Most of the world is dead. We know that since the dark fae spread out around Europe first, left it mostly intact, then reached the farther ends of the world. With all the rumours drifting between surviving groups over time, one theme was constant—the dark fae were burning their way through the world back to us.
And they have reached us, leaving behind a world—cities, towns, villages, farms—completely decimated. Swarms of their armies have burnt our human world to ashes, and now it’s all we can do to keep a day’s distance between us and the nearest dark fae army. There aren’t many survivors anymore, not with so many of the dark fae coming back this way, killing the humans they find, burning all of our histories.
There is no escaping them. No outrunning the inevitable.
We all know that, every single person in this group has accepted this glaring truth. But the question remained for a while—what do we do about it?
Waiting around to be butchered just didn’t seem to be a popular option in our group. So we came up with a scrap of a plan.
In this kitchen, with the perfect vantage point to the street down there, an almost-finished homemade bomb tucked away in the corner, and some stray dark fae separated from their army and headed our way, we will go out with a bang.
That’s what we’re doing here.
We are here to fight.
And we are here to die.
2
THEN
The handful of dark fae strays coming our way isn’t something we would have known if it weren’t for the most recent almost-death I mentioned earlier.
Loudun, France is a commune about a day’s walk from Tours, where we are now. It was in Loudun that we were hiding out, gathering supplies, getting some real rest (well, everyone else got some zzz’s but I find it hard to sleep longer than twenty minutes at a time without the sudden terror of dark fae hunting us zapping through my body and jolting me awake). Good thing I wasn’t sleeping that night, since I was the first to feel it—
The tremor.
It shuddered the floor of the grocer’s shop, rattled the windows in their frames with the sounds of faint whispers, like wind whistling through cracks. At first, that’s exactly what I thought it was—wind creeping into our dark space. But it was no breeze, no gush of air. It was the first symptom of what was to come: an earthquake.
It wasn’t my first thought. Even when all twelve of us had woken up to the third surge of rattles whose violence increased with enough power to rain down dust from the panelled ceiling, no one suspected that we were about to be thrown into the midst of an earthquake, cracks in the earth beneath us.
I’m from the South of France, spent much of my time at our villa there, gone for those semesters at boarding school. I know my country. France doesn’t get earthquakes … at least not before the dark fae invaded us.
Now, there is little to recognise in this new world. Whether the earth is rejecting the invaders, the darkness, the loss of its original and wretched guardians, I don’t know. All I know is that the earth is angry, and we wound up in the middle of its rage.
That day was a brutal one; more so than any I’ve ever faced before.
Mere rapid heartbeats after the third tremor, the entire group flew up in a flurry. Hands were snatching at duffel bags, clattering sounds of people fumbling with torches echoed out, the scuffs of boots scraped over the linoleum floor.
Everyone grabbed what they could, even with the ceiling dust turning to chunks of cardboard-like wood starting to rain down on us. One, the size of a half-torn torso, whacked me on the head, good and hard. The hit was enough to drop me to the floor like a sack of rice. But it didn’t knock me out.
Dazed, I staggered to my feet, felt around in the shuddering shop for my things. I managed only to grab the thin spaghetti-strap of my shoulder bag before a meaty hand snatched up my bony bicep and a gruff voice growled my name with exasperation, “Coralie.”
I sucked in a sharp breath before Paul swung me out of the danger zone of collapsing chunks of ceiling.
We stumbled forward, his hand slipping away from my arm. The crash of wood smacked down behind us with enough impact to cause a tremor of its own.
Distantly, I was aware of the shop door being booted open. The bell above it rang for a beat before it was drowned out by the sudden rise of crashes and bangs and rattles ripping through the air. Sounded almost like a fast train tearing off the rails, if that heart-stopping noise was magnified to flood an entire town.
Footsteps pounded on the linoleum, piling ahead to the open glass door. We poured out onto the street, bodies slamming into bodies, arms bouncing off arms. A bag whacked me over the shoulder at one point, but I hardly felt it. I don’t think I even noticed it at the time.
There was a moment out the front of the rattling shop; a moment of deafening songs of tremors, strangled breaths and shuddering bodies, and the flickers of torches giving off their faint light in the suffocating darkness.
The light did little. The dust in the air was too thick to see through—and I could already feel it starting to crawl down my itchy throat. Panicked gasps were breaking out all around me; everyone, suffocating on the dust spraying down from the buildings around us, hidden deep in the dark.
“Get to the middle of the road,” a familiar gravelly voice commanded, and I recognised it even in the faint wispy light of the torches to belong to Paul. If we had a leader among us, it would be him. But in the cold, harsh reality, we are a band of individual survivors—each one of us out for themselves.
But an earthquake?
That was a danger we hadn’t faced before. And sticking together was our best chance to survive.
We herded ourselves like sheep without a shepherd to the middle of the road. Before we could form a solid wall, someone squeezed into the middle of the group, and I caught the faint scent of peach-juice from a tin. It must have been Elsa, since she was devouring the canned peaches earlier before sleep came for most of us.
I couldn’t bring myself to be annoyed at Elsa for using us like shields against falling debris; wood house-faces and roof-tiles rolling down to crack against the cobblestone. Really, the tinge of annoyance that twisted my narrow face into a grimace was sprung through me purely because I hadn’t thought of that.
A soft murmured voice somehow carried over the shattering violence in the air, “Shouldn’t we find cover?”
That question speared memories through me.
Much of the year at Strath boarding school in Scotland meant a lot of days and nights spent binging TV shows. Drama, you know? And of course, earthquakes were a classic trope for those types of shows. So the memories came back to me in flashes, people seeking shelter in bathtubs with mattresses pulled over top, crammed underneath solid dining tables, hiding out anywhere but in the middle of the street—right between two danger points of collapsing buildings. But then, if they were collapsing, were they really all that safe?
“Stay tight,” Paul grunted, the clutch of fear evident in his shaky undertones. His hand—sweaty and too-large—grips onto my shoulder firmly, and it was just in that moment that I realised we were all holding onto each other in a circle around Elsa. “Wait for the tremor to stop, then we run for it.”
Run for it?
Run where?
Who knew how far this earthquake stretched? Did it reach other towns nearby, forgotten farms and lost villages?