Page 22

Hunted

Pressure clapped, a bone-deep punch that ripped the breath from Fenrir’s lungs and a scream from the crowd.

Instinct dropped him and half the crowd to a knee, years of military training overriding the cloying taste of dirt and smoke clogging the air. Good thing, too. Because from high above, earth rained like hail, a storm of dirt that crowded the light from the sky so densely Fenrir almost didn’t see it. Dust, weaving pale and wispy into the crowd, tendrils curling around the pockets of people furthest from the stage, glimmering with a light it should not possess—a light, Fenrir knew, meant death.

Run.

Fenrir opened his mouth to shout but was too late.

Light erupted, tearing through the crowd in another cacophonous crack.

The Earth shattered—exploded—sky blotting black with the density of debris kicked up. Screams rose and cut off just as abruptly, a sonic boom punching the air from his lungs and sound from his ears, stage rippling beneath him, wood creaking on its weakened struts.

Fenrir grit his teeth, vertigo tilting precariously for the few seconds it took him to regain his breath and blink the stars from his eyes.

No. Not stars. Debris. A rain of warmth, and—and wet. Fenrir shoved to his feet, boots sliding through a quickening slickness, blinking against the billowing cloud of smoke pouring over the crowd to see—

—Blood. Bright and bold, a painting of red smeared across the now shrieking crowd. What had been a mass gathering of people suddenly transformed into absolute chaos.

Panic tore through the crowd with the speed of a wildfire. The crowd charged forward, away from the chaos at their back, the wet-slick slide of disintegrated bodies churning the ground into mud beneath their feet. Bodies toppled over bodies while tents collapsed to tangle into the crowd, the living unable to escape the dead when the only way out was into the crowded fence at the foot of the stage.

Fenrir stumbled to the edge of the platform in time to see how the fencing bowed, the blue-tinged faces of the people caught between it and the crowd, the tear-stricken horror that lanced through an increasingly mindless crowd as another cloud of dust curled round their feet.

This next blast brought Fenrir to his knees.

The fencing strained under the combined weight of so many people, caging in both the living and the dead at the foot of the stage. Fenrir swallowed bile and reached for who he could. A woman clutched a child to her chest, her hand slippery with blood and sweat and the kind of gore no one should ever bear witness too.

Fenrir had. At the Rim. At the Pit. During the last stand the Stacks had made against an army more horrific than even the carnage before him.

But the majority of these people? They had not. Starvation and exhaustion, yes. But not the brutal reality soldiers at war were forced to carry. A reality Fenrir had just promised them he would protect them from. A reality he naively thought he’d left behind when the seam of the world had sealed away the source of so much tragedy—despite another waiting in the proverbial wings.

How was I supposed to know?

You wouldn’t, because you’re no king.

But who else was there?

“Hang on!” Fenrir shouted over the screaming crowd, the woman clutching his hand like the lifeline it was. Her sob tore through his heart when he hauled her out of the clutch of the crowd crush, skirt stained blood-black up to her knees, the child in her arm wailing brokenly when they hit the stage floor with a muffled thump. She lurched to her knees, the sound of the child’s crying a momentary relief before the shriek of the crowd overwhelmed all else.

“Don’t look,” Fenrir said when she turned. “Not out there, look only at me.”

Brown eyes met pale blue. Desperation met expectation. And all the promises Fenrir had minutes ago made came rushing from the devastation like the real herald he had erected.

“Head to the lake and get in the water.”

Within the churning mass of crowd another wave of dust crawled.

“If the dust follows you get your head underwater.”

The woman nodded, eyes beading wet while the strength of her arms around the child remained strong.

“Tell who you can on your way, and whatever you do, don’t look back. Okay?”

Fenrir dragged her to her feet, eyes cast down to the crying child’s face—the thumb she pushed over their blood-stained cheek. Fenrir’s breath caught for the half-second he watched them, the little slice of intimacy a knife blade to his heart.

The woman took off running before Fenrir had to confront he’d lost all capacity for words. The usual mechanizations his mind relied on faltered in a way they hadn’t before.

You’ve grown soft, didn’t feel right so much as it felt like a long-harbored truth. Something he’d done well hiding because it’d always been necessary when in the company of Lore.