The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 28 🔻 The House of God

There was a cry to my right. I abandoned the archer's dissolving body when both my friends tumbled down the steps. Reynard wasn't the king's right hand for nothing. His hair had come undone and hung in limp, greasy locks in front of his feral face. He fixed me with a savage snarl. "Come on then, Light worshiper," he teased.

It didn't take long before Vale was right back on her feet, charging up the steps for Reynard. But yet another figure swung up from the side of the staircase, and knocked her off course. Pinky planted a foot on Vale's chest, holding her down. Webb struggled in Blinky's scarred arms.

"I will kill you!" Crow screamed at Clyde, whom he had pinned beneath his body. He'd pulled the arrows from his own chest and he stabbed them into the screaming man's eyes through his mask, over and over and over again. "I will kill you all!"

And then an arm wrapped around me, immobilizing me. A sword bit into my throat. My rapid breaths clouded the blade, obscuring my frightened-looking reflection.

I tore my eyes away from the blade and met Reynard's gleeful face. "Surrender yourself, Prince!" he commanded. "Or you'll have the ashes of one more innocent soul staining your hands."

At that, Crow froze in mid-strike, an arrow still raised. Clyde had long stopped screaming. As his enemy's body began to wither away, Crow turned an ear to Reynard. His eyes blazed lux-red behind his disheveled black hair.

Both Webb and Vale struggled fruitlessly against their captors.

I winced when the knife cut deeper into my flesh. Suddenly I was so cold. "Tell him what I'm doing, girl," Reynard whispered to me.

"He...he has a sword to my throat," I said, trembling in Reynard's grasp. I couldn't contain my cry of shock when the blade sank in deeper. My life spilled from me in the form of an ice-cold mist. "Oh god..."

Crow gasped at my pathetic sound. Then he bared his teeth in Reynard's direction and rose, slowly, from what was left of Clyde's disappearing corpse. He raised hands above his head and let his arrows fall to the stones with a clatter.

The red light left his eyes.

"N-no..." I said through chattering teeth.

I could hear the amusement in Reynard's voice when he said, "Does the prince of monsters have a heart after all?" To his remaining team, he said, "Chain him. And if any of these freaks do something funny, we'll spill his nonexistent guts right here instead of After." He removed the blade from my throat and pointed it at my glowering friends. "The king wants to execute the monster himself."

Webb, Vale, and I were tossed unceremoniously to the steps. I clutched my hand to my seeping throat. Through my blurring vision, I watched Reynard and his hollows cuff Crow and put him in chains. I'd never seen him look so defeated before.

And then the night was full of terrible shrieks and hissing.

"Shit," Reynard hissed. "Get him to the horses. We're taking off. These three can feed the shadows for us."

Crow came alive at the sound of approaching shadows, and struggled against his chains toward us while Reynard and his men pulled him down the steps. "Get to the top of the temple, my fledglings!" he called for us. "See the truth for me!"

His words were lost over the sound of hissing as a wall of monsters separated him from us.

Webb, Vale, and I had nowhere else to run but up the temple steps.

And it was funny.

But I had to blink away tears as I ran.

Are there secrets buried inside?
Are there broken dreams that you try to hide?
Are there feelings that tear at your side?
It's like looking at a house of cards
A tower a lies
We came too far
Too far to turn around
Start up a war inside can't stop it now
I'm not scared of the dark no no
I'm not scared of the dark