Torn

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “I disagree.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he replied. “I’ve been incredibly lenient with you.”

  I blinked, and almost looked up at him. “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I have removed the chain. I have not pushed, and if you think I have, then you haven’t learned anything.” Straightening, he curled his hand around my arm. “I could’ve gotten you to say yes several times over the last couple of days. I haven’t. Should I have?”

  “I would’ve said yes only because I’m not in control of myself,” I said, shifting my gaze to the floor. “And I assume the reason why you haven’t done that is because you know it won’t work. Sure, you can get me to agree, but I cannot be under your control, and I am the entire time.”

  Drake didn’t respond for several moments and then he dropped my arm. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Surprise flickered through me. He was actually relenting? “I . . . I have questions.”

  “Then ask them.”

  His bored tone irked me, but I let it go. “Do we have to stay in here?”

  He was silent for a moment. “I guess not. Where would you like to go?”

  Hope sparked alive. “Outside.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  Out of instinct, I lifted my gaze, but stopped at his chest. “I have been locked in this room and in this house for over two weeks. I would like to breathe open air. Is that really too much to ask for?”

  “Yes.”

  I unfolded my arms. “Being cooped up in here is going to drive me insane.”

  “I thought you already were.”

  I was seriously going to throat punch this guy. “All I’m asking for is a couple of minutes outside, in the sun and in the open air. That’s it.”

  Drake muttered something in a different language and then pushed away from the dresser. He started for the door and I lifted my gaze. “If you try anything, you will not like what happens.”

  Triumph flashed within me. “Also, just a heads up, but threats don’t exactly make me feel comfortable either.”

  He held the door open. “And just a heads up, I really don’t care.”

  I pressed my lips together as I walked past him, knowing if I ticked him off now, I wouldn’t just be starting all over. He’d have me down in that horrible room and I would be doing terrible things to innocent people.

  That horrible cloudy feeling swept over me, and I was cold down to the marrow. Just standing beside him and having to breathe the same air made me feel like there was an iceberg taking up residence in my chest.

  I hated it.

  But I had to deal with it.

  Pushing those thoughts aside to dwell and stress over later, I followed him down the winding staircase. There was an ancient by the front door. He said nothing as he opened it and stepped aside.

  Cool air rushed over me, spreading goosebumps up and down my arms. The thin dress was no protection against the chilly temperature, but I wasn’t going to complain. I was outside, and even though I knew I wouldn’t make it far at all if I ran for it, there could be other opportunities. I just needed to . . . behave myself. Ugh.

  Drake walked out onto a sprawling, vacant porch. I imagined at one time it had bushy ferns hanging above the railings and comfy chairs perfect for a lazy day of reading. There was nothing human about it now. Just cold. Empty.

  A driveway that hadn’t been repaved in ages cut into the dead grass and disappeared into the woods several yards from the front porch. I walked down the old stone steps, stopping in the sunlight. I inhaled, closing my eyes for a few seconds, centering my thoughts. There was a deep, rich earthy scent that reminded me of a pile of grass clippings. I recognized it. I opened my eyes, looking around. I didn’t see it, but I knew we had to be close to the bayou.

  “Ask your questions.”

  I hated a lot about the prince of the Otherworld, but I really hated his demanding tone. “Can we walk?”

  Sighing, he practically stomped down the steps. “Ask.”

  I shot a nasty glare at his back, but I started walking. I did have a lot of questions and decided to start with the most important one. “What do you plan to do once you have your apocalypse baby?”

  Drake looked over his shoulder at me. “Would you please stop calling it that?”

  “What’s your game plan? The baby is born and the gates open. What next?” I folded my arms again as I scanned the landscape. There were no other roads except the driveway we were walking down. I knew there were none at the back of the house, because the bedroom I was staying in faced that portion of land. It was just tall weeds and trees back there. “There are a lot of humans. Like seven billion or something. I know that sounds like an all-you-can-eat buffet, but that’s a lot of humans who aren’t going to want to be on a menu.”

  He chuckled as he glanced over at me. “Humans are stupid.”

  I shook my head. “Wow.”

  “They ignore the obvious. They have a tendency to stick their heads in the sand and fabricate logical explanations that assuage their fears rather than face what’s right in front of them,” he said, and I kind of had to agree with some of that. “They won’t know we have taken control until it’s too late.”

  “And how will you take control?” I asked.

