Page 51 of The Incendiary

He already knew I was inclined to take late-night walks. While that explanation felt too easy, I decided it would have to do. My late-night strolls were how I’d witnessed his queen escaping the Butcher’s clutches in Brinnea, after all. He’d believed it once.

I don’t know what finally compelled me to speak to him. A need to fill the tense silence. Maybe unbidden self-hatred. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your…” I trailed off.

“My what?” He halted abruptly next to a dense copse of bushes.

“Your…” I stopped and searched for the word. Damn me for not thinking this through before opening my mouth.

“Spit it out, Fera,” he warned me.

“Your entertainment.”

He leveled me with a narrow glare. “My entertainment?”

“Your night… thing.” I gestured back toward the fortress. “I don’t know what you call that.”

To my surprise, his glare faded into a smirk. “You don’t know what to call what?”

He was going to make me say it. I shook my head, crossed my arms, and swallowed down my nerves. “What you were doing.”

“What was I doing, Fera?”

My nostrils flared. “You know… three people instead of two.”

His shoulders shook with silent laughter. I avoided his curious gaze and swore to myself that I would never attempt small talk with Elias Winterton again.

“I was getting bored, anyway,” he said casually, then continued to head north. I glared straight into his back. There had been two women in his bed. How bored could he possibly have been?

When we reached our destination, I never thought I’d be relieved to return to the site of a dead, decaying body.

“Here,” I announced when I recognized the outline of the ravine up ahead. Elias assessed the area and moved with composed urgency, pulling in two calculated breaths before reaching down with one gloved hand and fully uncovering the corpse.

He paused, staring down at the body. Dancing flames across his face illuminated his dread, and I felt it nagging in my chest.

I didn’t want to see. I already knew how unlikely it was that this was the Butcher’s kill, but the chance that it was had my muscles locked with dread. And with a tiny, twisted shred of hope. Because if it was him, then he might be nearby. I couldn’t block out the nagging, insistent part of myself that hoped he was.

When I finally gained the courage to look down at the uncovered body, I saw no bloody X across the dead man’s chest. Elias seemed equally relieved, though we both shuddered at the state of the decomposing body, rancid and picked at by scavenging animals. A few larger chunks of flesh were missing in a few spots.

“Are you close?” Shera called to me. “Is that the commander with you?”

“How did you know?”

“One, I suspected you’d try to do the right thing, as you always do. Two… I can smell him.”

I couldn’t help myself. “What does he smell like to you?”

“Right now? Sweat,” she answered sourly. “And two females?”

I bit my tongue, repressing nervous laughter, torn between disgust and amusement. I wasn’t sure how she could smell anything over the lingering scent of death in the air.

“Why were you out here in the middle of the night?” Elias demanded sharply, glancing between me and the body. A realization passed through him, and his voice softened when he asked, “Have more forgotten memories come back as nightmares?”

I wished I hadn’t told him that, or anything at all. I didn’t want him to discover a single part of me, so I didn’t answer. I stared down at the dead body, which was somehow more tolerable than his interrogation.

“What do you think happened?” I asked.

He squatted down closer to the corpse. “It’s not wholly uncommon for a body to turn up occasionally. Villagers nearby mostly keep to themselves unless help is needed, it wouldn’t be the first time some drunk idiot wandered into danger. Bears and wildcats roam these woods. Sometimes Molochai’s monsters, too. But this—” He stood and smoothly unsheathed the sword from his hip and used the tip, along with his boot, to shove the body over onto its side. “—was not a bear.”

I flinched and averted my eyes to gather myself before returning my attention forward.