The Alien’s Vicious Starflash Manor (Empire of Frost and Flame #2)

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 15

LARA

T he moment I finally admitted to myself that I was actually attracted to my captor—to the man who bought me and dumped me in his house to work in his kitchen—was the third time I tried to escape.

My second escape attempt hadn’t amounted to much. For one thing, the second prison break happened way too soon after that first disastrous zombie-ridden one—I hadn’t given Ivrael enough time to grow complacent again.

Either that, or I just had horrifically bad luck.

Really, I guess both are true, given that during the second escape attempt, I sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night and ran directly into Ivrael in the courtyard. He turned me around and marched me right back to the kitchen.

Then he called one of the burlier servants—a footman I recognized as having dragged that boy to the gallows—and told him to stand guard over the kitchen door.

I waited almost three months after that to try again, and I knew I should give it even more time. But the longer I stayed there, the more a pressure grew in my chest, screaming at me to get out. I knew I would die here—either painfully and slowly, or painfully and violently. Neither option appealed.

So I gave it just enough time for the guard to get bored with his new job and, more importantly, for Ivrael to leave home to attend to some Ice Court business.

Everyone was a little less precise in executing their duties while the duke was away. That time, I walked out the door in the middle of the day.

I’d been watching and realized my burly guard was nowhere to be found in the afternoon. That was also the time when, unless she needed my help with some particularly tricky or large recipe, Adefina often sent me to assist the housemaids—the ones who generally didn’t do any of the cleaning and so preferred to have the human sweep and scrub whenever possible.

Since Ivrael was gone and there were no guests to cook for, it didn’t take long for Adefina to send me to Ramira. I was supposed to ask the Icecaix maid if she needed help. But Ramira, of course, never knew what days I might show up to assist.

It took me about half a second to decide I didn’t want to clean. Instead, I walked through the door leading from the kitchen to the rest of the house, across the downstairs parlor, into the foyer, and then to the servants’ entrance on the far side of the house. I walked outside as if I were on a mission, some kind of assignment from Adefina or Ramira, and no one asked where I was going.

This time, I took Kila with me, tucked inside my sweater, nestled against the skin of my collarbone.

I’d snagged several additional tea towels to tuck around her when I grabbed my cloak and swung it over my shoulders. Although the tea towels might have been considered odd, no one noticed me hiding them under the cloak. And it wasn’t at all unusual for me to wear it when heading into the chillier areas of the main house—all of them, as far as I was concerned.

As soon as I stepped outside, I flipped my hood up over my head.

Kila fumbled around inside the sweater, and I had to clench my teeth against being tickled. Finally, her hands clasped the edge of my neckline from inside and her head popped out. She glanced around interestedly. “Are you sure about this?”

“We’ll find someone who knows how to get you back to the Starcaix lands.” I sounded more sure than I actually felt. But I wasn’t going to leave her behind.

“What if we don’t?”

“If we don’t, I’ll take you home with me.”

“To Earth?” Kila went perfectly still, and I glanced down to find her staring up at me, her green eyes wide.

“Sure. Why not?”

She frowned, worry sliding across her face. “I don’t know if raya are welcome on Earth.”

“You’ll always be welcome wherever I am,” I assured her.

She shivered, and I patted her shoulder with my pinky finger. “You can’t stay out here,” I reminded her. “It’s too cold.”

She gave a harrumph and wriggled entirely out of my sweater long enough to duck back under my hood, burrowing into my hair. “I’ve heard stories about rayas dying on Earth. Not the Eternal Dream—actual death. I don’t want that.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure you get back to the Starcaix lands.”

Kila grew quiet, but her wings buzzed anxiously every few moments.

By this time, I had made my way around the house and was once again headed across the back field toward the woods. I had barely made it thirty feet when a voice calling my name drew my attention. “Lara! Wait for me.”

Shit. Fintan. Of course. My shoulders drooped. There was no way I was going to get out of here without talking to him first. He jogged toward me, catching up easily.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” The bull-featured alien carried an axe in one hand and a package of some sort in the other.

“Trying to.”

“It’s dangerous out there,” he warned me.

“Yeah, but now I know where the cemetery is.”

Fintan, having heard me recite the story of my adventure with the undead, snorted. “The Eternal Dreamers aren’t the only dangers out there.”

“But there are dangers here, too. And I can’t keep living like this.”

“Here,” Fintan said, pressing the axe into my hand. “If anyone tries to stop you, tell them I sent you out for kindling for the fireplaces. No Icecaix will know what that entails.”

“Thank you.” My voice caught in my throat a little. I blinked, gratitude rising up in my chest as my eyes welled with tears.

“This, too,” he added, putting the package in my other hand and explaining, “It’s some smoked meat, a little bread. I don’t want you to starve out there.”

I nodded and used the hand that wasn’t holding the axe to give him a one-armed hug around the waist. “Thank you. You’re a good friend.”

He looked a little sad—possibly at that characterization of us as friends? But he didn’t comment on it, merely nodding instead. “Go.” As I turned to walk away, he added, “Be sure to take care of Kila, too.”

