Unhappily Ever After

Chapter 19 - Atrocities of Habit

Your attention for a hot second, plz.

Because I have a backlog of chapters and I don't believe in letting them sit and gather dust, I'm gonna give y'all a treat. So on Christmas Eve, two weeks Sunday, I'll be posting three chapters. But there's a catch, see, because they'll either be Empire of Ashes chaps, or Unhappily Ever After chaps. That part is up to you - because it's a competition! Whichever book gets the most new votes and comments before the 24th (and that includes all chapters) will get the triple update.

You guys get a week head-start because there are less of you, so keep it on the hush-hush. If you read both books, good for you, but now you're gonna have to pick. You can spam, tell jokes, write poetry, anything goes. If you don't wanna bother, that's also fine. I get it. I'm lazy by nature.

We drove to Wyst to the sound of Bon Jovi and Billy Joel. On the main roads, with Lee pushing the speed limits, it only took twenty minutes. Our back up was already lounging in the town centre, so that was where we left the car, abusing a Tesco employee carpark.

"This legal?" I asked mildly after I had slammed my door.

"Sure," Lee assured me. "I was a Christmas temp when I was fourteen."

I hid a grin as a yawn. "Raiding wasn't enough pocket money for you?"

"No, that was the winter when-" he trailed off, eyeing me warily. "Right. You wouldn't know."

"What wouldn't I know?" I asked. All the humour was gone, that quickly, l was acutely aware that I didn't know the guy all that well.

"Shit, Llewellyn, it ain't a cheery story, okay?"

I shrugged at him. "I don't know many cheery stories, to be honest. Do you?"

Lee stared at me, fighting a grimace. He glanced at the busy street, humans milling everywhere, then put a hand on my arm and tugged me further into the carpark. "Suppose not. But if I'm gonna tell it, we'd best stay here - the humans might freak."

I nodded and waited expectantly.

"Every few years or so, flockies stumble on our camps," Lee started. "Usually, the raiders are around, and we stand a chance of beating them back. But there was this one time - six, seven years ago, when Silver Lake men found an undefended camp near Llechi. The raiders were off, y'know, raiding, and the flockies spent the afternoon torturing the women ... doing all kinds of sick, twisted shit. Seventeen died, and another eight were screwed up permanently."

"And the kids?" I asked. I couldn't help noticing that there was too much emotion in his voice

"They killed most of the younger ones. They were crying too loudly, see. A bunch of us tried hiding in the old slate mines, but they smoked us out and beat us pretty bad. Would've done worse, too, if the raiders hadn't come home."

Us. I should have guessed. I really, really should have guessed and shut my mouth five minutes ago. My eyes snapped to the scars dotting his neck and collarbone: plenty of them were faded enough to be six years old. But there was no turning back now. "You were there?"

He rubbed at his face, avoiding my eyes. "I was there, yeah. My mam was one of the females who died, and my dad got himself killed soon after. You know how the mate bond goes..."

"I'm beginning to get an inkling," I murmured.

"Anyways, there weren't any raids for a long time. No one was gonna leave their families undefended... I didn't have any reason to stick around, so I worked shitty human jobs for a few months until Dafydd took me in."