  He stood in the middle of the cracked driveway and faced me. I immediately lowered my gaze out of instinct. “There may not be seven billion fae in this realm, but there are hundreds of thousands of us now.”

  The Order always knew there were a lot of fae, but hundreds of thousands? Holy crapola, that was a lot.

  “One fae equals a thousand humans,” he said, and I figured his math was a bit biased. “And once we open the gates, all will come through, and there are millions of us.”

  Wind tossed my curls across my face as I stared at his chest. There was no way, for obvious reasons, we could allow that to happen. “There are still more of us.”

  “You mean more of them,” he corrected. “Do you think we haven’t been planning for decades? Centuries?” He stepped forward, and my muscles locked up. “We are not barbarians who can only conquer by war. Not that we’d completely rule out that option if it came to that.”

  Good to know. I started walking past him, toward the end of the driveway. “But?”

  “But we have planned,” he repeated, easily catching up to me with his long legs. “We are everywhere. Some are just ordinary citizens. Others have willed their ways into positions of power.”

  I thought of Marlon. He was known as a huge developer in the city, and he had a lot of power locally, but I knew Drake wasn’t just talking about land development. “You’ve infiltrated the government, haven’t you?”

  Without even looking at his face, I knew he was smiling when he spoke. “Local. Federal. Global. We are everywhere, and it’s only a matter of time before we have complete control.”

  He made it sound so simple, and in a way, it was. If they got into enough positions of power, they could take over, slowly changing the world into what they wanted.

  “It still won’t be easy,” I said. “Once we figure out what’s happening, we’ll fight back. And yes, the fae have abilities we don’t, but we have a reason to fight no matter what.”

  “And what reason is that?”

  We’d reached the wooden area, and strangely, but not exactly surprising, there were no sounds of life. No birds. Insects. Nothing. “We value freedom above anything else.”

  “Except most humans will already be bent to our will and they will fight for us,” he said. “Human cannon fodder.”

  Disgusting. Terrifying.

  “I’m done with this,” he said abruptly, startling me. “It’s time.”

  Heart lurching in my chest, I took a step back. “Wait. We haven’t been out here long enough. I still have questions.”

  “You can ask them later.”

  Taking another step back, I struggled to keep the panic down. “Can we walk for a little bit longer? I don’t—”

>   “You’re delaying the inevitable.” Impatience rang throughout his tone.

  Sweat dotted my palms. “I don’t have to . . . have to feed. You’ve made your point now. I get it. You can make me do whatever you want. I don’t need to do that. I don’t want to.”

  “You obviously haven’t gotten the point since you keep referring to yourself as a human. It’s time for you to remember what you are,” he said. I knew there was no winning this argument with him.

  I spun around quickly, prepared to run back to the house.

  “Ivy. Stop.”

  I stopped.

  Just like that, my body was compelled to answer even though my brain was desperately yelling at me to get away, to move—to do anything to stop what was coming.

  “Look at me.”

  His voice slipped over my skin like silk. My ears buzzed as I felt my body slowly turning to face him. Against my will, my gaze lifted to his. I waited.

  Drake’s eyes deepened. “You will do as I say.”

  And I did.

  It was strange. One minute I was outside, skin chilled from the cold air, and the next I was in that room. There were different people in here now. The woman was gone, and I wondered what had happened to her. Then I was sitting next to an older man I didn’t know. He had silver hair at his temples, and then after a few whispered words, I was . . . feeding, and then I was upstairs, slipping into a deep sleep.

  I was shaken awake, a demanding hand biting into my shoulder. I woke to a dark room and a pale, silvery face.

  Faye.

  I leaned away from her, rolling onto my side. My thoughts were full of cobwebs, and I couldn’t quite recall the last several hours. All I knew was that I wasn’t supposed to be awake yet. I needed more time. My eyelids started to drift shut.

  “You need to wake up,” she said, grabbing my arm and squeezing hard.

  Confused, I resisted when she tugged on me. “I . . .”

  “There’s no time to explain. You must get up now,” Faye said. “It’s your only chance if you want to escape.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “W-what?” I whispered.

  Faye leaned over and turned on the bedside lamp. Soft light flooded the room. “You must get up, Ivy. The prince is not here and this will be your only chance.”

