War (The Four Horsemen #2) - Laura Thalassa Page 0,97
stone crashes through the window, just missing the aviary owner. He shouts, dropping his pen as the rock slams into the giant cage behind him, startling the birds.
His wife rushes over to him, grabbing some of the thin sheets of paper and pulling him away from the window. As I watch, she grabs a pen and begins scribbling down the same message.
My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it.
This isn’t going to work.
The fighting is right outside. I can hear other houses being raided, other families screaming for their lives. Worst of all are those cries that suddenly cut out. So many innocent people are being butchered, and behind all this carnage is War.
The door rattles as someone tries to get inside. It stops jiggling a second later, but then I see a man’s face in the window, a sword in his hand.
I level my arrow at his face. “Move along unless you want to die.”
Without another word, the soldier leaves the way he came.
I release a breath. So far, I’ve been fortunate, but it’s only a matter of time before my luck runs out.
The man steps into the communal bird cage behind his desk. Rolling up the note, he slips it into a tiny cylinder on the back of one of the pigeons. Once he’s finished attaching the message, he carries the bird to the back of the building and opens the door.
A soldier is waiting for him.
All I hear is a flutter of wings and a choking sound. Then the man is falling and the spooked bird is flapping into the sky.
His wife screams, dropping her pen and paper to rush over to him.
No, no, no.
I lift my bow and arrow, but before I can get a clean shot on the soldier, I hear the thump of an arrow and I see her body recoil. Another arrow follows.
The woman ran to her husband when she saw him killed. She ran to him. War thinks humans are the scourge of the earth, but is there anything so powerful as the way we love?
As soon as she falls, I see the woman who shot her.
I release my own arrow, and it clips the soldier in the shoulder. With a cry, she stumbles out of the back doorway, and now I’m stalking through the aviary, reloading.
I can’t look at the fallen couple who spent their final minutes trying to relay my message.
Outside, the soldier is trying to yank my arrow out of her flesh. I shoot her again, this time in the leg.
She screams, half in pain and half in anger. “What the fuck are you doing?” she accuses, clearly recognizing me.
I lean over her and grab the arrows from her quiver, adding them to my own supply. Just in case I run low.
“I’m trying to save humanity, asshole.”
With that I stalk back inside and kick the door shut.
I’m going to die today.
That thought has crossed my mind during pretty much every battle, but today it settles on me with cold certainty. A macabre part of me wants to know what War would think about that. He seems to care a great deal about my wellbeing, but he doesn’t love me, and he doesn’t mind death, and he’s brought me into battle once again despite how dangerous it is.
Would he mourn me?
He might, I think.
I head back over to the desk and grab the scribbled messages from where they lay. Between the husband and wife, they managed to get two more notes written. I take them both and fold them up, cramming them into tubes attached to the back of the first two pigeons I reach. Clutching the birds close, I rush back outside.
The soldier I shot is still there, leaning against the wall, trying to remove my arrows.
“What you’re doing is pointless,” she huffs, watching me as she works.
“Yeah, right back atcha,” I say, eyeing her futile efforts to remove the arrowheads.
I release the birds, watching them rise into the morning air. I don’t linger long enough to see whether or not they make it out of the city. I think it might crush the last bit of my hope if I saw them fall.
I head back inside. There are five more birds in the cage. Between three people, we’ve only managed to release three birds.
I grab the pen and paper from where the woman dropped them, and I begin to scribble out the same message I instructed the couple to write.