So down the main road, we picked up the pace, sharp breaths and some gasping sounds starting to rise up from our single file. Bags slapped against backs, but mine just bounced against my hip. Lost my main backpack in the grocer’s store, left behind. Now, all I had with me was my shoulder bag, too small to carry much of anything important. In it were some tampons, a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and a lighter, a small keychain torch, painkillers, a serrated kitchen-knife and a handgun that I’ve yet to use. But I’d lost everything else; clothes, washcloths, shoes, socks and underwear, books, a pack of kindling—and food. Tins and cans and packets, all crammed into that backpack, all gone.

  There was no going back for it, either. Not without parting ways with the group, and I’m no fool. I stuck with them all the way down the sloped street, until it happened all at once—

  The force of the tremor was enough to knock me off my feet. Like dolls cut from strings, we all went toppling over. Few still stayed standing.

  As I smacked onto my side against the cobblestone—even with the quivering beneath me that rattled me like an explosion of shudders in my body—I couldn’t tear my eyes off of it.

  At the bottom of the cobblestone downhill road, amber light shone up in warped rivers. And my heart sank all the way to my watery gut at the sight of them—at the sight of the dark fae army.

  Let me take you back there, to the last time I almost died…

  3

  The dark fae haven’t spotted us yet.

  Preoccupied by the violent tremors downhill at the cusp of the town, they focus all their attention on the earth. It’s worse down there—even beasts like the dark fae wear unease in the thinning of their lips, the tilts of their mouths, the uncertain steps back that they take, as though fighting the urge to retreat—an urge I doubt comes naturally to these warriors.

  Each time I lay my gaze upon these creatures, I’m stunned still and silent. Never before has anything in this world been so beautiful yet savage all at once. Not our lions, our tigers, even our storms.

  These beings are something else entirely with their ghost-white faces, flawless as though they are sculpted marble; others with beige tones to compliment honey-brown eyes so deep that even from this distance, I think fleetingly of pools of fresh mud and riverbanks. I catch amber eyes, like the early kisses of flames that come from their fire-torches.

  And I spot among the masses of them that they have captured a group of humans somewhere along their travels.

  The humans are unmistakable in their decrepit appearances next to such creatures. They huddle together, clothes turned to rags that hang off their bony frames, faces hollowed out by hunger and terror, sunken in and illuminated by the hot orange fire-torches.

  In contrast, despite the fae’s obvious beauty, the savagery of what they are shouts louder than the earthquake. It’s in the almond-shapes of their blade-like eyes, the cruel pinches of their brows and mouths even while eyeing the dangerous earth with creases of worry, and the sheer size of them. They are towers next to a tall human man, that’s for sure.

  Most look around the mid-six-foots, but some stretch up even taller than that. But it’s more than height; it’s the pull of their leather armour over bulging muscles, the circumference of their biceps thicker than my thighs in some of them.

  Each of them carries an abundance of weapons. An American’s dream, I think bitterly to myself. Belts of knives and blades, swords sheathed at their backs, razored whips coiled around muscular forearms.

  The terror at seeing them so close to us—so close to where we were resting not long before—has our whole group motionless. We have turned to statues, all flattened to the ground, hands spread out, heads down, eyes darting around.

  One wrong move, and all attention of the dark fae could fix right uphill—on us. For the moment, they watch the tremors wrack the earth. But that could change with a too-loud breath or a shift of the body. We are mere heartbeats away from being discovered.

  But then, for the first time in a long while, fate seems to look kindly on us—or at the very least, with pity.

  The earth splits.

  At the edge of the dark fae army, where hundreds of them are gathered, the most ground-wracking tremor strikes through the whole town. Dirt and tarmac are speared with a crack too fast, too sudden, too violent.

  My heart leaps up into my throat as some of the captive humans go tumbling into the widening crack. One has managed to grip into the earth at the edge, keeping herself up. But no one comes to her aid; not even her own kind. And it’s a mere ragged breath loosened from my tight chest before she’s falling into the opening pit.

