Page 46 of Fallen Thorns
I returned to looking at my feet. “Something is after me.” Not a question, I attempted to calm my manner.
“Not necessarily afteryou. Again, this is speculation,” they pressed.
“But in the room earlier, she said I was being hunted. I’m being hunted.”
Mars stared at me, lost for words.
Marianne was not guessing. Sheknewit and I knewit.
“But whatever it is, we can stop it right?” Rani began. “I mean, what you are,” she gestured up and down at us both, “I’m pretty confident you’ve been around for a while. And humans, look at our history! We’re not gonna just get wiped out one wet afternoon in November.”
“Marianne has lived a lot longer than us all. She knows things. Many things she keeps to herself. There’s no self-help books or how-to guides lying about grand castles guarded by bats. A lot of it we just pass on. How do you think we manage to never get caught? I know some history here and there but the majority of the time, we just want to live normal lives. Marianne is pretty good at guessing, but she’s also very good at dramatising things. She wants us to take this seriously. She thinks an other worldly creature has arrived, suspects it’s linked to the deaths in this city, and she wants to stop it before things get out of hand.
“Maybe this does have something to do with you, Arlo. Maybe there is something significant about you, but maybe you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re as safe as you’ll ever be under Marianne’s watch, and we will get to the bottom of it all. We always do.” Mars winked at me and held out a hand to help me stand. I obliged and a weight left my shoulders.
A few people had started leaving the room, though no one looked as terrified as I expected. Maybe I had been blowing this out of proportion. I was still on edge from the previous night, and it was all I could centre my thoughts around.
“Well, that was intense,” Rani said, attempting to lighten the mood again. “But kind of exciting.”
Both Mars and I glared at her in confusion. She burst into a fit of laughter. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m surrounded by a conspiracy theory come true, and now I get to hunt demons.” She made a sword-swinging gesture before turning to make her way back inside with a bounce in her step, presumably to find Carmen. She was considerably shorter than the wave of people travelling against her, yet it did not phase her. We stood aghast, both rallying questions in our heads.
“She’s truly something, isn’t she,” Mars said.
That’s my best friend, I thought proudly.
The two ofus held back to let everyone past, the swarm of bodies all deep in conversation.
“Mars,” I said, once the corridor quietened.
“Yeah?”
“You won’t tell anyone about last night, right?”
“No one has to know,” they promised.
“I won’t let myself get like that again. I won’t hurt anyone. I’ll help stop whatever is after me and the thing inside me. I won’t betray The Thorns.”
Mars dipped their head, a small smile forming across their face. “I know.”
ChapterEleven
“So, the training…” Ben started, fiddling with the cross on his necklace. “Are we talking like hand-to-hand combat with stakes and chains or just, you know, psychological mind games?” He reached down to sip his tea.
After the meeting, Mars suggested a change of scenery to clear our heads. They invited me and three quarters of Forever Red (who I kept having to remind myself were managed by Mars themself) to a quaint coffee shop outside of the city centre, a place I was duly promised neither I, nor the band, would be spotted while my lecture hall absence would be explained by a ‘funny turn’ in my health. They somehow managed to calm me and promised I would be able to catch up on the missed lecture, insisting I was ‘clever enough to miss a few’. That last part didn’t really help, but I had no choice otherwise.
Rani opted for staying with Carmen in the hideout so they could, and I quote, ‘explore.’ While I was definitely not an expert on the topic, the more I thought of the two of them together, the more I began to realise that perhaps this was no longer just Carmen’s ploy to stay close to me — the ploy which likely ended the second I lost control and was admitted into The Thorns care. Instead, they only seemed to have gotten closer. The nicknames, the glances, the grins. I’d had brief discussions with Rani before and based on what she told me earlier that morning, she was enjoying the way things were going between them. Of course, they hadn’t known each other long but what did I know? I didn’t understand a connection like that at all. I could barely manage a comforting hug between friends… Flashes of that night near the boathouse hit me. Lucy. Her icy hand under my shirt, nails in my hair, wet lips on mine. I shook the thought away.
“I’m just not verystrong, that’s all.” Ben began flexing his slender arms, waving them dramatically like a jellyfish.
Lawrence sat relaxed with his back against his chair, picking at the snake ring on his left thumb. Something told me it wasn’t his choice to tag along. “If you can play bass, you can snap a neck,” he said, not looking up from his paint-chipped nails.
The four of us paused to look at him, stunned.
“What?” Lawrence glanced up through his dark fringe.
“Dude, we’re in acafé,” Casper hissed.
“I’m just saying,” Lawrence mimicked the whisper, dusting imaginary dust off his skirt. He leaned forward, eyebrow ticked high. “Bass is hard.”
