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She nodded. “I got enough back from putting Grey to bed. I should be fine.” She shuffled over to the side of the small, one-room cabin and dropped Grey’s bag next to hers. The flashlight rolled back and forth along the floor next to it, falling into the dips of the boards. Its eerie dance continued as he shut the front door and started over to join her.
When he sat down next to her, the room fell unnervingly still. Noel’s heartbeat threatened to drown out Grey’s quiet, rhythmic breathing. How much had he fucked up by making that single choice to save him at the obelisk? Would Grey be as much of a mess right now if they’d parted ways the second they’d escaped? “Did I make a mistake?” He hadn’t even realized the words had slipped out until Cy’s head turned toward him.
“What the fuck are you on about?” she mumbled.
“I think you were right about us needing to split up. Grey kept pushing for that after you tore into us about it, and I kept telling him we were better off together?—”
She scoffed, her head lulling back against the gutted space where a kitchen used to be. “That was before I thought there might be a chance to bribe our way out of this.” Her eyes drifted over to Grey’s sleeping form. “And leaving him there to die wasn’t really an option.”
“You say that,” Noel began, a bitter tang surfacing in his mouth, “but what if we’re just causing more pain in the process?”
“He’s scared, Noel. He’s shutting down because there’s too much piled on him between that fucking fair folk and whatever the hell else people keep coming after him for. Us pulling him from that fire because he can’t do it himself is the only way he can survive, even if he’s struggling to fight through it all.” She sighed and slid a little further down to the floor, her chin dipping into her shirt. “He’s clearly fucking traumatized.”
Noel slumped in on himself and picked at his boot laces. “I don’t want to put him through more of this if he’s breaking.”
“No shit—because you’re his knight.”
He shot her a scowl. “I’m his friend. That’s all we’ve agreed on. Like I said earlier, I don’t even know if?—”
“And you won’t know if he dies, dumbass.”
He winced and glanced away.
“Do both of yourselves a favor and consider telling him when he wakes up. If you give him more to live for than friendship, he might bounce back from whatever’s eating him.”
A deflated chuckle tumbled from his lips. “We don’t even have anything to trade yet. We still have to find a place for Grey to paint, and?—”
“A place for Grey to paint?” her brows knitted together.
“Yeah,” Noel said, twisting around to rummage through Grey’s bag for one of the pigments. He held it up for her, letting it shift in its glass vial. “He’s going to give them a painting of nature. Something they’re bound to fall in love with since it sort of immortalizes nature.”
She plucked the vial from his hand and turned it around, letting the pigment dust the edges. “You’re sure?”
“He came up with the idea because of it. That fair folk—the one in black—they tried to convince him to go with them a while back when we were trying to find things to trade in some ruins. They told Grey that they could be their patron.”
Cy bit her lip and stared down at the red powder. “Do you think that maybe our keys to getting out are tied to the hunters we’re assigned to? That pink-eyed bitch talked like she’s your opponent, sort of like the other one claiming to own Grey.”
Noel paused, his gaze slipping to Grey.
Why don’t you come over and face me? A precursor to our dance on the sacred hunting grounds. Maybe I’ll even be able to convince Reign not to cut off your hands for touching their claimed prey.
He sucked in a breath. “You might be right…”
The thrum of Cy’s nails against the glass told him that her mind had started to work too. “The problem with that is that I haven’t met my hunter, which means I have no idea what they want. Wouldn’t giving something impersonal be like a slap in the face?”
“Well,” Noel mumbled, trying his best to skirt around any of the fair folk’s names and avoid summoning any more danger, “if I were up against Grey’s hunter, then I’d probably be fucked, so I can see that being a problem. They seemingly like art, and I can imagine this pink-eyed monster enjoying something like an ancient weapon that was lost on this plane.”
She tilted her head from side-to-side. “Maybe mine would be happy with something a little more mystical? I feel like there might be a bit of a pattern to it too, seeing how most of these pigments are from crushed flowers and things. It’s sort of like trading life, like how giving a weapon is trading power.”
Noel snorted, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I think you might be onto something.”
Her eyes danced as he reclaimed the vial. “I think I know of a good place for that painting. And I believe there are ruins not all that far from here either.” That renewed look of hope crept onto her dirt-stained face. “We might actually have a decent fucking plan.”
43
GREY
The light scent of fire clinging to the air woke Grey with a start. He propped himself up on the quilt, his heart racing until he caught sight of Cy’s figure in the doorway, messing with a pan over a small fire in the early morning sunlight, right outside their lodgings—wherever they were.