  Fleetingly, I wonder if there is lava down there, if it runs that deep into the earth, and the girl burned alive or melted. But the thought is hit right out of me when it happens; the crack is spearing uphill. It’s headed right towards us.

  I have barely a moment to see the dark fae spread out, backing off from the earthquake and the area, and that a handful of them are trapped on the other side of the crack. They separate, and the handful are riding what looks to be hairless horses adjacent to the crack, coming our way.

  I launch myself up from the ground. And I go sprinting down the road.

  Everyone else in the group has the same idea. No more single-file lines, organised movements. We sprint, as fast as we can, and I know someone is too slow when I hear a gurgling cry and the split of earth behind me.

  I don’t look back. I jump to the side just as a pile of roof-tiles comes smacking down on the road. Houses all around are crumbling to chunks and debris.

  I dodge and duck and dive, avoiding it all. Somehow, Paul got ahead of me with Kale. Maybe I’m too slow, maybe they were ahead of me the whole time. I don’t know. But I do hear the thumping of bootfalls behind me, right at my heels.

  But then behind me, there’s a sudden rise of mangled screams. And a very, very audible crunch.

  I stagger, my heeled ankle boots skidding against the cobblestone. Stumbling around, my shoulder collides hard with Laura barging past me. She keeps going as I search the growing darkness for the victims I heard—obviously crushed by some debris.

  I don’t get another second to look or investigate before orange light rises up ahead and my heart stops. Those dark fae divided from their group are coming.

  And they are close.

  I turn on my heels and I bolt into the dark. I use only the sounds of footsteps pounding against the road to guide me, smacking into car doors and tripping over abandoned bags of rubbish.

  We run for too long.

  I don’t know if we have left the town behind, or have come into another one when we finally slow. All I know is that we have lost some people, the earth doesn’t shudder with the tremors anymore, and my legs are searing from the inside.

  And one more thing…

  Those stragglers—the dark fae separated from their army—are not far behind us.

  4

  That dark fae army—in the hundreds—should have cornered and killed us.

  They should have had their chance to do what they do; burn places to the ground, torture humans they find, slaughter.

  If it wasn’t for that earthquake, that saving grace, we would all be dead. Or worse (after seeing the proof of human prisoners in the army with my own eyes) we could have been captured.

  France is my home. It always has been, since I never considered boarding school to be even a home away from home. So I know that earthquakes just don’t happen here.

  Whatever caused it has been the talk of the group since we holed up in this dirty, musty flat in the next village over (we figured out with street signs and our map that we ran all the way to Saint-Roch while fleeing the fae stragglers and the earthquake). Some of the others think that it was the earth rejecting the invasion—all the bloodshed, the darkness, the plague. But all that I can agree with in that reasoning is the perpetual blackness of the world. All the rest of it has been a reoccurrence throughout human history, so I don’t see why Mother Earth would get all up in arms about some virus and wars. We’ve done worse, us humans.

  Even the darkness is something we have done before, though clearly not to the same extent. But what we have done is covered our cities in smog, so thick that the sun couldn’t penetrate.

  So why would Mother Earth be on our side now?

  I’m not buying into the theories flying about this crammed ‘kitchen’ … if you could call it that.

  Maybe, since my life before the dark was all finer things and wealth and villas on the beachside towns and trips to the Swiss Alps, I’m a little on the judgey side, but this … kitchen reminds me of those found in the budget holiday vehicles; caravans. Mind, I’ve only ever seen the interior of those things on TV, but still. That’s what this kitchen reminds me of with its boxed-in space, crammed full to the brim with our remaining survivors, a hob instead of a full oven-cooker, no air-fryer in sight, a dirty white kettle that will never boil no matter how much I pray to Mother Earth that it will.

