CHAPTER FIVE

Lara

Consciousness returns slowly, awareness seeping in via bursts of sound and bright light that make me scrunch my eyes closed. I am so not a morning person. When I try to roll over and bury my face in the pillow, my arm won’t move.

Wait. What?

My whole body jerks as I tug with my arms and legs, but it’s no good. I’m sitting upright, tied to a chair at wrists and ankles.

I blink several times as my eyes adjust to brightness. I’m in a large tent. Strong sunlight strikes the white fabric, making the interior glow like the inside of a lantern. Lush carpets cover the floor in bright, tropical colors, and all the furniture is made from bamboo in sleek curving lines, like you see in pictures of fancy vacation resorts for the rich and famous. A large section of the tent’s back wall is rolled up to make a glassless window that looks out over thick jungle. It’s still as hot and humid as Miami, but a large fan hangs from the ceiling—and who knew you could have fans in a tent?—stirring the air into an artificial breeze.

“Ah, good. You’re awake,” Elton’s posh voice says. He sits across from me in a plush chair, leaning back with all the nonchalant ease of a king on a throne. “I must apologize for the accommodations. We’re roughing it on this excursion.”

I suppress a snort. Roughing it? Only someone rich would think this qualified. He should have seen my first efficiency apartment, which was smaller than this tent, with a peeling linoleum floor, paper-thin walls, and zero insulation. I boiled in the summer, froze in the winter, heard every little thing the neighbors did, and fought a constant war against bugs. I do not do bugs.

My mouth feels so dry my tongue’s glued to the roof, and it takes me a second to croak, “Where are we?”

Maybe we’re still in Florida, and the police will be here any moment. I’ve got one of those tracker apps on my phone, and Sherrie has access to it.

Shit. No pockets in this damned catsuit, so no phone.

“We’re on my island.” Elton smiles.

This time I can’t keep from snorting. What a rich asshole thing to do. “Of course, you own an island.”

“It’s a special island.” His smile drops, and his tone goes defensive. “This island didn’t exist until a few months ago.”

“There’s no way this is some kind of new island made by an active volcano.” I know I write fantasy, but does he think I’m stupid? I eye the rampant greenery outside. “There wouldn’t be plants yet.”

“This island didn’t appear because of a volcano.” He leans forward, a manic light in his eyes. “It was magic. Magic exactly like that found in your books.”

Oh, great. Just my luck. I not only get kidnapped, I get kidnapped by a guy who’s completely delusional.

“That’s impossible,” I say. “I made up all of the magic.”

Or kind of. I based it on an old family journal filled with strange, runish shapes that were supposed to be the language of the fae. No one can read it—the symbols aren’t actual Norse runes and don’t correspond to any known language. Yet I spent hours poring over it as a girl, imagining I could understand parts of it, then more hours researching everything I could find on Faerie. Is it any wonder I turned into one of those teens, always daydreaming, always making up stories of Faerie in my head?

It’s how I knew I wanted to be a writer and why I write fantasy with magic and orcs. Every story I found about orcs sounded nothing like Tolkien. The orcs were instead proud warriors, quick to anger but with a core of honor.

I used the symbols from my ancestor’s journal as the fae language in my fantasy books, assigning each rune a meaning that felt right.

“Everyone’s told me my entire life, ‘Elton, Faeries aren’t real’ and ‘You need to find something worthy to spend your time on.’” He sneers the repeated phrases in a sing-songy voice. “But I don’t care how many charities my older brother starts. What could be more important than being the person who proves magic and Faeries exist?”

I get it. Not the competing with your family part—my parents have always supported me, no matter what I wanted to do, like writing monster romance—but I get wanting to believe in Faerie and magic.

He picks up a folder from the small table beside him and opens it. After plucking out several 8x10 inch photographs, he holds them up in front of me. They’re close ups of pearlescent-gray stone covered in carved symbols.

Shock courses through me.

The rune-like shapes are the same language that fills my ancestor’s journal.

If that’s not surprising enough, they no longer give me only a vague idea of meaning.

No, now I can read them as easily as if they were English.

I gasp, my heart racing as shock courses through me. How can I suddenly read them? My eyes dart across them, picking out individual words that hold no cohesive meaning, because each picture shows only a fragment of a sentence.

“Ah ha! I knew I was right.” Elton jabs a finger toward me. “They are the same symbols.”

God, who even says “ah ha” these days? What did this guy do as a teen? Take classes on how to become a Bond villain at some fancy prep school?

He snaps his fingers, and the goons enter the tent. At Elton’s imperious wave, they pick me up, chair and all, and carry me over to a large desk. More photographs cover its surface, carefully laid out until their overlapping shapes make a poster-sized picture of a wall carved with the runes.

“Where’s this from?” I ask, desperate to know anything that will help me better understand my family’s history.

“An ancient building in the center of the island.”

There’s an entire building inscribed with the same language as my family journal? This language has been one of the biggest mysteries of my life. To be this close to a place that might have answers… “Can I see the building?”

“That will not be necessary.” He points at the photographs and says in the plummiest of tones, “You’re going to translate this for me, so I can use the magical artifact it explains.”

I can’t let this asshole discover I can read the text easily—anyone willing to kidnap a woman because he thinks she might know something isn’t the kind of guy you can trust to let you go if you give him what he wants.

