relief flooded her face. “You… thank you,” she breathed, flexing her hand. “What’s your name?”
“Grey.”
“Grey,” she said, a hint of a laugh slipping into her voice while Noel towered behind him. “I’m Cyanide. Call me Cy. I… don’t suppose you’d be willing to patch up my back too?” She gave a sheepish wince.
* * *
“You two don’t seriously think there’s a way out of this…” Cy started, her brows knitting together. She tossed down another collection of twigs and crumpled paper in Noel’s stone circle outside the garage.
“The fair folk deal in bargains,” Noel said, “so if we give them something of value?—”
Cy scoffed. “Funny. You act like there’s anything they’d be willing to take over enjoying a Wild Hunt. They’re blood thirsty.”
Noel grimaced and dropped to his knees with a match. “You say that, but don’t they also value stuff more than they value us? We’re just human filth to them. We’re disposable in comparison to anything we could give them.”
“That’s quite a bold statement,” she muttered, folding her arms over her chest as the first of the paper began to burn. “Not to mention that we’re marked for death because of the Calling, right? It doesn’t make much sense to fight that. We can only really delay the inevitable.”
Grey hugged his knees to his chest, noting how Noel was biting his tongue in favor of skewering one of the fish he’d come back with. That slow dip of the sun on the horizon might as well have been sand draining from an hourglass with Cy’s combative words against anything Noel tried to argue.
“Well,” Grey began, clearing his throat, “if there was a chance, would you at least try it?”
She worried her lip and crouched down next to him, nearly sitting on her bag just behind her. The sputtering sparks reflected in her thoughtful, dark eyes while Noel turned the fish over in the fire. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted. “I guess it depends on the price.”
“What do you mean?” Noel asked with a frown.
“They hate us. They hate what we’ve done to a world that isn’t theirs, but they claim it anyway. So I guess my only assumption is that they’d want us to trade our humanity in the end—to give up who we are in favor of bending the knee to them. Complete surrender.”
Grey shifted. “Well, the fair folk didn’t break through the veil all those years ago until we destroyed enough to anger them, right? So, we were thinking to give them something back that once belonged to them or by creating something in offering, rather than destroying.”
Her lips pursed, quiet settling in around them, save the gentle crackle of the fire.
“You do have a point…” she muttered, her eyes sliding over to meet Grey’s. “So what are you planning to trade?”
32
NOEL
Cy’s relentless chattering with Grey overshadowed Noel’s relief of gaining another ally. Every second he focused on cooking or eating, he scooted closer to Grey, millimeter by millimeter until the soft calls of owls signaled for him to put out the fire.
Crawling back into the garage hadn’t fixed that small seed of jealousy from planting itself like he hoped—not when Cy had stolen Noel’s place next to Grey. He considered dragging his bag around to the other side of him and selfishly pressing his back to Grey’s, but when he considered the small opening between the garage shutter and the concrete, he laid down to face it. Putting another body between Grey and any potential intruder seemed like a wiser decision than leaving it up to Cy, who’d been so adamant on separating them in the first place—who’d planted that horrible idea in Grey’s head while he was being hunted by Reign.
Sleep took its sweet old time to greet him while Cy’s irritating whispers and strange new sounds kept him on edge. When his eyes finally closed, the image of Cavan’s van smashed at the bottom of the ravine was etched into the back of his mind, sending him spiraling through a series of wild dreams until he jolted awake at the first light of dawn.
Cy and Grey didn’t stir as he got up and stretched, unable to tear his gaze away from the rise and fall of Grey’s chest—hating how his sights quickly snapped to Cy’s curled up form facing him. He ducked under the garage door and sighed. Of course Grey would hit it off with her. Earn her trust. Survive with her.
He ran a hand through his hair on his way down the main road until he came across a closed, green-painted door and stopped. It might as well have been the door to his parents’ townhouse, crammed between a bakery and a seamstress’s hovel of a workshop. His mother said the green would keep away the fair folk since it blended it with nature, despite how his father rolled his eyes. Green eyes, the same hue as his own. The same eyes that people said made him lucky because that meant he could trick the fair folk into believing he was blessed by them—a lie, but a kind, hopeful one.
He stepped up to the threshold and tried the handle, his heart hammering in his chest when he found it locked. A few minutes and some finagling of his dagger later, the door popped open with a buckling crack to the remnants of a dwelling not all that unlike his own. The major difference was that this one kicked up dust motes wherever he stepped and the plates sitting on shelves above the sink didn’t have the little hand-painted flowers he used to trace at dinner.
Which is why the task of looting the pantry left a sour taste in his mouth. But it wasn’t like someone would come back in the next few minutes to hold him up for it. Whoever had lived here before certainly didn’t need it now, but Noel did. Well, assuming he’d find anything at all.
A sharp scrape of a shoe against the plank floors, and Noel smacked his head against the inside of a cabinet. He winced as he scrambled to his feet, only to find Cy standing just inside the house.
She scowled. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”
Noel grimaced and continued rubbing the spot as he shook his head, stooping back into a crouch. “Finding food. Supplies. Anything useful.”
