Page 61 of Fires of the Forsaken
“She couldn't control it.”
“She killed two people!”
“How do we know Seruf didn’t create her? Has she, perhaps, been Seruf’s spy all along?”
“She’ll kill again. Mark my words.”
Terrick tried to plead my innocence. “The lass stumbled across a traumatic event. And, for a child to see such a thing…but it doesn’t mean shecan’tcontrol her powers. You know her! She’s a good lass. She won’t hurt anyone else.”
His words fell upon deaf ears.
The townspeople, long frightened by the Celestials’ wrath, would never trust me.
People stopped visiting his shop. They kept a distance when we walked through the streets. Eventually, vendors found excuses to withhold their merchandise from Terrick.
“I’ve got no eggs today, Terrick. The hens are old—don’t produce as much as they used to.” The rather rotund man wouldn’t even look at us.
“Ah, yes, but I’m afraid the last pig is already spoken for. Perhaps if you’d arrived sooner?” The pig keeper rubbed a hand against the back of her neck and turned away.
The most hurtful betrayal was Lorcan’s. When Terrick and I approached the inn, hoping for a hot meal, Lorcan waved a knife at me. “I’ll not have you coming near this place anymore, girl,” he said.
Girl.
I wascailín álainnno more,
And Swindon no longer welcomed me.
It still could’ve been a safe haven for Terrick. All he had to do was rid himself of me. But he didn’t.
“I’ll never leave you, Lass,” he told me on one of the many nights I cried myself to sleep. He pressed his lips to my brow, holding me close while sobs wracked my body. “You are not evil. Nor are you a monster. The townspeople are frightened. They’ve seen too many horrors in their lives. Do not listen to them.”
So, we prepared to leave our home.
And what the townspeople never knew, or perhaps never understood, was that they could never fear or hate me as much as I feared and hated myself.
19
Gasoline Whiskey
Cheriour kept looking at me, probably stunned I’d gone a solid five minutes without saying a single word. A new record for me.
Shock was an absolutebitch.
My body moved on autopilot as we entered the castle’s big-ass foyer. The barren room was the size of a cathedral. Minus all the stuff that made cathedrals cool. It boasted no furniture, decorations…nothing.Instead, wounded soldiers sprawled across the ground. We maneuvered around them to get to the stairs.
I should’ve felt something as I stepped over semi-conscious bodies. Anguish. Disgust. Fear.Something.But I was too numb to process those hard-hitting emotions.
“Right,” Quinn’s voice drifted toward me. “I’ll mend Ben, Ruben, and—” he cut himself off with a harsh sigh as he took an armful of bandages from the man walking beside him. “Paige may need to go first. She won’t last much longer with that inflammation.” He knelt beside a woman with a badly distended leg.
At that moment, a strained and hollow curse rose from beneath my feet.
I’d stomped on a guy. And the poor bastard had a very obviously displaced collarbone. “Shit, sorry!” I hissed, stumbling away from him.
He grumbled, choked, and blacked out. And that funky-shaped collarbone? It was honestly the least of his worries. He also had a big ole hole in his stomach.
I expected my gut to twist at the sight. It didn’t.
“Ten minutes, Cheriour,” came Quinn’s conceited voice. He gave me one long, hard glare before he lowered his head and peeled bandages away from the woman’s festering leg.
