Field training: Day 15, hour 8
First battle
I whipped my head back and forth.
Slash. Punch. Kick. Thrust.
My forearm burned from gripping my daggers for hours, and my body whirled helplessly as bodies slammed around me in the the village hut.
On the frozen side of a mountain, I fought with desperation.
My brain noted the pattern of the attack and that we should be fanning out for maximum effect to corral the attacking creatures.
But that wasn’t what I did.
Knowing something was different from doing it.
I choked on exhaustion, confusion, and violence as my arms swung desperately in every direction.
My blows were frenzied and panicked.
It had been like this for hours. A harried rush of barely defending myself.
Various weapons had pierced my skin, and if it weren’t for my fucked-up fae queendom, I would have been long dead from blood loss.
My body was covered in wounds.
Blood splattered my flesh, smoke clouded my vision, and icy cold slowed my muscles.
I was in hell.
The ungodly didn’t all burst from their hosts and attack us as monsters of flesh and claws.
No.
I would have preferred that.
Instead, they fought as villagers: innocent women, men, and teenagers.
When the first ungodly had charged, Malum had brutally cut through its carapace and removed its head.
The creature was nothing but an oozing green mass of death.
There had been a moment of silence as the villagers stared down at the desecrated body at Malum’s feet.
The shock of calm.
Before the storm.
Rushing from every hut, hundreds of villagers had screamed and charged us. Some had weapons. Some wielded nothing but teeth and nails.
And it wasn’t until you killed a villager that the ungodly would burst through their flesh in a roar of snapping pincers and rage.
It was like fighting two at once.
Once you’d defeated the villager, the battle really began. It was a psychological trip. Not the good kind.
I could barely get past the first step: kill the villagers.
Now I hesitated yet again as a young woman with dark hair and pale skin threw herself at me. I didn’t raise my knives as she snarled and contorted.
With dark hair and sad eyes, she reminded me of an older Jinx.
She slammed her teeth against my bicep and ripped through my flesh. Up close, I could make out the lime-green sheen that covered her eyes.
That should have made all the difference.
I knew that one of those things was somehow inside her and making her attack.
But logic wasn’t always enough.
I hesitated.
My monster had stopped screaming for blood hours ago. It was confused.
I didn’t know how to act or what to feel.
She was living a nightmare she hadn’t asked for. Mouth at my collarbone, her teeth somehow shredded my skin down to my bone.
I shook at her weakly.
Watched with a sick fascination as she snarled and bit with the ferocity of a rabid animal.
I grabbed her by the back of her neck and tried to gently extract her.
She didn’t deserve this.
She didn’t know what she was doing.
Her nails dragged across my face, and the gushing blood tinged the snowy world in a ruby haze.
“Please don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t do this.”
Her nose scrunched up as she screamed, “You killed them!” She bit down on my hand and slammed her feet into my stomach.
“Please,” I begged. “Please understand.”
She screamed louder and bit down on my forearm as I tried to hold her away from me.
Around us, knives whirled, fire leaped, women screamed; men yelled, the wind howled, villagers died, and monsters emerged from their corpses.
It was hell.
“Please. Please. Please,” I chanted as I held her.
Maybe I could tie her up?
She screamed mindlessly.
“Please.”
I begged the sun god. Pleaded with whoever was in charge of goodness and civility in the realms.
A rusty sword slammed into my thigh, and I grunted as my right leg exploded with pain.
Yet another fucking wound to add to the collection. The girl failed, and her teeth dragged against my chin.
An elderly man, weathered and gray, snarled as he pulled back the rusty sword and aimed for my other leg. He looked so old.
So feeble.
Someone’s grandfather. Maybe hers?
Maybe I could tie him up too?
He swung the sword forward, but it halted midswing as his entire arm clattered to the ground.
Warm blood spurted onto my face and further decreased my visibility.
“What the fuck are you doing?” John screamed as he viciously severed the elderly man’s head from his body.
An ungodly burst from the fallen man’s form, and John sliced at the creature until it was reduced to a green pile of gore.
He grabbed my arm with his dirty hands. “What the fuck are you doing? You need to kill them!”
His dark gaze raked up and down my wound-covered flesh and the teenager kicking in my hand.
John’s fingers tightened painfully.
“She doesn’t know any better,” I whispered back, and my voice cracked on the dry air and the vise that constricted my airways. It was clear that the ungodly had made the villagers mindless.
John whirled and snatched a throwing ax from the air.
Wind breezed against my cheeks.
He halted the weapon’s trajectory centimeters from my face.
With a roar, he turned and chucked it back at a villager, and there was a sickening squelch as it cleaved the woman’s face in two.
“Aran, they are not people! They were dead before we got here, so you need to fight!” he yelled as he whirled and ducked knives slashing furiously, fighting without an ounce of hesitation.
But the problem with having an analytical mind was that I couldn’t believe his lie.
His statement wasn’t true, because they weren’t monsters; they were people who’d been overtaken by monsters.
The distinction mattered.
Maybe there is some way to save them? Take the ungodly from them without killing them?
There had to be a way.
If the creature got in, then it could get out.
John lunged across the room to battle with another villager and left me.
“But she doesn’t mean it.” I shook the biting girl in my hand like I could show him. Change his mind.
Make him see that she could be saved.
Suddenly the weight in my hand disappeared.
