Every single one of my joints stiffened. I shut up, Fate did too. Neither of us said a word.
“I’d tell you where we’re going,” he said, “But that would defeat the whole object of the blind folds, wouldn’t it?”
“Probably some kind of sex dungeon,” Fate said, “I mean, I’m into it, but you haven’t even asked if I have a safe word or anything.”
“Look, we weren’t hurting anyone where we were,” I said, “Why the hell did you have to bust in on us like that?”
“Rules are rules.”
“Your rules are stupid. You just pick people up, pluck them out of their houses, and what, make them disappear?”
“If they’re weaklings, then the Caretaker will make sure to weed them out. Are you a weakling?”
“Why don’t you stop the car and we’ll go another couple of rounds? I’ll show you.”
“Nice try. The car will stop when we get to the Caretaker. Until then, I suggest you shut your mouths, or I’ll make sure the boss knows about your intention to escape. He won’t like that.”
Make sure the boss knows. So, the other guy isn’t in the car, too? “Where’s the boss?”
“Alright, another word and I’ll have to gag you.”
I bit my lip to stifle the comeback from spilling out of my mouth, then took a deep breath to calm myself down.
“It was Emily who won,” Crag said, after a pause. “Marie’s been shit the last few episodes, and she deserved to lose with that Frankenstein cake. Pistachio flavored fondant? C’mon.”
Fate heard but didn’t reply. I didn’t feel the need to speak, either. All I could do was rattle escape plans around in my brain like marbles in a tin can. My hands were bound, so were Fate’s. The car door was probably locked, and we were on the highway, so we were moving fast. There was also a high probability that magic had been used to make sure we either couldn’t easily escape, or that at the very least we would be tracked if we tried to leave. Getting out of this was going to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, at least while the car was moving.
Maybe when we stopped, I’d have a small window of opportunity between being moved from the car to wherever this Caretaker was. I’d pulled my punches with Abvat, and this tough guy had caught me by surprise, but if I had another round with him, I’d make sure he’d regret the day he ever set foot in our apartment.
I felt Fate lean against my shoulder, then shudder as she tried her best to stifle the coughing fit about to start. She failed. Fate started hacking uncontrollably, a sound that was wet and painful, like it was ripping through her lungs. I tried to touch her, but my hands were tied behind my back and I’d been strapped in with a seatbelt.
“Hey,” Crag called out, “What’s happening to her?”
“She’s singing, she’s just really bad at it,” I yelled, “She’s fucking dying, you moron!”
“Dying? What are you talking about?”
“She’s sick! And I’m the only one who can help her, so if you don’t want a dead girl in the back of your car, you’ll untie me!”
“I’m not untying either of you.”
“Great, then you’ve sentenced her to death yourself. Think your boss will like you making the call like that?”
“I don’t think he’d give a shit either way, if I’m ho—”
I kicked the back of the seat I was sitting behind, hoping it was his. The car wobbled, then the brakes screamed, and the car ground to a halt, gravel crunching underneath the tries. Grunting and cursing under his breath, Crag unbuckled himself, stepped out of the car, and opened my door. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me; instead he pulled the blindfold off, reached for the tie-wraps keeping my hands bound behind my back, and slit them free with a knife.
“Fix her, and do it fast,” he said. He was still wearing those sunglasses.
Fate hadn’t stopped coughing. I pulled her blindfold up, threw my arms around her and whispered those words into her ear, words I didn’t know the meaning to, or where they came from, but words that seemed to carry a little trickle of magic, enough to soothe her and help her relax. As I held her, I noticed the pendant around my neck glowing slightly, silvery blue light dancing inside of my jacket. Crag, the driver and sole occupant of the car besides us, hadn’t seen it yet, but he was going to if I turned around. I waited until the light, and Fate’s coughing, died off before clipping the top button of my jacket closed and letting her go.
I cupped her face with my hands. “Are you okay?” I asked.
