The sulfurous stench of fear wakes Croi. It covers her skin and buoys her insides as though her body has been learning to be afraid while her mind was busy sleeping. She lies still, with her eyes closed, trying to orient herself. The last thing she remembers is the night crows turning into black smoke and violating, drowning, forcing her to unconsciousness.

She sends the mental equivalent of a poke to her other self. “Are you there?”

No thanks to you.

“No need to be crotchety. I didn’t plan for this to happen,” Croi grumbles.

She’s in some sort of conveyance that is moving briskly over a rocky road. She opens her eyes and immediately wishes she hadn’t because the first thing she sees are the bars of a cage. Bars she is on the wrong side of. Weak light barely illuminates the forest they’re passing through. They must have been traveling awhile now. Nothing hurts too much, so Croi is sure no one has taken a bite of her yet. However, the scarf tied around her face is gone.

Croi turns her head and almost swallows her tongue. Caolan is slumped not too far from her in a corner of the cage. Is he dead? She stares at him and sees his chest rising. Whew. In front of her, just two breaths away, is another striped kin. In fact, the entire cage is filled with striped kin. About fifteen or so, not including Caolan. She wonders if they’re all catkin. She can’t tell as, like Caolan, they’re all unconscious in their fae forms.

As the minutes pass, Croi becomes aware of a wrongness within her; her nose stings and her eyes prickle as if in preparation for despair. Her palms are sweating, and she’s breathing in short gasps like she is in the process of fleeing from danger. Her chest hurts, but beyond the physical pain is a deep fear mixed with a feeling she can’t pin down. Hopelessness. That’s what this feeling is.

“What’s wrong with me?”

I feel the same way.

Croi sits up gingerly, trying to move past the panic and peer through the wall of kin to see what’s pulling the wheeled cage, but the kin are too densely piled, and she can’t see through them at all. She tries to shove them away from her and notices that all of them have black patches on their arms. A liquid slime, coating small areas of their skin. She touches the patch on the arm of the kin directly in front of her and jumps when it coalesces into a night crow. It shouldn’t be possible for it to be here during the day. The night crows are creatures of the night, the Hag taught, animated by the darkness.

The night crow Croi disturbed fixes a beady red eye on her. Malevolence fairly drips off it. Its magick is a shimmery black and has a discordant melody that grates on her nerves. Croi accepts the challenge in the night crow’s red gaze and calls to its magick with a thought. The magick roils and the creature falters, losing its bird form and dissolving into smoke. It collapses back onto the skin of the sleeping kin. Croi stares at the patch in puzzlement when a noise makes her turn. Her mouth drops open at the sight before her.