Feya walked on ahead, Arden trudging along behind her like a leashed dog. The jangle of her charms clacked loudly with each step and set my caution alight. The last time we’d ignored it we’d attracted Bozaite’s and Mora had paid the price with spilled guts — the memory spidered down my spine, we couldn’t afford to lose more numbers, not now.

Frost nudged me from behind, his fingers poking into my shoulder as he muttered for me to move along, “Come on,” He whispered. “I know you know what could lurk in the grass.”

I walked on and depsite my own wariness, I teased, “Nervous?”

“You’re not?” He scoffed lowly. “Even the small monsters are still monsters, Anala.”

My eyes crept back to the rotting yellows narrowing the path stones, narrowing onto the larger shrubs by our feet. They ruffled with the dusting breeze and curled spinderly at my legs, my heed heightened with a stuttered step. I yelp as Frost’s large hands grip down onto my hips, his fingers holding bruisingly as he forces me forward. “What did I just tell you?” He hissed. “We don’t have time for your crap here, Anala. You could get yourself killed.”

“Don’t touch me.” I snarl over my shoulder, prying his hands from me with vehement. Frost brutishly grunts back and finally takes a releasing step away from my behind since the Karoma. The nip of the morning finally bites at me with his distance and forces my senses to sharpen with it; my ears pick up the sharp whistley noise from the beginning of the trail, only this time it’s louder and echoes through my ears in pulses. I contemplated not telling them, not asking if they could hear it now in all its ringing glory and risk being under Arden’s ever-flowing scrutiny once again… but if this was something, something as devastating as the Karoma had been, it wasn’t worth my silence nor my thinning pride.

“Do you hear that?” I asked and watched as Arden turned to stare at me with exasperation over her shoulder.

“What now, Crux?” Arden gritted.

Inhaling deeply at her tone, I said, “That. That high pitched, annoying ringing. I told you earlier but you wouldn’t listen.”

Arden spun in her heel, stopping feet before me, and glowered through her cloaks hood. The fog ahead thickened and its whisps licked through the air to cradle closer to her lithe frame. “Oh, for Sparks sake, Crux, just shut up and keep walking! We’re almost there, you’ll live.”

Resentment floods me in its greying overcast and twitches my fingers against my thigh, holstered with Mora’s stolen dagger before Arden’s pendant glints against my eye, serving as the reminder it was made to be. Arden was not to be touched, not unless I wanted the Three Courts raining hell on me too.

“Was it not your people that said to always be cautious of what lurks, of what lives?”

“Yes,” She scoffs. “But that certainly didn’t mean believing the delusions of a woman going mad.”

Oh. Okay, we’re choosing blows below the belt. I flip through all the times Arden’s been snarky unprompted, all the times she’s thrown my mistakes, my lack of understanding in my face and decide: Good. “Well, if we’re talking about going mad–“

“Stop.” Feya whispered. Arden’s face drops with shock and she spins around to face Feya with more contempt oozing from her than when Dankworth had asked her to dance. For a split second I’m shocked, too and there’s a swirling of smug brushing along my chest, but then I see how she’s watching the same line of decaying, yellowing shrubs that I had been earlier and it all flies to the zephyr.

“I think she’s right.” Feya nods to the bushes.

“You hear it, too?” Frost calls to her, stepping back onto my flank.

“No.” She responds. “But I see it.”

Feya’s need to be ominous always takes place when we need it the least and I almost wished it was Arden, blunt and straightforward, who had all the knowledge. I follow her gaze back to the splintery plant, watching closely. For a minute, there’s nothing but the breeze led movement and I begin to think maybe Arden was right, I was going mad and now I was dragging Feya down with me. But then the grass strands wriggle in a worm like manuver and its ends part almost unnoticeably with a gooey texture stringing between it and that same tune sounds loud enough to finally reach the ears of the others. Frost inhales sharply above me.

“Run!”