Page 94 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
I took a step toward the mouth of the cave. Tacker parried to block me.
“Blood doesn’t determine the kind of person you are,” I said. “It’s all about the choices you make.”
Fletch’s bright eyes dimmed. He pouted. “Maybe we should let her go.”
My heart soared.
Irritation rippled through the squared line of Tacker’s jaw. “Fletch—”
“I think I’d feel bad.” Fletch regarded me like a lamb. “She seems friendly. Eating her would feel wrong.”
My heart plummeted to my bowels.
A memory from Sunday Circle years ago flitted back to me. Uncle Neel’s lecture on the Fomorians had somehow succeeded in engrossing Ace, a kid who often fell asleep during religious lessons. In between bites of an ice cream sandwich, he’d raised his sticky hand to ask Uncle Neel for the gory details on what the Fomorians had done to their victims.
Stern, Uncle Neel had answered, “They ate them.”
Ace and our other classmates had rumbled, amazed. I’d nearly snorted at the time, assuming Uncle Neel had named a tamer crime than rape, mutilation, and torture, one the young’uns at circle could understand. But now—cannibalization seemed an imminent and terrible fate.
When I heard the scrape of metal against a scabbard, my hackles raised to emit a shriek. Tacker bent over me, his sharp teeth flashing as he fisted his long, hooked blade—the kind used to gut fish.
“Don’t fret, Fletch. She’s no friendlier than a sea-dragon.” He grabbed my bicep when I tried to run, wrenching me into him. “She’s just a clever talker.”
“No, I’m not!” I appealed to Fletch, struggling. “I honestly believe there’s good in you!”
Scully scoffed, but Fletch’s brow remained bunched in doubt.
“That’s enough, Fletch.” Tacker shook me. “If you want your father to see your worth as a leader, you can’t fall for every sweet lie you hear from the likes of her. She can’t possibly see good in us, and she shouldn’t.”
Tacker’s low laughter was a death knell, tolling through the cavern. “We Fomorians earned our reputation, little Danann. We feel no guilt in it. Do we, Fletch? Unless you’ve a quarrel with your father’s ways.”
That rattled the morality right out of Fletch, and the hope right out of me. “Of course not, cousin.”
“Good.” Tacker offered his knife to Fletch. “Then you’ll be the one who takes her heart.”
Undiluted joy glowing once more in his eyes, Fletch took the proffered knife, and I screamed for mercy, prey in a snare.
Seventeen
Pete
Petehadlaughedwhenhe’d returned to the lake to find smoke, ash, and his prisoner gone. While Shorty had been resourceful enough to make fire (how she’d known she needed fire to break her tether, he couldn’t say), she’d neglected to cover her tracks. Through the sand. Her footsteps led his eyes down the shoreline, the direction from which her now familiar scent beckoned. Like a fecking curling finger.
He’d glanced down at Sionna beside him, her floppy ears perked. “Shall we go fetch Shorty before she kills herself?”
The spoilt babe he’d come to know wouldn’t make it far in the deep forest without help. He’d wagered she’d go but a mile before she opted to rest her legs, assuming a good hiding spot would thwart him.
He’d been bemused—and impressed—to find he was wrong. Shorty hadn’t stopped to rest. She hadn’t stopped foranything. The pace she’d kept was breakneck, to the point where Pete and Sionna became winded.
“Christ,” he’d muttered to Sionna, whose tongue wagged as they climbed another mossy hill. “She keeps this up, she’ll break her bloody ankles.”
That he hadn’t already stumbled upon her mewling over some minor injury amazed him. The beyn he’d been carting around in his wagon couldn’t walk a snail’s pace for a quarter of an hour before begging a reprieve.
By the time Pete had finally caught sight of Shorty, he was damn sure he’d been duped. She’d covered fifteen miles before she’d chosen to hide for the night—in a cave concealed by ivy.
Not exactly the feat of a coddled fussbudget, is it?he’d judged from where he and Sionna hid amid surrounding brush, watching Shorty skitter around the forest floor, foraging nuts like a paranoid squirrel.But why act the princess? How would that benefit her?
She goaded you into leaving her unattended, now didn’t she?
