Chapter 4
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This is fine.
My fae abductor hands a crust of bread to a bulbous green creature, who wiggles joyfully before plopping down underfoot and nibbling it while murmuring a chant of food food food.
Stirring roughly two dozen eggs in a skillet, the faerie man nudges the creature aside with the arch of his boot.
“Do excuse my pets, Danielle. Goblins don’t know any better.
Their mental power is comparable to dogs’, and their vocal cords are capable of mimicking sounds, but beyond that…
they make very poor companions. I’ve taught them a few commands to curb their uselessness, but there’s little else they’re good for, truly. ”
Immediately proving his point concerning mental limitations, another goblin wanders into the kitchen, sees the first nibbling the bread crust, and unleashes a troubling cry before charging.
“No. Sit.” The harsh words stop the second goblin in its tracks, and my faerie kidnapper sighs as the creature whimpers and plops.
Handing him his own crust of bread, my warden mutters, “It’s pitiful, truly.
Goblins are capable of evolving into hobs, which grants them a consciousness beyond beastly instinct, but I have yet to learn how to make it happen. ”
I’m not sure how I feel about the fact he’s tried to force it.
Despondent, he continues muttering, “I know evolution has something to do with the accumulation of knowledge, but I’ll let you guess how well my endeavors to create a goblin school went.
Their attention spans are nearly as bad as their breath.
” Setting the matter aside, he pulls the skillet to a different burner, turns the gas stove off, and smiles.
“Would you like anything else to go with your toast and eggs, love? Juice, perhaps?”
“Um…” A means to contact Zahra would be nice.
But I shouldn’t be greedy. When he asked me this morning what I wanted for breakfast, I wasn’t expecting him to let me out of the cage and suggest I could come with him to the kitchen if I wanted.
Taking small, cautious steps right now while I learn his limitations will likely keep me safer for longer. I say, “Maybe orange juice?”
“The fruit or the color?” He swings open a contraption that appears fridge shaped without so much electronic fanfare.
On the whole, it looks more like a wooden cabinet inside and out, and despite the chill wafting forth from the open door, it is completely silent.
Within, only glass containers rest on the shelves.
“I have mango and apricot as well as orange.”
Mango sounds amazing, actually. “Mango, please.”
He smiles, again. He does that a lot. If it were less manic more often, maybe I’d be deluded into a false sense of security.
So far, the cage isn’t bad if he lets me out with about as much fuss as he did this morning.
Which was, of course, no fuss at all. The bath last night was amazing.
Finally being able to scrub the past few weeks of grime off my body was therapeutic on levels unknown.
I’m pretty sure I was in that bathroom for over an hour, lobstering in a fugue state, but he didn’t bother me a single time.
The clothes he provides are comfortable and cover more than the clothes I’m used to wearing.
He’s feeding me more than my mother’s strict diet regime permissed, even allowing me to have the luxury of juice.
And since he spent the entire walk down the stairs telling me how he steals his eggs from someone named Willow in the human world, I’m wondering if I could have asked for meat and not worried that I was eating some weird thing from Faerie.
All in all, so far, I think I can tolerate this lifestyle.
Maybe true freedom would have been scary anyway, right? Full of too much responsibility and struggling. Full of constant anxiety, poverty, and distress. It would have been a different sort of torture. It already was.
I didn’t exactly have fun sleeping on benches, or scrounging up a few dollars for greasy fast food, or constantly, constantly watching my back in case someone might recognize me as the supermodel Danielle Storm and post something online that would give away my location to my mother.
A lifetime of paranoia out there in the human world wouldn’t have been very free.
Assuming consensual begging is important to this faerie man, this is fine. Totally fine. I’ll jut my lip a bit later and ask for less graphic books to read, then I’ll sit pretty in my cage and indulge in the peace for a while.
Adaptation.
I’m good at it.
Reasoning.
I’m great at that.