Her eyes were red and glistening, a single tear streaking down her cheek. “Peachy,” she croaked, smiling faintly.
I wiped the tear away. “We’re gonna be okay… just relax.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Crag bellowed, “I also wouldn’t relax.” He yanked my arm toward him, then cupped my face with one single hand, squeezing my cheeks so tightly I thought my head would pop like a grape. “If you do anything like what you just did to me again, I will go against the boss’s orders and deal with you myself, understood?”
Cars hissed past us, filling the silence with the sound of their wheels on the tarmac. If anyone saw what was going on, nobody stopped to lend a hand, nobody even honked their horns. We were in the middle of a quiet highway, with nothing but darkness and trees all around us; nobody was coming to help. I didn’t speak.
He shoved me back against the seat, fixed the blindfold around my eyes, then slammed the door shut. A moment later, we were on the road again, and while my hands were free, I didn’t think escape was an option. Even if I could get out of the car, there was no way I’d get Fate out and moving before Crag stopped us both. I thought about reaching for his neck, his apparent weak spot, from behind and suffocating him as he drove, but the last thing I wanted was for him to throw the car off the road with us in it. I had to pick my battles, and this wasn’t one I could win.
We were driving for what felt like another hour before the car pulled off the highway and started moving along a quiet, single road. I could hear crickets outside, and owls hooting in trees. Fate had suffered another attack and then promptly fallen asleep against my shoulder. I was trying to figure out where in the hell we were, but my sense of direction was completely shot, and despite being untied, I’d been warned against taking the blindfold off. Still, it looked as though we’d arrived wherever we were going—which was great, because I needed to pee.
The car rolled to a stop. Crag turned off the ignition and stepped outside, but he didn’t immediately open the backseat door. Instead I heard him walk a few paces away from the car and start talking to someone else. Their voices were muffled, distant, difficult to hear, but I got the impression one of them was a woman.
I shrugged my shoulder and nudged Fate awake. “We’re here,” I whispered.
“Five more minutes,” she said, her voice lazy and groggy.
“Fate wake up. We’re here.”
“Huh?” she perked up. “What’s here? I can’t see.”
I dared to peek from under my blindfold, but I could hear Crag approaching so I let the blindfold go and placed my hand on my lap. He opened the door, unbuckled my seatbelt, and pulled me out into the cold, night air which, out here, had a fresh, rural scent like a forest after a night of hard rain. Someone else approached, a pair of cold hands reached for the blindfold around my eyes, and then I could see.
The woman in front of me had wavy locks of black hair that cascaded around her shoulders like a waterfall of darkness, which meant I already didn’t trust her. As a rule, I didn’t trust anyone with black hair. She had perfect, pearly white teeth, and she also had very delicate, elfin features, like Fate—like me. It was impossible to escape the size of her smile, or the blackness of her eyes; she didn’t have whites or anything, they were just black orbs.
“Hello,” she said, in a bubbly voice, “You must be the new girls.”
“The new… yeah? Who are you?”
“I’m Aisling, I’m here to take care of you.”
“W
ait, you’re the caretaker?”
She laughed. “Oh, no, no. I’m gonna take care of your induction into the Order.” She gestured to the emptiness behind her—nothing but wide-open space, with a tree-line in the distance and a crescent moon hanging above. “The Caretaker, well… that’s another thing entirely.”
“And what is… this place?”
“That’s… really not for me to say just yet. I know you must have questions about the Order, you’ve probably heard some things.”
“A few,” Fate said, nodding. “You guys are dicks.”
“The Order gets a bad rap, but you understand we are here to guard humanity and protect the supernaturals that are worthy of filling our ranks, right? We’re peacekeepers.”
“You’re murderers and thugs,” I said, “What peace do you keep?”
“Do you really think this world would be half as quiet as it is now if not for us and what we do?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Before us, supernaturals who fell through the rifts were able to run around unchecked, exploiting humans or starting fights with the other supernaturals native to this world. It was chaos. Now, at least, there’s a system in place to catch wayward supernaturals and make sure they aren’t a threat to others.”
