I See Faeries

~chapter four~

Old Friend

~

Breakfast was rushed. We ate quickly and silently, not wasting time on words. No one had raised the alarm yet, it seemed. We hadn't been attacked yet. Still, we didn't want to push our luck.

"I'll explain everything tomorrow," he'd said once we reached our room last night. I didn't bother to protest. I think all three of us were too tired to sit around talking. We'd collapsed into bed immediately without even doffing our shoes.

Now, we were gulping down our food so that we could be out of the inn as quickly as possible. Sheba was still in wolf-form, and ate the scraps that I tossed to her. I was wearing the cloak again, and had been getting scandalized looks from a prissy-looking man sitting a few feet away. It was bad manners to eat with a hood on, but I had little choice.

It was also unusual for a woman to eat alone, as I must've appeared to be. As a fae, Roman would be invisible to any human without Sight. Sheba, however, could be seen - presumably because of her wolf-form. Were she a woman, I imagined she would've been just as invisible as the faerie. 

I swallowed my last spoonful of grits, struggling not to make a face. I'd never eaten such garbage before.

"Okay, let's go," Roman said softly, throwing his napkin onto the table. Thankfully no one was watching us closely enough to notice the plate from which food kept disappearing, or the momentarily floating napkin. I pushed back my chair and followed him, with Sheba at my heels. Upstairs, he grabbed the knapsack and adjusted his cloak on me. Sheba sat by the door and waited impatiently, her tail swishing circles on the dirty floor.

I had turned to head for the door when I saw her freeze. The long, stiff hairs on her back suddenly rose as she slowly tilted her head. Her lips pulled back to display wickedly sharp ivory teeth, and a low growl rumbled in her throat. She stared intently at the blank surface of the door, and her ears twitched like she was listening to something. Roman heard it a second before I did.

"Footsteps," he whispered.

This was uncomfortably reminiscent of days ago when we'd been in the manor library and heard a knock on the downstairs door.

Our eyes met. "The hunters," he hissed, "Soran's men. It has to be them. Sheba doesn't act like this without a reason."

I gulped. "What do we do?"

He cast his gaze around the room once. Resignation settled in his features, and I almost cried when I saw what he was looking at. The window. A two-pane, narrow window on the second floor of the inn. It was our only chance of escape.

My heart stopped for a moment as something crashed against the door, rattling it violently on its hinges. The flimsy wood creaked, and I knew that it could only hold on for another minute. Sheba snarled, her teeth flashing, and stepped back. Her body was coiled like a spring, and I almost pitied whatever was on the other side of that door. Almost.

"How will Sheba get out?" I asked, suddenly realizing that she planned to fight whatever was trying to get in. The window was set high in the wall, and wasn't particularly wide. It seemed unlikely that she would fit.

Roman just shook his head wordlessly, and pulled me toward the window. He grabbed a chair and smashed it into the glass, which shattered immediately. The edge still sported jagged shards, but I'd known that I wasn't going to get through this painlessly. I clenched my teeth and allowed him to help me onto the sill, where I crouched precariously. Some of the glass sliced through my delicate slippers, and I bit down on my lip and tried not to whimper.