Don't Touch My Men - Helen Scott Page 0,1

was doing this, who was controlling the zombies, and who was after Mae. I mean, we knew what Wardwell had told us before everything went south, but could it really be the Headless Horseman? And how was the Horseman a god?

My brain spun, not just from the visions, but from all the information we’d been given recently. If the darkness Mae had felt searching for her was powerful enough to take her via magic zombies, then what the hell kind of hope did we have of getting her back?

It might have been helpful if my visions had a sound other than the roar that was similar to static. When I moved again and nothing more appeared to me, I tried going backward, but only caught brief glimpses like still frames from a movie. It was up to me to piece what happened together from that.

The simple fact that I’d even had the visions I had was proof that something beyond strange was going on. I had visions of death, period. It was only ever the act itself. Not what happened to the body afterward. Gods, I didn’t even want to imagine that—visions of maggots eating a corpse, suffocating because it felt like I was the one in the coffin buried underground, or being torn apart as the remains rotted away somewhere.

“What the fuck is going on, Grim?” A voice finally broke through the haze of my visions. Hunter. I could tell from the strain in his voice that he was right on the edge of losing it.

The fae had been stressed and on the edge of breaking, mentally cracking wide open, ever since Ellis had returned home with an almost dead Mae. It was only after we’d spent a long night in bed together that he’d seemed even remotely put together, and now it sounded like all that progress had gone out the window.

“The darkness has Mae,” I said with a growly edge to my voice.

“How do you know that?” Ellis demanded.

“Death visions.” Hunter stopped dead in his tracks, and even his chest stopped moving, like he was suddenly a statue. Quickly, I added, “She’s not dead, but the dead took her. I don’t know what it means, or where they were going. By rights, I shouldn’t have even had the visions to tell me that. I mean, they were already dead, I shouldn’t have seen anything, but I did.” I gave them a brief rundown of everything I’d seen, from the flaming skewered Wardwell, to the hoard breaking the window, to Mae being dragged away.

When I was done, I pushed to my feet, tired of sitting on the floor in the hallway, and grabbed a beer for each of us from the fridge in the kitchen. We all knew we couldn’t charge after Mae, not like this, and not without any kind of idea where she may have been taken or how to get her back. If we did something like that, then it would just be a suicide mission.

We all sat in stunned silence as we chugged our beers. Admittedly, I should have probably grabbed something a bit stronger, but the last time I’d checked, most of it had been destroyed in the brawl with the mages. Maybe when we replaced the liquor cabinet, we could get something with padding and bubble wrap.

“So how are we going to get her back?” Alastair asked, looking between us as though one of us would have a brilliant idea that would solve all our problems.

I didn’t think any of us expected Hunter’s shadows to explode out of him and turn the room to night as he said, “I don’t know yet. The one thing I do know is that when we find this asshole, his death won’t be quick. Mae is ours, and anyone who lays a finger on her is going to pay.”

2

Hunter

It’d been five days, three hours, and twenty-nine minutes since we discovered Mae was gone. I’d tried not to count the time that passed, but it was impossible. It was like something deep within me wouldn’t let me forget how long it’d been since my heart was torn from my chest.

Leaning against the side of the building in the dark, a cold wind blew down the alley, stirring the scents of the city. Unpleasant scents that reminded me that humans were dirty selfish creatures who flocked together and destroyed everything they touched.

My phone buzzed in my pocket for the thousandth time, but I gritted my teeth and ignored