  It’s made fuller by the couch and armchair we pushed in here not long after we settled in. I’ve found a cosy spot on the corner of the couch, leaning against the thick arm whose material stinks of stale cigarettes and spilled beer.

  It brings an idea to mind. I rummage through my shoulder bag and pluck out a French cigarette and lighter. No one bothers to even glare at me. Not like I can go outside for a smoke, can I? Besides, this is still France. And some of the others are too deep in sleep to notice.

  While some of the others sleep, most of us are wallowing in the silence that swallowed us a little while ago. Paul went back to scout the road leading into the village. We need to know if those straggler fae are coming our way. And he still hasn’t returned. Each second that door doesn’t open and he doesn’t step inside, is another second my breath feels too tight in my chest.

  But the silence is more than impatience. It’s sorrowful, too. Respectful, on my part.

  We lost three between the earthquake and the flat.

  The quiet lone-wolf of the group, Adler, somehow vanished. He must have gotten separated from us while we ran out of the town, forever gone to the dark now. Maybe he’s still out there, wandering, searching for us. Or—more likely—the tough German will do just fine on his own.

  The others we lost (two of them), I heard being crushed by debris. I’ve since learned that those two were Nate and Miranda—two British siblings, no older than me in my final year at boarding school. At least I had the chance to leave for university, but those two only had the opportunity of a world strangled by darkness and war.

  Our numbers are down to eight now. Less if Paul doesn’t return. The stubborn bull insisted on going it alone. ‘Can’t risk more people’, he gruffed when Laura offered to go with him.

  Laura is as close to bravery as we have among the girls here. She’s a close second to Paul. The rest of us don’t do so well in the courage-department.

  I tried to be friends with her once (partly for protection, I won’t lie), but I’ve never been skilled at things like that and now she thinks I’m a ‘pretentious twat’. Her words, not mine. Said them right to my face. Apparently, she values herself higher than me because she knows how to hunt and live off the land, but I don’t.

  Even in this whole new world, I guess these things still matter to some.

  Not to me, it doesn’t. All that matters now is survival.

  But even now, we know that survival has gone from a hope to a fantasy.

  Paul bursts into my thoughts when he comes barging through the kitchen door. The sudden sound yanks everyone out of their stupor. The ones who were asleep jerk forward, eyes wide and panicked, hands reaching for nearby weapons.

  My slim cigarette hovers near my parted, chapped lips, vapours of smoke slithering out of me; anticipation freezes me.

  When gazes land on Paul as he shuts the door quietly then leans back on it, a ribbon of relief unwinds over us, and we all go back to poor posture, slumped.

  He’s alive. He wasn’t followed.

  For a minute, we’re safe.

  I take a breath of my cigarette, hearing the paper crackle in the quiet.

  Still, eyes follow Paul as he slides down the door and rests his forearms on his drawn-up knees. His gaze darts around the kitchen for a beat before he shakes his head.

  My face falls. Blood rains out of my head and piles around my thumping heart. My hand lowers, lingering the cigarette between my knees, ribbons of smoke lifting up from it as it turns to ash.

  “They are coming this way,” he tells us. “Four of them.” As an afterthought, he adds, “Saw no signs of the army.”

  His add-on has no effect on the utter defeat deflating me. Four dark fae are more than enough to take us all out. Just one of them could do more damage than that. I’ve seen these things in battle—I’ve seen them rip out throats with their teeth and plunge their hands into ribcages. Gruesome stuff; the kind that sticks to dreams and turns them ghastly.

  Paul leans his head back against the door. Looking up at the popcorn ceiling, he says, “I assume they are going around to meet back up with their army. They know where they are and how to find them. So even if we move on before they get here…”

  He trails off and the implications hang heavy over us. My head bows as I bring up my knees to my chest. My white country-dress slips back as I rest my chin on my knees. My cigarette hand rests over the arm of the couch, going unsmoked. A long line of ash falls to the linoleum floor.

