Daydreams And Nightshade (DaN #1)

Chapter 10: Every family's got something

"It was a mara." Noah winced, busted lip searing as he spoke and he licked some dried blood away from it. "A blight feeding on nightmares. We didn't know it at the time, but there was no mistaking it afterwards."

"And it just... appeared when you touched it?" Cassius' pronunciation of 'just' sounded off on account of his front teeth being gone. "Why?"

Noah wasn't sure he wanted to get into that. Admittedly there was a reason, but how many supernatural things could he throw at the men within just an hour or two?

"Somehow I pulled it into our plane," he chose to reveal. "Maras are a type of blight that only have physical forms in other planes of existence. Doesn't stop them from causing nightmares in our world though, unfortunately."

Cassius opened his mouth to say something again, but a tremble in his face suggested the wound on his chest had made itself known.

"How is it?" Noah squinted to discern the cut behind Cassius' torn shirt, but the darkening sky did him no favors. "The skin around it looks pretty red."

"Could be from the blood." Cassius tried to smile it off despite Noah's certainty that the rest of him had paled significantly from his usual pinkish flush. "I don't think it's infected, at least."

"Well, not to be a downer like Winton, I don't know if it's gonna stay that way for long." He scratched his cheek against the tree behind him. "Camp's not much cleaner than an old horse stall.

On that note, they were all grateful that the soldiers' horses rarely passed by there so the ground hadn't been trampled into mud yet. This did not help the fact that Noah still had dried mud caked on his forehead and cheek from before though, and the itchy sensation remained no matter how much tree scratching he subjected his skin to.

A blood curdling scream emitted from one of the tents, and both men sucked in a breath.

"Speaking of Winton," Noah mumbled, and Cassius refused to let his breath go. "I guess... we should figure out what to do about this whole situation."

"What did you have in mind?" Cassius asked with an exhale. "They're not gonna let us go until we talk and well, I don't think we'll want to talk, right?"

Noah thought back to worse times. Times he wished would not remind him of the state he was in, but perhaps it was a blessing in monstrous disguise that he'd been through hardships before.

"Those couldn't scheme or torture properly even if it was possible." Noah winced through another scream from the tent. "The fact that they're trying to torture us in the first place means they're most likely cannon fodder."

"Front-liners?"

"All too likely to die, so I'm guessing they're avoiding being labeled as deserters by claiming to interrogate the enemy instead, but torture doesn't work, and any higher ranking leader would know that and not give such an order."

"So..." Cassius knitted his eyebrows, swollen eye twitching. "... they're just gonna keep at it until we're all dead, then?"

"One way or another, if nothing changes." Noah couldn't help but drop his attempted soothing voice. "Doesn't matter if one of us breaks or not. They'll have to trust the information regardless, and if they find something they'll have what they need and can kill us, or they'll find out we were lying..."

"... and will kill us."

"For what it's worth, the fact that they're avoiding the front lines by doing this means they'll want us alive for as long as possible and they won't manage that if they're too rough with us."

"How can we trust they even know how to control that? None of them seem very bright at this p—" Cassius interrupted himself as Marteau walked up to them, dragging a roughed up Winton behind him.