In a flash of knives, an ungodly ripped from the now-dead body and unfurled to tower about eight feet in the air.
Before it could do anything, its head was sawed off, and the body collapsed.
Malum stood in front of me.
Tattoo painted in red and green, his eyes were silver chips of molten steel. “Start fucking fighting, or I’ll kill you myself!”
I opened my mouth to argue.
Malum stalked toward me with arms on fire. Bronze muscles rippled with unbridled strength, and his harsh features were taut with hatred.
He pointed his dagger at me like he was actually going to attack.
“You’re a fucked-up bastard,” I snarled.
He kept his blade directed at me.
My monster awoke with a vengeance, and it screamed in my head, egged on by Malum’s stupid face.
Kill him. Bathe in blood.
Malum used his size to crowd me against the wall of the hut until I had to tip my head back to look at him.
The sharp edge of his dagger pressed against my cheek.
“You’re pathetic and weak.” He looked down at me like he was a king and I was nothing.
I shoved at him, but he didn’t budge at all as he tensed his muscles and kept me pinned at his mercy.
“And you’re a shitty leader.” I spat blood across the brutal planes of his face.
The dagger dug into my cheek as the dying screamed behind him.
He was really going to do it.
“What the fuck is going on?” Scorpius shoved Malum away from me and yelled at him as he ran a hand across his lover’s face to feel his expression. “I couldn’t hear you, and then I find you in the corner threatening Egan instead of the ungodly? What the fuck are you doing?”
Flames whooshed above as the pine roof burned. Ear-piercing shrieks echoed as the demons slaughtered two ungodly at once.
Malum scoffed at Scorpius. “He deserves to die. We both know he’s interested in Orion.”
“Now is—” Scorpius turned around and dragged his dagger down a villager’s torso from neck to lower belly. He turned back. “Not the time!”
Malum growled out, “Fine.” He gave me a once-over, lingering on my numerous gaping wounds. “He’s probably not going to survive anyway.”
My vision blacked out with rage.
To stop myself from attacking Malum, I stalked past him into the dense fighting in the center of the structure.
Snow mixed with fire.
And I used all my hatred to blindly slam my knives into villagers and then the ungodly.
I hacked.
I killed.
And I kept killing.
I didn’t bother to stop the teeth, the weapons, and the pincers that scoured my flesh as I attacked.
The pain was welcome.
As I punished others, I let them punish me.
A weapon banged against the floor, and the sound reminded me of a gunshot.
Fighting in the smoke, I barely registered what was the present and what was the past.
Back in the beast realm, I’d been talking to Walter in the foyer when I heard the first bang.
Then gunfire had ripped through the front door, and I’d thrown myself in front of Walter.
But the bullets had gone through my flesh and into his. He’d died, but I kept living.
It wasn’t fair.
So I’d lain on top of his corpse and let the machine guns load into me. Shrapnel tore apart muscle and bones, but it was the only penance I could pay.
Now I attacked in a foreign realm, but once again, I wasn’t able to save any of the villagers.
So I let them hurt me.
Paid my price.
I wasn’t the good guy or the villain.
The gray of a hopeless existence tied my hands and held me hostage.
John yelled something, but I couldn’t hear it.
I launched at an ungodly and sawed through its chest. Its pincers cut through the tendons of my forearm, but I didn’t release it and kept cutting.
I grunted.
Across the smoky room, Orion looked up and held my gaze as he snapped an ungodly’s neck with his bare hands.
His mesmerizing eyes were wide, and it felt like he was seeing straight into my black soul.
I looked away first.
Malum shouted at John to dodge as he threw his daggers across the room with precision.
Scorpius slid across the floor and sliced off the feet of an ungodly. Then he stood up and fought back to back with Orion.
They moved like a unit.
When one ducked, the other lunged, and both of them were precise and deadly with their knives. They trusted each other completely.
What was it like to have a partner to fight beside?
No. My fictional lover would never make me fight.
As soon as he saw that I was injured, he’d kill everyone with a snap of his fingers.
His sole life purpose would be to protect me.
As they fought, Orion smiled up at Scorpius like he was the sun. It was love.
Hm. Maybe I would fight beside my fictional man.
Malum snarled an expletive, and I realized he was watching me stare at his men with longing.
He chucked his dagger across the room, but this time, he didn’t yell a warning, and I barely ducked in time. The villager behind me collapsed.
The fucking hubris.
Chaos raged around us.
I slowly raised my bloody knife and pointed the blade at Malum.
Let it linger at his chest.
“Pow,” I mouthed and mimed firing it like a gun. Imagined the enchanted bullet exploding through his heart.
Ending him.
Just like he had done to me earlier.
“Pow. Pow.” I pointed in between his eyes, then on the other side of his chest.
The triangle of death.
I let Malum see the desolation in my eyes—the hatred.
The promise.
He was just a normal fae after all; only the queen was impervious to enchanted bullets. And I was her.
Pure rage darkened his face as he stood unnaturally still and seethed with the battle raging around him.
Then he sauntered forward, driving his shoulder into my side with such force that I slammed to the floor.
He smirked as he knelt to retrieve his weapon.
My monster seethed, but this time, I calmly got to my feet and walked into the battle.
An hour passed in a blur of violence.
And when the last body hit the floor, the eerie silence returned, and there was nothing left to distract me from the screaming.
It hadn’t been coming from the villagers, because it had been inside my head the entire time.
It was me.