No one’s taking pictures of me in bikinis and underwear here or making me kiss a dozen strangers a month.
That’s nice.
An upgrade.
A few wayward kisses on my face is better than Rodrick’s sweaty hands getting gropey while his stinking breath infiltrates my nose and his I can’t wait until you’re mine pollutes my ears.
This is fine. Better. Maybe even good.
Once my faerie abductor is finished cooking, he leads me into a lavish dark wood dining room and pulls the chair at the head of the table out. I bite my tongue to keep from thanking him, since Frelsi’s taught me that we do not thank the fae, lest they take our souls.
I’m so grateful she was able to teach me some guidelines before all of this happened.
I’m less grateful that my abductor acts like he’ll die if he doesn’t tap a kiss to me every few minutes. This time, it’s the top of my head before he sweeps back into the kitchen to bring out the food.
After he’s finished adorning the table with everything he’s cooked, he loosens the cord tying back the long sleeves of his robe, stuffs it in his pocket, and removes the stopper from the pitcher of mango juice.
I watch as he determines the position of my glass before pouring, then I cross my ankles as he sits beside me—on my left, which seems relevant, somehow—and begins buttering toast. For me. Apparently.
“One or two slices, my feather?” he asks.
“One is fine.” This is more food than I’ve had in my entire life.
“And your eggs, love?” He scoops a heaping helping onto a wooden spoon. “How much?”
“Uh…maybe half that?”
He corrects the portion, ascertains where my plate is, and delivers.
If I absolutely had to get kidnapped and become a faerie’s pet, I guess it is nice that I’ve been kidnapped by the kind of pet owner who would microwave their dog’s wet food dinner.
Worse things have happened.
And I’ve definitely been subjected to them.
Carefully, I pick up my fork and eye my faerie kidnapper, to make sure I’m allowed to start eating.
Without warning, he merrily consumes three entire eggs in a single bite.
My eyes widen.
He scoops another obscene portion into his mouth, chewing delightedly the entire time.
He is…so blindly happy—no pun intended—that it’s actually starting to make me question whether I should be concerned at all about any of this.
Generally, people are overjoyed whenever they get a new puppy. If faeries regularly adopt humans as pets, maybe this situation is comparable to that one. After all, he’s displaying I have a new puppy levels of joy.
He is also displaying has not eaten in three years.
My word.
I thought the dozens of eggs and a skillet the size of a small country was extreme.
Silly me.
It’s…kind of cute how happy he is, rocking back and forth as he stuffs his face with food.
Realizing I’m already heading toward Stockholming myself into submission, I focus on my own food and poke at my eggs before nudging a few onto my toast.
Carbs. Butter. A full plate. It nearly makes my eyes water.
This is luxury unlike anything I’ve had before, and my warden sure is cute enough, isn’t he? What more could I ask for if not that Stockholm syndrome might take away my apprehension in full?
In all fairness, complacency is probably the best case scenario for my mental health here.
It’s not like I have the opportunity to run away again.
The only reason I could the first time is because I had Frelsi’s magic, but Frelsi was born in my bedroom.
She doesn’t know what’s out here in Faerie, and I sure don’t.
We both only know it exists because it’s one of those things the fae are born with—their name, the rules, and a sensation that home lies just beyond the fabric of reality.
If the goblins in my kidnapper’s palace are like dogs, wild goblins would be like wolves.
My choices are: being ripped to shreds in the woods…or…enjoying silk jammies, big breakfasts, and flower petal baths.
More complacent than ever, I sip my mango juice.
“Here you are!” Frelsi cries, zipping through an archway that leads into this pristine dining room.
Like the rest of the places I’ve seen here, it’s all tile floors, ebony stones, and dark wood, but it’s in this moment I realize my black-tipped pixie really seems to belong amid all these shadowed shades.
Colliding with my cheek, Frelsi gives me a hug.
“I overslept. Our bed is so comfy, and we haven’t had a real bed for weeks. ”
“Morning, Frel,” I murmur.
