Chapter 34: Looks Like Cedric's Eyes I Ended Up Living Next Door to My Ex-Husband
The entire carriage heaved and lurched like a ship caught in a gale. The violence was coming from the coachman's box — where Adrian was. "Ugh—! Your Highness, barricade the door! Right now!" His voice was strained but commanding. Beneath it I could hear the rapid clash of steel and the chaos of multiple bodies in motion. He was outnumbered. I should go out there. I could— "If Your Highness steps outside, you'll put us both in danger! Block the door — now!" He'd anticipated me entirely. "But—!" I bit back the protest. As much as every instinct screamed at me to help him, Adrian was right. I had no combat training. Going out there wouldn't make me useful — it would make me a liability. I forced myself to think clearly and swept my gaze around the carriage interior. Something to wedge against the door. Anything solid. There was nothing suitable in sight — of course there wasn't. This was a Grand Duke's carriage. Every surface was polished, upholstered, or decorative. "Fine. If there's nothing to use, I'll make something." I gathered my skirts, braced against the opposite wall, and started kicking the base of the seat with everything I had. The craftsmanship held firm — infuriatingly so. These seats had been built by skilled artisans with no thought toward being disassembled mid-ambush. "Come on—" The carriage lurched again, throwing me sideways. I caught myself against the wall and went back to kicking, teeth clenched, legs burning. Then — a crack. A gap appeared beneath the cushion. I dropped to my knees and wrenched at it, one foot braced against the frame, and a length of solid wood came free in my hands. "Yes." I scrambled toward the door. The wood was nearly in place against the handle when— Click. The handle turned. My blood went cold. I looked up through the window glass and stopped breathing. A man stood just outside the door. Or — something that wore the shape of a man. He was dressed in rags, skeletal thin, vertebrae visible at the nape of his neck. His frame trembled with each pull of the locked handle, his body so slight it seemed a strong wind might take him. Grumble. Grumble. Slow. Methodical. Wrong. I shook myself back to awareness. Don't freeze. Block the door. My hands were shaking. I drew one slow breath and pressed the wooden wedge into place beneath the handle. And then the thing outside raised its head. I looked at its face — and my mind simply refused what my eyes were showing me. There was no face. No eyes. No nose. No mouth. Blank skin stretched smooth over the skull's contours, like a mannequin pulled from a display and set loose in the world. Then, with a sound like tearing fabric pulled over metal, a seam split open across the lower half of what should have been its face — ripping sideways, jagged, wrong in every way a mouth should never be. "Found. Found." The words scraped out from that gap, mechanical and flat, repeated without inflection or pause. And it pulled. The handle rattled violently. The wedge held — barely — but I could feel the door frame beginning to flex. More shapes were gathering outside the window now. Others like it. All of them faceless. All of them converging. "Found. Found. Found—" Those aren't mixed-blood demons. I didn't know what they were, but I was certain of that much. I planted my feet and threw my weight against the door.
At that same moment, Cedric was walking alone along the forest path. He checked his wristwatch. By his reckoning, Rebecca should have passed through here by now. The road ahead was still. Empty. Quiet in a way that forests rarely were at this hour. Odd. He stood looking at the path for a moment longer than necessary. Then, unbidden, the image surfaced — Rebecca laughing at something Adrian had said, the two of them walking close together as they left this morning. Cedric pressed his lips together and walked on. Don't be absurd. He had no business feeling anything about that. If he was feeling anything at all — which he wasn't prepared to confirm — it was nothing more than the vague unease of watching someone you'd known become unfamiliar. Or perhaps a residual protectiveness, old and habitual, toward a woman he'd once been responsible for. It certainly wasn't jealousy. His shoe stopped. He looked down. The toe of his boot was faintly scorched — a thin wisp of smoke curling from the leather as though he'd brushed against a lit ember. He took another careful step forward. A second thread of smoke rose. A camouflage barrier. He recognized it immediately. A barrier of this kind was designed to redirect those who passed through it — steering ordinary travelers away from whatever lay beyond while allowing access only to those its creator had specified. It required rare skill to construct and considerable power to maintain. But all barriers, however sophisticated, had a threshold. Approach them with enough force, and they fractured — showed their seams. Cedric had always been powerful enough to find the seams. His gaze lifted slowly toward the forest interior, and the faint amusement at whoever had been bold enough to lay this near his castle grounds dissolved without a trace. Rebecca. The thought arrived before the reasoning did — a cold, sudden certainty moving through his whole body at once. He was already running.