I’d heard about the rifts before, everybody had. Fate and I had arrived on Earth because we’d fallen through one of them, as had any other supernatural from the other side that we’d ever encountered. Nobody could tell me what the rifts were, how many there were, or just how many of us had fallen through from our world to this one, but one thing was clear—there were a lot of us, and we all had agendas.
Mine was to survive.
“We weren’t hurting anyone where we were. You just busted into my house and grabbed us—how’d you find out where we were, by the way? We’ve always been super careful not to do anything stupid.”
Aisling smiled sharply. “Look, this is all a bit much. I understand. Right now, all I need to do is get your measurements and—”
I batted her searching hands away from my torso. “—measurements? For what?”
“After,” came a dark, cold voice, “Assuming there is one for you left.”
I turned my head and saw him marching toward us, though where he’d come from, I couldn’t say. There were no other cars, no bikes, and it didn’t look like he’d arrived via parachute, but he was here, the man with the red jewels and the long black coat; the man whose magical aura I could feel caressing me even now as he moved past me, the man whose name I didn’t know.
“You,” I said.
“You will allow Aisling to take your measurements,” he said, “Then you will surrender your personal belongings to her. Your friend will do the same. Is that understood?”
My chest tightened. The pendant around my neck was the only thing I had that reminded—if you could call it remembering—me of home, of a home I didn’t know. It was the only thing about me I knew for a fact had any real magic in it, the only thing about me of any value besides Fate. I couldn’t let them see it. “You want to take my things?” I asked.
“It’s protocol,” Aisling said, tilting her head to the side and pouting. “Sorry.”
Fate rubbed her hands together. “It’s cold as shit out here,” she said, “Can we please just get this over with? I really would rather die than have to stand out here much longer.”
“Aisling, take their measurements; Crag, their belongings,” red jewels said, “The eager beaver will go first.”
“Right away, boss,” Crag said.
“First?” I asked, “First to what? And why the fuck don’t we get to know your name yet?”
Crag came over to me and placed a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged him off and moved closer to red jewels. If he didn’t tell me his name soon, I’d give him a name he probably wouldn’t be too happy with.
“You forget your place,” he purred, matching the speed of my advance and squaring up to me. Power curled off him like fire; fire so intense it stopped me dead in my tracks. The night itself seemed to surround him, thicken around him, darken in his presence. I suddenly didn’t want to be anywhere near him or his black eyes. Eyes like Aisling’s. “But if you are both to meet the reaper soon,” he said, “You should know the name of the person who arranged the encounter. My name is Draven, I am a High Marshall of the Obsidian Order.”
“Draven…” the word fell past my lips on the back of a sigh. I was about to speak, but Crag’s hand was on my shoulder again, and this time I couldn’t shrug out of his grip.
“She will go first,” Draven said. He was talking about Fate.
“First to what?” I asked for a second time, “What are you sending her into?”
“She will meet the Caretaker, and she will either survive and join the Order, or be found unworthy and die.”
“Are you insane? She’s sick! She can’t—”
“Sick?” Draven asked, cutting me off. “What kind of sick?”
“I… I don’t know, she’s just sick, okay? Whatever you’re going to put her through, she may not survive it. Don’t do this to her.”
I watched him as he considered what I’d said and found myself strangely admiring him. He had a striking beauty about him that was entirely otherworldly, inescapable. Even as he stood in quiet contemplation, he commanded the attention of the people around him. I, like the others, were clinging to him, waiting for him to decide. I’d never come across someone who had that kind of power before, but then he spoke, and any admiration turned to poison. “Then we’ll have to kill her now and be done with it,” he said.
“Seline!” Fate yelled, utter panic in her trembling voice.
