A Girl Named Calamity by Danielle Lori

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

TRAPPED

Metal. The smell hit my nose and roused me from a deep sleep. Every muscle in my body ached as I sat up and opened my eyes to the rising sun.

I’m dead. I had to be.

I looked down at my blood splattered arms and imagined I was a ghost, only coming back so I could say goodbye to my grandmother.

A man’s glassy brown eyes looked me straight in the face. Later on, that image would haunt me with the words I caused this.

I’d never seen a battlefield, but I imagined this was how it would look.

I was lying in the middle of many bodies. A man lay too close for comfort, his eyes open and his throat cut. There was another lying close by with his neck at an awkward angle. Nausea washed over me as my eyes took in the rest of the gruesome scene.

If I wasn’t dead, then how had I slept through this? Two more men were steps away from the camp, with knives in their backs as if they had been trying to run away. Two more, too bloody to notice where the wound was, were next to the fire.

When my eyes landed on Weston, and slowly traveled up his bloody hands to his smoldering eyes, a shudder of fear went through me. The reason he didn’t drag the bodies away and why he made me wake up to this hit me like a ton of bricks. His face was hard and unreadable, but his eyes didn’t lie.

He wanted me to see this. Sympathy or guilt held no place inside him; the only glint in his eyes I saw came from pleasure. He wanted me to know what he was capable of.

Message received, I thought.

I watched his eyes blaze before I leaned over and threw up everything in my stomach.

* * *

I had seen him kill before, but this time it was different. The men were young and looked like they could be king’s guards from Alger. They weren’t, but it didn’t matter because a sense of homesickness and disgust had already hit me. They were clearly running away from Weston, and yet he had to kill them.

It made me nauseated and truly terrified around him for the first time. Maybe this was what he wanted: terrify me to keep me in line, now that I knew I was his pawn in whatever endgame he had planned.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up on end as I walked down to the nearby stream to wash the splattered blood off. The blood I felt seep into my skin and taint my soul. The blood I had caused. I might not have stabbed the knife, but my hands shook as if I had. I now felt like the killer farm girl from Alger.

I spent a long time at the stream, watching the water turn red before the clear overtook it.

I didn’t know from how far away he could hear my thoughts, but they were in such a jumble I didn’t think he would be able to understand them, anyway. The ones at the apex were my frustration of this entire journey, the illusion of safety being ripped from me, the determination I had to keep the seal closed, and thoughts of my own demise. They swirled around in no particular pattern or manner and made me almost sick again with their waltz in my mind.

I walked back to camp, which had been moved over a few feet so I didn’t have to trip over dead bodies.

I sneered how compassionate of him in my mind. But I might as well have said it out loud, based on the glare he gave me. I marched over to my saddlebag and pulled out my map. It took me only seconds to realize that we were heading in the opposite direction of Undaley City. My face was a blank mask while I looked at him with the map clenched in my fist. He returned the neutral look, his eyes showing how much sympathy he held. None. A shiver went down my spine.

I was tangled with a viper, his fangs in me deep, and I was scared my claws weren’t sharp enough for the fight.

* * *

A cold sweat covered my entire body as we traveled through the sparse woods the next morning, and I was sure Weston could hear my heartbeat. I didn’t know how I could get myself out of this mess if I couldn’t even have my thoughts to myself. I tried not to think of anything when my brain wasn’t forcing me to think of a plan. I was in complete turmoil between the two.

When we took a break, and I had some semblance of privacy, I let my thoughts wander. I wouldn’t run, because it would have done nothing but delay him for the short seconds it took him to catch me. And then, I would probably guarantee he would tie me to him like an actual prisoner. And that wasn’t something I could handle. I needed to do this smart. Needed to think it through and not react like the terrified girl I was.

I wondered where he was even taking me. Since he could read my mind, I was almost guaranteeing he knew everything about me.

I had no answers and too many questions.

I always wondered why he had changed his mind to escort me, and now I felt like the naive farm girl from Alger. I wished I could go back and never stop at his table.

I wish I could go home.

I was more than frustrated because a sense of betrayal hounded me. It wasn’t as if we were honest with each other, but I had trusted him to take me to Undaley.

He was my one safety net, and now I knew it was all a lie. Now, the net only felt like a death sentence.

I was caught up in it.

Trapped.

* * *

We stopped riding when the sun began to set; the air between us was not disturbed at all with words. I had nothing to say to him. And he never had much to say.

I was out of any rations my grandmother had packed, but hunger was the last thing on my mind as I sat in front of the fire. Weston disappeared, and I imagined getting on Gallant and taking off. But I wasn’t stupid. He could sense Untouchables a mile away. I didn’t doubt he could sense me just as far. It wasn’t the right moment.

When he came back with a couple of rabbits, I watched him skin them, forcing myself to keep my mind silent. I focused on the slice of his knife and the sounds of the crackling fire.

No wonder I hadn’t seen men like him in Alger. He wasn’t human; at least, I didn’t believe he was. The presence he carried around with him wasn’t normal. It could physically draw you in in a hazy trance or get under your skin and have you itching to get away. I had felt both.

He looked human, if not so perfect that he appeared sculpted out of flesh and bone.

But he wasn’t perfect. He had scars aplenty, covering his torso, and even one from me gracing his bicep. The one on his lower lip didn’t take away perfection but magnified it. He might not have been perfect, but he was the perfect man. On the outside.

He turned his head and a heated gaze latched onto mine. I had forgotten he could read my thoughts. Or maybe I just hadn’t cared.

What a shame it’s wasted on someone with such an ugly inside, I thought. The heat in his eyes stilled to indifference before he looked away.

Stress was easiest to deal with when one wasn’t awake; that was why I fell asleep moments later.