The truck lurched under my feet at the same time I heard the squeal and crunch of metal. The front bumper swung through the infected on the hood, knocking half of them back to the ground. The infected it missed didn’t look to see what was happening but rushed for me. I never stopped firing as I stepped back from the cab, trying to give myself room. The canvas of the soft-sided truck slightly gave under my foot but held.
I stepped back and up again, onto the first support, relentless in my determination to live. I retreated onto the soft canvas again.
One second, the roof was holding; the next, it ripped. My right foot went through. Hands closed around it. I screamed, struggling to pull free as the canvas ripped further. The bow slipped from my hands.
Thallirin roared.
The truck tilted and started to fall to the side, taking me with it as teeth bit down on my calf. I cried out and watched the blood-soaked pavement rush toward me.
Chapter Eight
Thallirin appeared before I hit the ground, pulling me free and taking off at a run. He jumped onto the roof of a car, the metal buckling under his weight, launched us onto the roof of a ranch house, then landed on top of a two-story home.
The moment he set me down, we both clawed at my leg. The first layer of clothing was torn and bloody. A choked sob escaped me, and I started shaking violently as Thallirin continued to peel back layers of material. It was hard to see anything until he exposed my reddened and unbroken skin.
I stared at the two crescent-shaped indents for several long moments then fell back against the shingles and looked up at the pale blue sky.
I’d been bitten.
“Holy fuck,” I said shakily.
If not for my layers, I would be changing already. Morphing into a mindless meat-sack. No. I’d be headless. Dead.
Sitting up, I looked at the skin again, disbelief and relief making the marks seem surreal.
A tremor underneath me drew my attention from the bite to Thallirin, who knelt in the same spot, still looking at my leg. He was shaking hard enough to send snow sliding down the roof.
There was a torn bit of earlobe on top of his head—it wasn’t his because it wasn’t grey—and a general coating of gore covering him. I remembered the explosion of bodies and bloody bits and then the bumper. He’d been trying to get to me, I realized.
He lifted his gaze from my leg to my face.
If I’d thought him cold and angry looking before, I’d been wrong. He was dark with rage and barely keeping his shit together. But was that rage directed at me for being bitten or at the infected?
Before I could decide, he grabbed the back of my head, his steel fingers holding me in place, and set his forehead to mine. For a heartbeat, I thought he was going to try to kiss me and that I’d need to throat punch him. But, he didn’t. Instead, his shuddering exhale warmed my face before he closed his eyes.
It took a moment to realize that he wasn’t mad at me or trying to make a move. He was scared and probably just as relieved as I was that the bite hadn’t broken the skin.
Below us, the fighting continued, infected calling out to one another as they tried to overcome the few fey guarding the precious trucks, our only escape route.
“They need you,” I said.
“You need me.”
His words were barely more than a rasp, and in them, I heard a pain so deep I wanted to cringe away. Yet, at the same time, I wanted to comfort him. Him. Thallirin, my stalker. The guy who obsessively watched over me and just saved my life because of that deep obsession. The same guy who was acting like losing me would have been the end of his world.
I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it, and I knew we didn’t have time for me to try.
“I swear I’m not leaving this roof,” I said. “There’s too many infected down there and not enough fey.”
He pulled away and stared at me for a very long moment as groans and squishy noises continued to assault us.
“Take the snow and wash your face. Now.”
The calm, slow way he said it tripped my panic switch. I looked down at myself, noting the goo on my clothes. I was covered with transferred goo from being carried, a risk we both knew he’d needed to take to keep me alive. And, looking at the mess on his face, I realized what I probably had on my forehead, too.
I grabbed a wad of snow and rubbed it over my face.
“Did I get it all?” I asked with my eyes closed.
“Again,” he said.
I repeated the process twice more before he said I was clean.
“They can use ladders,” he said, standing. “Yell for me.” Then he jumped off the roof into the mess of infected and started thinning the herd.
A weird feeling settled in my stomach, and I wasn’t sure what to think. The depth of his infatuation was scary in its intensity because I had no doubt that he’d abandon his fellow fey to get to me again if I called out for him.
I watched him fight, viciously ripping off head after head. He was a machine. A monster. But, the kind I’d want with me in just this situation. He kept the infected from reaching the house and helped his brothers determinedly fight the horde.
I couldn’t say how many infected there were. The creatures were smart, though. They kept trying to get to the truck engines now that I was out of reach. The one I’d fallen through lay on its side with the hood open and fluids spilling onto the ground.
The infected not trying to gut the trucks were swarming the fey, who worked tirelessly, ripping off heads. I lost sight of Thallirin twice under their numbers and felt a twinge of worry, mostly for my fate if something happened to him.
Abruptly, the infected started to flee like someone had called a retreat. One minute, the street was filled with a writhing mass of bodies; the next, it was empty.
The fey looked around and at each other.
“What do you see, Brenna?” Thallirin asked.
I stood carefully and looked around. The infected were gone, leaving only trampled snow in their wake.
“Nothing.”
He looked at one of the other fey.
“Use the roofs and find the others.”
The fey hopped up onto a building and took off at a run, jumping from house to house, following the path that our group had left. Below me, the fey started moving the infected bodies to the side, clearing the road. They righted the truck, and I wondered if it could be fixed.
Thallirin jumped to another roof and used the snow to clean off what he could. The rest of the fey took turns doing the same.
I stayed where I was, face stinging with cold, safely freezing my ass off on the roof. I could feel Thallirin's gaze on me as we waited.
It didn’t take long for everyone to show up. Most of the fey were carrying totes of supplies. The ones who weren’t loaded down with totes carried the humans.
“What happened?” Ryan asked.
“Infected trap,” Thallirin said. “Brenna’s on the roof.”
The fey carrying Ryan set him down and jumped up by me.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Yes, please.”
Under Thallirin’s sharp eye, the fey held me gently as he delivered me to the blood-soaked ground and left me beside Garrett. Around us, the fey loaded the trucks in a flurry while Ryan and another fey checked the engine the infected had tried to destroy.
Someone gave me a new, clean jacket to switch into, as well.