The raya poked her head out from behind the hair framing my face and waved cheerfully. “Goodbye, Fintan,” she called out before shivering and ducking back inside the hood as we headed toward the tree line.

Once we reached the woods, I stopped long enough to turn my doubled cloak inside out, putting the green layer on the outside in the hopes of blending into the woods.

I knew the cemetery of the undead was to my left as I faced the forest. So this time I went right, ducking far enough into the tree line so that I was unlikely to be seen, but staying close enough to be able to leave the woods quickly if danger presented itself.

At least, that was the plan. We did move through the forest that way for hours. And we got farther away from Frost Manor that time than I ever had before. I don’t know what we would have found if we’d been able to keep going that night.

But this time, instead of zombie vampires, we found monsters of an entirely different kind.

K ila alternately curled up against my neck to sleep and tried to peek out from inside the hood, peering out from between strands of my hair to see where we were going.

“It all looks the same,” she complained for what seemed like the millionth time.

My fingers and toes first began to ache with the cold, then burn, and finally, they went numb. I trudged through the trees, their snow- and ice-laden evergreen boughs never changing—until the moment I glanced up and realized that the trees were now closer together, growing in more densely packed groves.

At some point, Starfrost Manor had disappeared, its lands gradually turning from open-air fields to lightly wooded land to thick forest.

Kila had fallen asleep, crawling under my sweater and pulling it up around her like a blanket, draping herself across my shoulder with her head in the crook of my neck, her right arm and leg hanging down behind me, the others in front of me.

I didn’t blame her—I was cold, miserable, and tired, too. I began watching for a place to rest, finally finding a tree growing beside a log that had fallen over a dip in the ground, creating a covered hollow protected on three sides, just big enough for me to curl up in.

Not that I had seen or heard anything in these woods that might indicate danger. But it was eerily quiet. Once again, I didn’t hear any birds, no chittering of squirrels or rustling of rabbits. Just cold, unrelenting silence.

I pulled a branch off the log, using it to sweep out the hollow space beneath, worried that something might have made a den in there. The last thing I wanted was to go up against a bunch of angry foxes or something else irritated that I had co-opted their sleeping spot. But there was no indication that anything had ever been inside it other than fallen pine needles.

Once I was certain it was safe—or as safe as anything in this cursed land was—I crawled into the tiny area, leaned back with a sigh of relief to be off my feet, and pulled my knees up to my chest.

I don’t know how long I slept. But several hours later, I jerked out of a light doze, uncertain what had awoken me. It was pitch black outside of my hiding space—not a single ray of moonlight broke through the canopy of trees. I considered checking if I could see more on the other side of my crawlspace, but the thought of stepping out into that blackness sent a chill racing down my back.

That’s when I heard it. It started as a whisper, a susurration of words scraping across each other, hissing out meanings that I couldn’t understand. But as the sounds grew louder, the whispers separated into distinct strands, resolving into lines of meaning. Within seconds, they were circling me, the voices coming from every direction, calling me by name, letting me know I was neither anonymous nor alone out here.

“Lara Evans.”

“We see you.”

“What are you doing so far from home?”

“Oh, little girl.”

“Come out to see us.”

Kila sat up with a start, then froze as the voices continued their taunting, singsong words, swirling and moving around us.

“What is that?” the raya hissed.

“I have no idea.” I tried to sound tough, unafraid, but my voice quavered and dropped to a whisper. “Nothing good.”

“Well, that much seems obvious.” Despite her sarcastic words and tone, Kila gathered the neckline of my sweater into her hands and pulled it closer around her, holding it up under her chin.

As we continued to avoid answering the creepy voices out in the woods, they began to grow angrier— singing less and snarling more. “You can’t hide from us forever, you know.”

“Keep playing, little girl. It’ll be fun.”

“We always take our prey in the end.”

I shuddered, wondering if these things, whatever they were, could get to us. I never answered them, huddling in the dark and deciding Kila and I were safe as long as we stayed tucked away in this hollow.

We stayed like that for hours, the voices trying various ploys to draw us out.

“We can show you the way home.”

“We can take you to your world.”

When that didn’t work, one of the voices changed, grew higher and lighter. It became Izzy. “Lara? I miss you. Roland hurt me. Won’t you come save me?”

Then a different voice. “Come with us and you’ll be safe.”

I knew it was a lie, and yet part of me yearned toward it. The replica was so perfect, so much Izzy, that it was all I could do to keep from scrambling out from under the fallen log and throwing myself through the dark toward the voices. But then Kila hissed, “No matter who it sounds like, that’s not who it is. Don’t move.”

“It sounds like Izzy,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

“It’s not your sister.”

I knew that, and yet it was comforting to hear it from someone else—someone I trusted.

“Do you think they’ll still be here when the sun rises?”

I gave a tiny shrug, not wanting to dislodge Kila from her perch on my shoulder. “No idea. I hope not. If the sun does drive them away, we’ll need to get as far away from here as possible.”

“What if they follow us?”

“As far as I know, I didn’t come across anything like them when I headed the other direction in these woods. Maybe they have a specific territory…or a range or something?”

