Chapter 3
THREE
ALLERIA
The fae stands over me, so close I could touch it if I dared.
Those pale gold eyes haven’t left my face since it dropped me to the ground.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. That deep, instinctive part of me, the part that understands the danger before my mind does, shrinks in on itself and hisses.
Don’t twitch. Don’t flinch. Don’t give it a reason.
Its lip curls as though it can hear my thoughts. Then it turns and walks away.
One second those eyes are fixed on mine, the next it crosses to the far side of the hollow and crouches.
It presses one palm against the ground, lips moving.
I strain to hear, but no sound reaches me.
Then it straightens and moves to one of the trees.
Palm against the bark, its mouth works again.
Then to the next tree. And the next. A circuit being repeated over and over, while I shiver in the dirt.
“Please.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “My father is the king. He’ll pay any ransom you want. Gold, land, anything. Please. Please let me go.”
It doesn’t give any sign that it’s heard me as it walks to the next tree.
“Did you hear me? I said my father …”
I might as well be talking to the wind.
I wrap my arms around my middle, trying to hold myself together.
Where are they? The Dell can’t be that big. They should have found me by now. They have dogs and trackers. They can follow prints and broken branches. So why haven’t they come?
My eyes dart to the fae, kneeling on the ground again, one hand braced in the dirt, the other pressed against a trunk.
Has it hidden me somehow? Or did they go back to the lodge for more people?
I don’t know which thought is worse.
My eyes snag on something. A ring of pale mushrooms on the far side of the hollow.
As I watch, they start to glow—faint at first, just a halo around their caps.
Then brighter. The fae steps into the circle, drops to its knees, and digs its fingers into the earth.
The glow builds until my eyes ache, then fades again when it stands and walks away.
I start counting. It’s something to focus on, a way to stop my thoughts from spinning apart.
It spends three heartbeats at each tree. Four at the patch of bare ground. Eight at the mushrooms.
I force my eyes away and look around the rest of the hollow. The path we came from is no more than twenty feet away from me, opposite where the fae is.
I could run.
The thought rises from the same place that’s been hissing don’t move since it dropped me here. I shove it down. I’ve seen how fast this thing moves. I’ve felt how strong it is. Running would be suicide.
But lying here waiting to see what it does when it finishes …
My heart thuds against my bruised ribs.
I can’t outrun it. I know that. But I can’t just lie here and die, either. At least if I run, I’m doing something. I’m not accepting that I’m nothing more than prey.
I watch it complete another circuit. Then another.
I push myself upright. The fae doesn’t even glance my way. It places its palm on another trunk, head turned away.
I shift to my knees, eyes fixed on it as it moves to crouch inside the mushroom circle again. Silver light climbs its fingers, throwing strange shadows along its arms.
If I’m going to move, it has to be now. While its back is turned. While it’s as far from the gap as it gets.
Now!
I snatch up the nearest handful of debris—stones, broken twigs, a clump of wet leaves—and hurl it as hard as I can to my right. It hits the undergrowth with a rustle and a clatter that sounds deafening in the silence.
The fae’s head snaps toward the noise.
I launch to my feet and run.
Not toward the obvious gap. That’s too exposed. I sprint left, toward the darker space, where shadow gathers between the trunks. My legs don’t want to work. The first step nearly pitches me face-first into the dirt. The second catches. The third turns into a stumbling, lurching run.
Roots grab at my ankles. I jump one, clip the next, and slam my palm against a tree to keep from going down. Bark scrapes skin from my hand. I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except reaching those trees.
Twenty feet.
The slope is steeper than it looked. Loose soil slides under my boots. My breath tears in and out, each inhale colliding with bruised bone.
Ten feet.
Almost there.
Five feet.
Something flickers in my peripheral vision.
I’m not going to make it.
And then I burst through the gap and into the forest beyond.
The canopy is thicker, branches knitted so tightly together that the sky is nothing but thin strips of gray. The ground is a treacherous mess of slick leaves and roots.
I don’t look back.
If I see it behind me, I’ll fall apart. If I don’t see it at all, I’ll slow down. Either way, I lose. So I keep my eyes forward and run.
My breathing is a ragged rasp in my ears, the only sound in the dead forest. Every jarring step sends a fresh spike of pain through my ribs. My shoulder throbs, each swing of my arm a reminder of what awaits me if I’m caught.
