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Then, as if a door had been opened to a deep unseen world that buzzed with electricity, a wave of static energy released into the air and trickled through my body in steady, humming pulses.
I spun, lungs pumping and eyes frantically searching the street while my mind narrowed on nothing but that hum. “Michio?”
The cool breeze whispered back, breathing icy tendrils beneath my hair and down my nape. But the hum remained, stronger now, searing through my blood.
“Ye feel Michio?” Roark turned in a circle, visually probing the houses and overgrown yards. “Where?”
As the hum quaked through my body, I tried to trace the source. It didn’t draw outward in threads like the aphids. It spread like a beam of light. I should’ve been able to pinpoint where it concentrated, but it felt like it was coming from every direction.
“Everywhere?” I panted hopeful gusts of air and scrambled over the rubble toward the street, looking in both directions. “I don’t know.”
Jesse paced around me on the street, his bow in one hand, the other raking through his hair as his sunlit glare burned over the landscape. “I don’t like this. What do you mean everywhere?”
The humming sensation felt like Michio, but it didn’t. The night Michio left, I could sense his general direction. Granted, it had only been seconds before he blinked away. But now?
“There’s no clear direction.” I curled my hands into fists. He had to be out there, and my heart thundered with every second that passed. Every second that I might’ve been losing him. “Let’s spread out.”
The moment the words left my mouth, a blur of movement spread over the horizon. I whirled, turning completely around, my gaze darting in every direction. I couldn’t see that far to make out what they were, but the blur of countless tall, dark shapes seemed to emerge from everywhere. In a few seconds, they would be surrounding us.
My muscles stiffened and heated as I reached for the bow on my back and nocked an arrow. The hurried mass of movement propelled toward us with lightning speeds. Seemingly man-sized. Or aphid-sized? I didn’t feel aphids, but holy fucking shit, they didn’t move like humans.
They moved like Michio.
The flash of Roark’s sword glinted in my periphery. Jesse planted himself at my side.
“They’re not aphids or nymphs,” I shouted, loud enough for forty soldiers to hear.
Footfalls pounded around me. Men shouted. Knives and other weaponry sounded as they slid from their leather holsters. And one clear, baritone voice boomed, “Fuck yeah. Let’s fight!”
The sun shone in my eyes, harsh and glaring, but the thunder of fast-moving footsteps was clear as day. The approaching stampede reached my ears before I could identify exactly what was coming. The tremors in my hands shook the bow and the humming in my veins strengthened as the noise grew closer, and the blurring shapes took form.
Men. Hundreds of hard-eyed, snarling men leapt over broken fences and bounded across the roofs of cars, hurdling everything in their way to cover the distance between us.
Why did they make my insides hum? It had only been seconds since I first felt them, not enough time to evacuate to our vehicles. What did they want? They were charging too aggressively and urgently to have come with anything but the intent to kill.
Could we defend ourselves against their numbers? Some of the approaching men carried assault rifles and handguns, but most were armed with weapons like ours.
I stared down the shaft of an arrow as forty soldiers spread out around me with knives, axes, and crossbows at the ready. Jesse and Roark stood at the edges of my vision, flanking me.
“Don’t leave my sight.” Jesse stepped closer, his arm bent with the pull of the bow string, his elbow grazing my head.
My ears rang with the thump of my heart, my fingers trembling to release the arrow. But they weren’t close enough, and I needed to make all twenty of my arrows count.
Our circle of men widened, stretching outward, and suddenly, several broke away. They ran down the street, clutching hunting knives and hacking at the approaching men in their paths.
A rifle went off, then another, and just like that, arrows thickened the air.
It was easy to differentiate between the two sides. Our men shouted, made expressions, and gestured to one another. The others were strangely stoic, aside from their snarling, and didn’t make eye-contact.
I sighted a man with blond plaits of hair forty yards away, his jeans and shirt tattered and smeared with dirt. He trained his crossbow on me, no surprise on his face at the sight of a woman. But he hesitated then angled away and shot someone else.
A pained grunt hit my ears. I closed off my emotions to it, couldn’t think about the people dying or the bullets whistling past or the arrows skipping across the ground around my feet.