“But we don’t know how far we have to go to get out of that range.”

Kila was right. I knew our best chance of survival was to turn around and head back to Frost Manor as soon as possible.

But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet.

“They haven’t attacked us,” I pointed out. “Maybe we have to go to them or something, and that’s why they keep trying to get us to come out.”

Part of me wished they would attack us, get it over with. I clutched the axe Fintan had given me, preparing to fight back, but I knew there was no way I could ever win.

Hauling wood and cleaning the duke’s house every day had left me stronger than I had been before Ivrael had brought me to this frozen hell—I was probably more physically fit than ever. But I’d never been taught to fight. Especially not with an axe.

So. I had a single axe with very little idea of how to use it, and there was just one of me.

Plus a raya, who, despite her ferocity, didn’t have much in the way of defensive moves

This time, the voice that came out of the darkness belonged to Ramira. “Starcaix rayas make delicious snacks. All crunch and squish—a single morsel and then gone.”

I could feel Kila’s horror through the way her wings paused and then fluttered—frantically, but also silently, as if she were trying to escape a monster that hunted by sound alone.

“Great,” I muttered, trying to lighten the mood a little.. “Now we’ve reached the taunting portion of the night. I wonder what’s next? Serenades?”

Seconds later, I wished I hadn’t given the creatures the idea when they began howling into the night sky.

Until that point, the longest night I had ever endured had been spent riding an ice horse from the Trasqo Market to Frost Manor. This one felt longer. Finally, after what seemed like centuries trapped in the darkness, the very beginning of the gray light of dawn allowed me to see more than just a couple of inches away from my face.

But when I looked toward the voices, I wished I hadn’t.

I don’t know what I had expected. I already knew they were monsters. And yet I was still surprised when I caught sight of them prowling around our hiding spot, one of them pacing back and forth directly in front of us.

At first, I thought they were your everyday, garden-variety wolves. Well—maybe not quite garden-variety. I doubted wolves could whisper in the darkness, after all.

I didn’t know how many of them there were, but many more, I suspected, than required to rip us both apart with their sharp teeth and claws.

We’d be dead in seconds.

I found myself thinking of fairy tales again—this time of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf’s answers to her implied questions.

What big ears you have.

The better to hear you with.

What big eyes you have.

The better to see you with.

What big teeth you have…

“The better to eat you with, my dear.” The wolf creature moving just outside our hollow answered my thought, and then all of them joined in a kind of lupine laughter, sounding like I imagined the sound of hyenas laughing, all yips and howls, teeth and blood, and dark desires.

Kila retreated into my own hood— At least I turned it inside out so it’s not red , I thought inanely—and then the raya pulled one of the extra tea towels I had brought with me around her shoulders, shivering against me.

“That sounds terrible,” she said as the wolves continued to howl.

The more I looked at the things, though, the less like wolves they appeared to be. Oh, they were large, rangy, with gray-and-white mottled pelts and ruffs of thicker fur around their neck. But their jaws were too heavy, their ears too big, and the way they walked was just…wrong. Their hind legs looked too long—like people attempting to scramble around on all fours rather than animals padding on their paws. It looked uncomfortable and unwieldy.

Then one of the creatures opened its mouth wide—too wide, wider than it ever should have been able to open—its tongue rolling out as that eerie voice so like Izzy’s echoed through its mouth and across the forest.

“Stay in this forest too long, and we will have you in the end.”

“I’m afraid,” Kila whispered in my ear.

“Me, too.”

It was like these wolf monsters, whatever they were, had gotten inside my head and pulled out my deepest fears and desires, as if they somehow knew all the things I couldn’t admit even to myself, and then fed them back to me.

So when the voice changed again, at first I assumed it was another one of their tricks.

“Lara! Where are you?”

I went completely still, and on my shoulder, Kila jerked, her wings buzzing in my ear. Neither of us said anything for a long moment.

“Why would they use Duke Ivrael’s voice?” the raya finally asked, her voice barely a whisper in my ear.

“No clue.” It wasn’t like I was somehow more likely to answer an Icecaix noble than I was to answer my own sister—or her voice, anyway.

But his voice continued calling my name. And it sounded farther away than the other wolfish voices.

It wasn’t until those wolf-like creatures started hissing and snarling that it occurred to me that there really was something different about this new voice.

“Don’t answer him,” one of the wolves said.

“He doesn’t want you.”

“Not like we want you.”

“He’s exactly like all the other Caix.”

“He’ll just use you and throw you away.”

That’s when I knew the other voice must be the actual Duke Ivrael. I hesitated for only a moment, certain that I would regret any choice I made.

But in the end, I decided that I would rather live in Frost Manor with the possibility of escaping some other day than die in a foreign Caix forest, shredded until there was nothing left of me but bloody strips, ripped to pieces by wolf-monsters straight out of a fairy tale.

And not the good kind.

Never the good kind.

But oh, God. I knew in the moment just before I called him to us, that there was no one—not a single person in his world or mine—that I would rather have come to my rescue.

“Ivrael,” I shouted. “We’re over here!”