  Either way, we are stuck in the middle of dark fae—and who knows however many other armies are out there in the black. This village hasn’t been touched yet, and that means that some fae armies haven’t finished what they started—so there should be more coming.

  Surrounded, I see no way out of this. And apparently, neither does anyone else.

  I mean, it could be the world wearing us down to scraps. We’ve been at this a long time. Over a year. I don’t know exactly how long, but it’s been time that has stretched us from hopeful to absolutely desolate and hopeless.

  I can’t stop the thought from invading my mind—what if none of us really want to keep at it anymore? We have no more fleeing, running, escaping left in us.

  And our fantasies of life by the sea are just that—fantasies. How can we adapt to a proper life in the dark? Who’s to say that we won’t be found by other armies—or even other survivors, the none-too-kind ones that aren’t exactly rare.

  None of us offer up any solutions. Well, not until Harry speaks up—

  “We could fight.” His voice is small, broken by how unused it is. He’s not much of a chatterbox.

  All gazes cut to him.

  Silence sweeps over us, an expectant and laughable tint to it.

  With a bitter smile, I finish off my cigarette then flick it to the floor. Using the toe of my boot, I stamp it out, then bring up my knee to my chest again.

  Paul is the one who answers, “Fight against the dark fae?” He manages to fight off the incredulity from his tone, though I recognise it in the corner creases of his eyes.

  “We,” Harry repeats, elbowing his only friend in the group, Jamie, “could fight.”

  I lift my chin from my knees and narrow my eyes on them. Confusion is etched onto the grim tilt of my mouth.

  Jamie shoots his friend a baffled look.

  “We have everything we need in this room,” Harry goes on, his mind churning behind his bottle-green eyes, working faster than he can speak.

  “We wouldn’t stand a chance,” Spike—he says that’s his name, but I doubt it to this day—argues, an irritated edge to his tone. “They’d massacre us all before we could lift a knife!”

  “No, no, we wouldn’t have to get close, not at first,” Harry says, his eyes lighting up. “We build a bomb. That gives us a chance to …”

  “Finish them off,” I say, eyeing him with a whole new outlook. Smart cookie. Bet he was destined to be some genius before all this shit happened.

  He looks the part, too. Pimples—all red, angry and yellow-tipped—litter his chin and cheeks, and his auburn hair wears the oil carried from weeks of not washing it. Beneath his baggy, torn t-shirt (with some cartoon character on the front, go figure) he is all scrawny skin-and-bones.

  But if the kid says he knows how to build a bomb, then good for him. And it might make the difference between going out with a blast and going out with a sizzle.

  I’m leaning towards the blast idea.

  I’m the first to nod.

  Paul watches me for a long, quiet moment. Then he nods, too.

  It’s a ripple after that. All except Spike seem to agree, even if none of us are terribly happy about it.

  Finally, Spike pushes up from the cabinet beneath the stained sink and strides to the pantry. He rummages through it for a moment before he pulls back, holding two bottles in his hands; cheap whiskeys caked in dust.

  “Well if this is it, then I want to have to some fun.” He grins something oily, baring his plaque-stained teeth at us. I suppress a shudder. “Who’s with me?”

  Only Laura reaches out her hand for a bottle.

  I roll onto my side and lay there. I stare at the wall.

  And silently, I listen as the next few hours roll on. There’s the clinking of glass, the glugging of whiskey, and the two weeds in the corner, working on the bomb.

  Snares of sleep dare start to wrap around me.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been tucked up here, but just when the murmurs in the kitchen begin to muffle, my eyelids are fluttering and my mind has drifted off to that strange place between sleep and reality.

  In a life full of almosts, slumber only threatens to take me. It starts to. But before it can secure its grip on my melting mind, I hear it—a heavy skittering sound.

  I blink, awake.

  Looking at the wall, a frown knits my blonde eyebrows together and I listen. Maybe I just imagined it. It could have been a sound of my strange dreamlike thoughts.