“There’s no way I can do that! How am I supposed to work like this?” I jiggle from side to side, emphasizing my tied-down limbs. “Besides, I don’t have any of my reference materials,” I lie. I don’t need anything to read the photos, but I also don’t want to give in to this asshole.

He snaps his fingers again. God, even his finger snaps sound obnoxiously imperious. I never knew it was possible to hate the sound of a finger snap, but here we are.

One of the goons sets a small table beside me, and the other places a brown, leather-bound book on top. The old journal is scuffed, the edges worn to soft beige by constant handling.

Another zip of shock goes through me, this one tinged with fear. This is my ancestor’s journal, the one that should be safely back at my childhood home in Ferndale Falls.

“What? How? If you hurt my parents—!” I don’t even know how to finish that sentence.

“Now, now. No one’s been hurt,” Elton says. “Klaus here is surprisingly light on his feet. Aren’t you, Klaus?”

Goon number two grunts, and says in a German accent, “Their back door wasn’t even locked.”

“Of course it wasn’t!” I blurt. “That’s the whole point of living in a small town full of people you know and trust!”

A wave of homesickness washes over me. I left Ferndale Falls for New York City a few years ago, hoping on-site networking in the biggest city in the publishing world would help my career. But I miss my hometown, with its gingerbread-trimmed houses and adorable Main Street. These days, I spend so much time holed up inside my apartment writing that I could live anywhere. I’d have moved back already if the town wasn’t shrinking, losing young people each year. I took a hard look at the dating-pool options when I visited for Christmas, and let’s just say the pickings were beyond slim—they were downright skeletal.

They weren’t Brokk, a little voice whispers in the back of my mind. I tell the voice to shut up. It’s not as if a hot-shot model from the big city would tank his career to live in a small town.

Goon number one—still nameless—flicks open a knife and cuts the zip tie holding my right wrist. Then Klaus sets a blank pad of paper and a pencil on the small table beside the journal.

“There now.” Elton rubs his hands together. “I think that’s everything you’ll need. Let’s get cracking, shall we? I want my name plastered across all the news headlines by the end of the week. We’ll see what dear old Dad has to say about my ‘hobbies’ then.”

As if I care about his daddy issues. I glare up at him. “What do I get if I do this?”

“Money.” He eyes my pissed-off face and ups the ante. “Freedom.” When I don’t change my expression, he adds, “Your family journal back.”

Want flickers through me, and he sees it, grinning. God, I’ve got such a shit poker face. My old friend Hannah used to beat me constantly every time we played games. There’s no point in hiding that he’s won.

“Fine. I’ll need to refresh my familiarity with the language by reading something I already know.” I touch the front of the journal. It’s a lie. I’m dying to see if this new ability to translate the runes means I can finally truly understand my ancestor’s story. In the past, I gleaned hints of meaning, but I could never tell if I was actually reading or making up my own tale.

“Fine.” Elton parrots my word back to me, letting me know that it’s not actually fine, but he’s not going to argue… for now. “Klaus, you’re with me. Vito, watch her.” He strolls from the tent, the blond goon following him, while the dark-haired one takes up a wide-legged position in the doorway.

I guess they don’t consider me much of a threat, even with one hand untied. Which is accurate, if I’m being honest. Even if I got free of this chair, what could I do? I’m on an island in the middle of nowhere.

I pull the journal toward me and flip open the cover. Spidery handwriting in beautiful calligraphy covers the first page:

A True and Accurate Accounting

of the Adventures of Caroline Bakeworth

in Her Dealings with the Fair Folk

Caroline lived in England over three-hundred years ago. Family legend says she got into some kind of trouble—probably dallied with a man out of wedlock—and was married and shipped off to America with her new husband to avoid scandal.

Family legend also says she was a witch, that it’s something that runs in our veins. But no one else in my family has ever had powers, so it’s hard to believe.

Finally, I’ll be able to read her words, maybe get some answers! As crappy as this kidnapping shit is, I have to thank Elton for that—who knows when I would have realized I can read the runes.

Why can I suddenly read them? Did years of my subconscious churning over this unknown language finally lead to a breakthrough?

I flip the journal open to the first page where she switches from English to the symbols, anticipation zipping through me.

Father forbade me to go near the fairy stones, but that only made me want to go more. I slipped out the servant’s entrance in the middle of the night. Barefoot and wearing only my night rail, I ran, such as I was never allowed to run during the day, the activity deemed too unladylike. Oh, the freedom of running! Energy coursed through my limbs. Was this why they forbade it? Because it felt too good, too much of the body?

The woods behind Harden Hall were dark and deep, the wind whispering secrets I longed to understand. I rounded the trunk of an ash tree and came upon a man.

Or perhaps not a man. For lo, surely no mere mortal could be this beautiful. His clothes, while of the finest cut and cloth, were a bright blue such as no Englishman would wear, the waistcoat heavily embroidered with silver thread. His pale skin gleamed in the moonlight as if he held a piece of that celestial body within his own. And his features were carved by a master, a sharp imperious nose, high cheekbones, and a mouth that spoke of sin.

“Little human, have you come to be mine for a night or an eon?” Those lips curled into a wicked grin, and everything my chambermaid told me of what happens between a man and a woman in the marriage bed flooded through my body with instant awareness.

“A night,” I whispered.

“Pity.” He dropped his head, his breath brushing over my ear. “What I would do to you, if I had an eon.”

Then those lips were on my neck, and a—

A deep thump makes me jerk against my restraints as my head whips around.

Vito lies in a heap on the floor.

If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.