  Her words tumbled through my brain like tumbleweeds rolling down a vacant street. I was slow to make sense of them, but I didn’t close my eyes again. I pushed myself up into a sitting position. Nausea hit me, clearing enough of the cobwebs for me to realize that was different from when I woke normally after . . . after feeding.

  Feeding.

  My gaze lifted to Faye’s. “I fed again.”

  Frustration pinched her features as she reached toward me, unlocking the band around my neck. She tossed it onto the bed. “I know. And if you keep feeding, you’re going to get addicted. You probably already are.”

  “Addicted?” I repeated dumbly. That was the first I’d ever heard of that. “What do you—?”

  “Ivy.” She clutched my shoulders and shook me until my head snapped back. “You need to focus. We have to go now. Do you understand me? This will be your only chance before your time is up and the prince will be in this bed, creating a child that will open all the gates to the Otherworld.”

  Creating a baby . . .

  Holy shit. I tossed my hair back from my face as the remaining tendrils of sleep cleared and the fogginess left my thoughts. “The prince isn’t here?”

  “No.” She pushed off the bed and stood. “He left about thirty minutes ago, taking three of the ancients with him. It was a planned trip, but we don’t have a lot of time. There’s only a small window of opportunity.”

  Pushing off the bed, I moaned as a wave of dizziness hit me. I fought through it, straightening. “Sorry,” I gasped out. “I’m not feeling too well.”

  “Of course not. You have to sleep off the more unpleasant effects until you get used to them.” She walked over to the door, pressing the side of her face against the wood. “Fae don’t necessarily experience the adverse reactions, and only the younglings, when they first start feeding, experience the euphoria and following sleepiness, but for halflings . . . it can be different. But that’s not important right now.”

  I raised a brow as I tucked the bushy mass of hair behind my ears. I had a feeling what she was saying was going to be important later, but right now, it wasn’t a priority. Later, I was going to have so many questions for her. “So you’re going to help me escape?”

  She nodded. “And before you ask why, all you need to know right now is that the Order is not the only ones who want to prevent the gates from opening.”

  I stared at her carefully. Trusting her was risky, but then again, why would this be a trap? And if it was, could the consequences be any worse than what I was already facing?

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  “I couldn’t get a thorn stake.” She reached around to the back of her jeans and pulled out an iron dagger. She pressed the handle into my hand. “But this will do.”

  My fingers curled around the handle of the weapon I was oh so familiar with. It felt like ages since I had held one, and I welcomed the weight in my hand. “It will do,” I said as she reached for the door. I thought about something. “Wait.”

  She looked at me.

  Grabbing a handful of the dress, I lifted the skirt part and used the dagger to cut a slit halfway up my leg to allow for more movement. “Ready,” I said.

  Faye grabbed the doorknob but paused. “I won’t kill any of them,” she warned me. “I will incapacitate, but I will not kill.”

  I thought about that for a second. “Okay. I’m probably going to kill them, though.”

  She made an exasperated sound, but opened the door and peered out. “It’s clear.”

  Knowing this could somehow blow up in my face, but willing to risk it for a chance to get out of this place, I took a deep breath and pushed everything aside. Now was not the time to think about what I’d been forced to do while being imprisoned here, or about Ren, or anything other than escaping.

  I followed her out into the hall, and we made our way to the stairs. At the top, she said in a low voice, “There are three fae downstairs in the main room. There are more in the house, but I hope we can get out before they know what’s happening. Valor is . . . he is occupied at the moment in the back room.”

  Knowing what the back room was used for, I couldn’t suppress a shudder. “Can you incapacitate quietly? Because I can kill quietly.”

  “Yes.”

  I looked down the stairs, not seeing anyone yet. “Let’s go.”

  We crept down the stairs, and of course the steps creaked every couple of steps, sounding like cracks of thunder. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how quietly I could kill. I had never really attempted to do it without making noise.

  Faye reached the landing first. We were about twenty feet from the front door, and we were so close, but the foyer opened into two rooms. There was a good chance we’d be seen. My pulse pounding, I stepped down into the foyer, pressing the dagger against my leg. I took two steps before a voice rang out from the adjoining room.

  “Where are you two going?”

  Cursing under my breath, I looked over to see a male fae walking toward us with another fae behind him. Faye didn’t answer, so I decided to go the “whole kill me some fae” route.

  I stepped toward the male. A flicker of surprise scuttled across his features a second before I slammed the dagger into his chest. He did the poof-begone thing.