My arm felt like it was going to separate from my shoulder. The joints of the door were giving way. I could hear them — creak by creak, the frame losing the argument against however many of those things were pulling from the other side. "Adrian!" "Ugh—! Your Highness!" "There are faceless creatures at the door — multiple ones—!" "Same out here! I'm coming — just hold on!" Looking out the windows, I could see them surrounding the entire carriage on all sides. An impossible number. Adrian's voice was coming from somewhere beyond them, his sword cutting arcs of violet light through the mass of bodies — but there were too many between him and me. How long can I hold this door? My arms gave the honest answer: not much longer. The joint cracked. A loud, definitive snap. I released the handle and threw myself back. "Fine." I hefted the wooden block in both hands. "Come in, then. I'm not going down without a fight." The door swung open. The first one stepped through without hesitation — that same eerie, unhurried stride — and I swung the wood directly into the side of its head with everything I had. The creature made a sound. Not quite pain — more like confusion, if confusion could be audible. It staggered. I hit it again. It dropped. The next one stepped over the body before it had even finished falling, and I swung again — and again — moving without thinking, voice rising with each blow. "You absolute—! You think I'm just going to—! Stand still!" The rhythm of it took over. The ones I hit fell back or crumpled; the ones still outside couldn't squeeze past them fast enough to replace them. I was holding the doorway with pure, graceless, furious momentum. I'm actually quite grateful they don't have faces, I thought wildly, in some distant corner of my mind not currently occupied with swinging. Considerably less guilt this way. Then one of them grabbed the block. Not my arm — the block itself, seizing it mid-swing with a grip like a vice. I yanked. It didn't move. The others outside began pushing forward again. Oh no you don't. I let go of the wood entirely, reared back, and drove both palms into the creature's face — or rather, the smooth blank expanse where its face should have been — with every ounce of force I had left. It reeled backward, collided with the ones behind it, and in the stumble, released the block. I snatched it off the floor just as Adrian's voice broke through the noise from outside. "Your Highness!" "Adrian! Are you all right?!" "I'm fine — are you—" His eyes landed on me, wild with relief and something that might have been disbelief. "Your Highness, you—" A creature lunged from my left. I caught it across the temple mid-sentence. "Sorry, what?!" I shouted over the din. Adrian shook his head sharply. "Nothing! I'm very glad you didn't hear me!" The violet energy along his sword was blazing now, crackling at the edges. He was cutting through the mass between us — closing the distance — almost there— Something closed around the back of my neck. I hadn't seen it come. It must have been behind me the whole time, waiting, patient in that horrible mechanical way they all were. The grip tightened. The air left me all at once. "Your Highness!" Adrian's voice cracked — the sound of genuine terror — and the violet energy on his blade erupted outward in a wave, scything through the nearest cluster of creatures like they were made of paper. But there were still bodies between us. So many bodies. I drove my elbow back into what I estimated was its midsection. Nothing. No reaction at all. The grip tightened further. My vision began to gray at the edges. I spent the whole morning planning how to become wealthy, I thought, with a kind of distant, helpless absurdity. I had a whole plan. The fog thickened. My legs stopped obeying me. This is a genuinely terrible way to— And then the grip was gone. Air rushed back into my lungs in a violent gasp. I stumbled forward, coughing, catching myself against the door frame. When I managed to open my eyes, the creature that had been strangling me was suspended in the air several feet away — lifted clean off the ground, held fast by something I couldn't immediately see. Then I registered the light. A lance of brilliant blue, sharp and precise, had struck it at the back of the skull. Not Adrian's violet — something different. Something I recognized from somewhere closer to home. It was the exact shade of Cedric's eyes.