I made a move toward her, hot, furious anger filling my chest and fueling my actions, but Crag held me in place. “Don’t try it,” he warned, “Or I’ll pop your shoulder out and really give you a disadvantage against the Caretaker. Not that it needs one to deal with a pipsqueak like you. I’ve seen it eat guys twice my size.”
“Crag,” Draven said as he walked away, “Remove Seline’s jacket and take her things while I deal with her friend.”
Crag picked at the top button of my leather jacket and managed to pop it open only because I took the slack in his grip as an opportunity to wriggle away from him. “Wait, wait!” I yelled, running after Draven with my hands up. “I’ll go first!”
Draven stopped, turned around, and in his eyes, I noticed something; a flicker of light besides what little glow my own hair was giving off. This light was blue, and faint, but it pulsed like a distant, cold star in the night sky. I realized, then, he was looking directly at the pendant around my neck, that small, flimsy, crescent shaped shard of crystal that held a sliver of magic inside.
“What is…” he tilted his head, eyes narrowing, eyebrows meeting in the center of his face. I clasped the top button of my leather jacket closed again and saw on his face a look almost like remembrance, but then he shook his head like he wasn’t sure of what he’d seen.
“I’ll go in her place,” I insisted, “I’ll do this for the two of us.”
“No,” he said, with all the stern authority he could manage.
“That woman has never done anything wrong to anyone in her life, and you’ll condemn her to die at the hands of some thing in the woods? No. I’d die for her a thousand times if it means she can be spared that. Send me against to face the Caretaker first, send me twice, I don’t give a fuck.”
Crag advanced on me again, I could hear him coming up behind me—he was impossible to miss. Knowing now what I didn’t know the first time we’d met, though, I spun around and struck him square in the center of his throat with the tips of my fingers. Crag staggered, clasping his throat, gasping for air. I turned my head and stared at Draven, a breeze gently whipping my face.
Fate’s eyes were wide with shock, maybe awe. Aisling was nodding, impressed. Draven was all cold, hard stare. “If you fail,” he said, “You will both die.”
Aisling had kept nodding for a
second, but then stopped and shook her head. “Wait, no, you can’t do that,” she said, “Protocol—”
“I’m High Marshall, this is my decision. She will face the Caretaker instead of her friend, but will carry both their fates in her hands.”
“You know I have to report this.”
A tense moment passed. “Report it. Take that one inside. I will take Seline to meet the Caretaker personally.”
I didn’t like the way he’d drawn that last word out, it sounded almost sinister, but it looked—for now at least—as though Fate would be okay. Once Crag managed to catch his breath, he walked around me, scowling, and joined Fate and Aisling, who were walking, walking, walking, until they just… disappeared into the night. Poof. Vanished.
For the first time ever, I was alone with Draven, and somehow, the night felt thick as well as cold. I had to swallow a couple of times to fight the anxiety away, that growing sense of dread that came with feeling like the dark was closing in on me. The last thing I wanted was for this guy to sense any kind of weakness from me.
“Alright…” Draven’s voice trailed off. “It’s time to meet the Caretaker.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Draven walked me away from the point where Fate had disappeared, away from the comfort of the car I had been driven in and the road the car had been driven on. He also walked me away from any source of light that wasn’t natural, and as we pushed further into the thicket of trees, the light from the crescent moon started to have a real hard time reaching us, turning the darkness heavier still.
As subtly as I could, and only because I was walking behind him, I reached for a strand of my hair and rolled it between my fingers. Whenever I did this, the glow from my hair seemed to intensify just a little bit, almost as if reacting to my touch, or my thoughts, or maybe just my need for light. It made me feel better, safer, more confident, and boy if I ever needed confidence right now.
Wet leaves crunched under my feet, crickets hadn’t stopped chirping since the first time I’d heard them, but this time there was no owl hooting in the night, no birds of any kind in the trees in fact. My skin started to prickle, my heart galloped, and as the trees grew denser around me, a pinch of panic grabbed at the back of my throat and squeezed.
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