She throws me a grin, sits herself down on the corner of the table by me, and extends her extra-knuckled hand. “Kidnapper man, where is my sustenance?”
Kidnapper man chuckles. “My name is Castor, hatchling. Fetch your own food. It is abundantly displayed.”
Castor.
His name is Castor.
Frelsi crosses her arms. “You made my Dani get her own food?”
“No.”
“Then why do I have to?”
“Because I would not remove my organs one by one for your pleasure in the same way I would for her.”
The mad spark in my small pixie’s eyes sends a shudder down my spine. Before she can ask that I request such a horrific display, I say, “Frel, no.”
Her lip juts as her nose scrunches. “Why not?”
It really should be obvious.
What should also probably be obvious is a loophole in his violent statement. He can’t lie, so what he just said has to have some twisted phrasing that means he would not actually, upon my request, begin dissecting himself, right?
By the time the words blur in my brain and I’m not sure if I’m recalling them correctly anymore, I still haven’t found the part that makes it clear he’s not being wholly forthright.
Which is…odd.
When I was a child, I pleaded with my mother to not make me do swimwear shoots.
For one thing, I was embarrassed, already struggling with a complex where my figure was concerned thanks to how my mother spoke about my body.
But, for another, I was also much too aware how people looked at me.
I did not feel safe in such skimpy attire. Not at all.
Way back then, I still bothered to cry and beg, thinking it might appeal to the something in that woman that was meant to love her only daughter.
Compared to my memory of those cries going unheard, the contrast in what this faerie man seems willing to do for his new pet is loud.
Yeesh.
Dog people are crazy.
A little more comfortable, I settle in while Frelsi makes a point of dragging her wings across the table as she mopes on over to a slice of toast. Her pitiful little self sniffles as she peers at the glass butter dish beside the bread platter. Her big eyes hit me.
The back of Castor’s hand so gently stops me when I reach for the knife to butter her a slice. He says, “Don’t allow her to manipulate you, Danielle. Manipulation, from this point on, is a game between us. And I insist it remain a private lobby.”
Frelsi stomps her foot. “I’m too little.”
“And?” he prompts.
“I can’t do it.”
“Well, surely you can’t with that attitude.”
“I want butter.”
“Indeed. Then, hatchling, I do suggest you problem solve.”
Frelsi stabs a finger toward me. “Solved.”
“No.”
“Asking for help is solving the problem.”
“Asking for help before you’ve tried at all to do it yourself is taking advantage of the blessing that you have those willing to help you.”
She huffs. “Actually, it’s saving time.”
“It’s forfeiting a chance at self-sufficiency, which won’t save time later if you want to do something when Danielle is absent and you must spend time to find help.
Help is always a luxury, and if you depend on it too completely, it is a weakness.
” Castor takes one bite out of his own toast; it is now half gone.
“I will not help you. I will not allow her to help you. Figure it out.”
Frelsi, a tiny being of pure spite, tries first to lift the butter knife.
Castor saves her from being crushed by it.
She tries—and fails—to bite him. Stomping, she next fights to tear a manageable piece off a slice of bread.
Once she has, she marches it to the butter, drags it across the soft stick, and gasps once she realizes that she has succeeded in her goal.
Plopping, she flitters her wings and munches.
“Atta girl,” Castor murmurs, low voice tender in a way that makes my heartbeat skip a pace.
I freeze, glance at my chest, and petition the organ for an explanation.
Alas, the foolish thing provides none.
Instead, it figuratively shrugs, offering little more than a pathetic commentary about how praise has been otherwise quite absent from its dreadful little life.
The boding well, this does not.
Or, at least, it does not bode well for maintaining autonomy and a sense of independence. It bodes swimmingly for the survive through complacency plan.
After all the time I spent gathering the courage to flee my mother’s chains, going back to submit and survive hurts.
Positive thinking, though.
At least I’m good at it.