Tortured until the brutal end by the Hind or her elite squadron of dreadwolf interrogators. Later, she’d managed to confirm that her parents were dead. She could only credit Urd for the fact that the dreadwolf guard posted at the front door hadn’t seen her. Arriving home after midnight, she’d spied the broken windows and shattered front door, the spray paint on the siding of their ordinary suburban house-REBEL SHITS-and begun running. Three years ago, she’d been studying late at the university library with her friends. Pure dumb luck had kept Sofie out of the dreadwolves’ clutches, too-at least until now. They were likely the same as hers: rebel human parents who’d either been caught or sold out.
Emile had gotten all of them out of the bunks, aided by a gentle human sun-priest, who was currently serving as lookout at the shed ten yards away. It would not be an easy journey, thanks to the dozen small forms crouched behind her in the mud before the barbed-wire fence.įive boys and six girls gathered by her thirteen-year-old brother, who now stood watch over them like a shepherd with his flock. Yet tonight … tonight, Sofie did not mind letting a little of the monster loose.
She might have all the traits of the Vanir, but she’d never be Vanir. She’d spent the years since then learning to wear her humanity like a cloak, inside and out. So she’d done it under the radar, in a back-alley, highly illegal Drop center, where a leering satyr had been her Anchor, and handing over her firstlight had been the cost of the ritual. She might not have bothered to make the Drop had her parents not encouraged it-with the healing abilities she would gain, it provided extra armor in a world designed to kill her kind. Granted her a long life span and all the benefits that came from it that her human family did not and would never have. A rare benefit of being able to switch between human and Vanir identities-and of being a rare human who’d made the Drop. Alone, even on foot, she could have easily made it. But only two places existed for her now: here, and the port of Servast, her destination tonight. Half of the Ophion rebel bases had fallen. She’d stood mere feet from a guard in the breakfast line this morning and he hadn’t so much as sniffed in her direction.Ī small victory. Two weeks here, and that reek had become etched into her very skin, blinding even the wolves’ keen noses. It had also veiled her when they’d marched her and the others between the brick buildings of the camp, this new Hel that was only a small model of what the Asteri planned to do if the war continued. The reek of the days crammed into the cattle car had covered the telltale scent in her blood. Two weeks, and still the guards-dreadwolves, all of them-had not sniffed her out.
Sofie had survived in the Kavalla death camp for two weeks.
0 kommentar(er)