Where is it?
I can’t hear anything except my own body—boots pounding, breath rasping, my pulse hammering in my throat, my temples, and my wrists.
Maybe it’s still in the hollow. Maybe it’s still kneeling in that glowing ring, finishing whatever it started while I run blind through trees that all look the same.
Or maybe it’s right behind me.
I don’t know. I just keep going.
The ground dips without warning. I slide down a muddy slope, and catch myself on a sapling that bends to the ground. Scrambling to my feet, I keep moving.
A dark strip of water flashes ahead of me—a narrow stream cutting across my path, all slick stones and black water.
I jump.
My foot hits a rock and slides. My knee smashes into the ground, pain jolting up my thigh and into my hip. For a heartbeat, I’m on all fours, panting, hands sinking into water so cold it numbs my fingers.
Get up!
I haul myself upright. My legs shake with every step. My vision swims, spots dancing at the edges, but I keep moving because stopping is worse.
Run. Run.
I risk a glance over my shoulder.
Nothing.
There are no antlers weaving between the trunks. No tall, gray-green shape. Only broken branches and churned leaves where I’ve crashed through.
I might actually have lost it.
Hope hits me so hard it almost knocks me sideways.
The air ahead of me changes, turns thicker and wrong. A patch of shadow between the trees deepens, turning from ordinary dark into something that raises the hair on my arms.
The fae steps out of it straight into my path.
I try to twist aside. My boots skid on wet leaves. I’m still turning when it hits me with the force of a battering ram, lifting me clean off my feet.
For one weightless moment, the world turns into a spinning blur of trees, and sky, and ground.
Then the ground slams into my face.
Air explodes from my lungs. Dirt fills my mouth. Pain flares along my jaw. Blood coats my tongue.
I scramble up, pushing onto my hands and knees—
Its foot connects with my ribs.
The pain is absolute. It whites out my vision and empties my mind of everything except the burning reality of my body folding around the blow. I can’t scream. There’s not enough air. My mouth opens anyway. Nothing comes out except a thin, whistling wheeze.
I curl around the agony as its foot connects a second time. My arms lock around my middle, trying to protect my stomach.
I can’t see. I can’t think.
Fingers close around my ankle, and the world jerks into movement.
I’m dragged backward across the ground. My head bounces off a rock.
Light bursts behind my eyes. I claw at the earth, at ferns, roots, anything I can reach.
My fingernails catch on stone and bend back, tearing away from the nail beds.
The pain of it makes my stomach revolt. But nothing I do matters, because it doesn’t slow down.
“No!” The word tears out of me, ragged and desperate. “Please. No! Stop!”
It does.
The relief lasts half a second. Before I can react, it flips me onto my back and settles on top of me, its weight across my thighs, knees pressing into the ground on either side of my hips. I thrash beneath it, bucking and twisting, trying to throw it off.
It’s wearing a thin, ragged tunic that might once have been white, but is now filthy and torn. Its legs and feet are bare, streaked with dirt … and pressed against me through that thin fabric and my hunting leathers …
My mind goes blank.
In one terrifying second, everything I thought I understood rearranges itself.
Because the body pinning me down is unmistakably, undeniably male.
I can feel the evidence pressed against my hip—the weight and heat of …
it … even through my leathers. There’s no way to pretend otherwise, no way to keep thinking of him as an ‘it’, as an animal, as a … thing.
He’s male. He has male parts that work the same way as a human man’s. And he has me pinned beneath him, completely at his mercy.
Terror floods through me, a different kind than before. This one is older and deeper, the kind that every woman learns early in life. I know what men do to women they have pinned beneath them. I know what happens to girls who can’t fight back.
I scream.
The sound rips out of my throat. I scream, and I thrash and claw at him—his chest, his arms, his face. My torn fingernails drag across his skin, leaving pale tracks that don’t bleed. I scream until my voice breaks, my lungs burn, and the sound dissolves into sobs that shake my whole body.
The fae doesn’t move.
He sits astride me, watching and waiting while I exhaust myself. His expression doesn’t change.
When I finally go silent, chest heaving, and my face wet with tears, he leans down. So close I can smell him. Earth and sweat, and green growing things … And underneath that, faint but unmistakable, the copper tang of old blood.
His eyes meet mine. Pale gold, empty of anything I recognize as mercy.