Chapter 5 Lore #2
“It’s all very allegorical, though,” I added quickly. “She only attacks those who’ve been warned against touching her belongings. Really, it can be read as a study of why society finds women who stand up for themselves unappealing and villainizes them.”
I’d read the book right after a particularly bad breakup and felt a kinship for Jessa Maya.
I’d been the one who ended the courtship, but I was villainized for breaking his heart.
In reality, he hadn’t really wanted me, and he’d let it slip that he was in love with someone else who’d given her heart to another.
Apparently, I’d been the safe, second option.
It was perfectly acceptable for him to settle, but I knew it was a recipe for disaster down the line.
I’d saved us both from a loveless union, yet I was the villain.
I felt my blood pressure rising and took a deep breath to center myself. Honestly, the way female characters were held to a higher, impossible standard in fiction was one of my biggest gripes.
A woman was branded as unlikable and irredeemable if she behaved the same way a man did. It was unjust how we demanded perfection from some characters while praising the flaws of others as growth.
That unfortunately wasn’t restricted to the pages of novels, either.
That notion often bled into reality.
So, yes, Jessa Maya might kill and eat her victims, but that was beside the point. The moral of the story was to respect others or suffer the consequences because you never knew when you were messing with a rage-fueled cannibal who was extremely particular about her belongings.
I knew I was careening over the edge, but focusing on something familiar was keeping me grounded for the moment.
The assassin seemed to choose his next words carefully. “Did the woman you spoke with earlier say anything similar to you?”
I thought of her parting words.
“She said, ‘Touch anything, and I’ll gut you like a pig.’ Then she mimed a very convincing stabbing motion, laughed, and flounced off into the woods.”
He stared at me for a solid moment, seeming lost for words.
I had a feeling it was more my description of her frolicking into the forest rather than the subject that had thrown him.
“Dark humor is an acquired taste,” I pointed out, “so I didn’t hold it against her.”
The woman lived alone in a world where giant spiders impaled people, and I doubted she had visitors over for tea very often.
Far be it from me to judge what she found funny.
“How, exactly, did this cannibal goblin story make you feel safe?”
I bristled at his tone. “It’s not like the book started off with the cannibalism. It was very pleasant up until it wasn’t.”
I left out the part about my dissolved courtship and how I’d felt an odd kinship toward the villainess in the story.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath.
“How long ago did she leave?”
“Maybe an hour?”
I lifted a shoulder. I hadn’t thought to check the nonexistent clock.
I’d been preoccupied by addressing his wound like any normal adult dealing with a post-monster-attack crisis. The least he could do was thank me for playing nursemaid and remaining calm and clearheaded enough to focus on his trauma.
Up until this unfortunate event, I didn’t even know I could help someone back from the brink of death. His manners clearly needed work.
“She helped me carry you in and went to collect the herbs a few minutes later.”
He glanced around the room, a new alertness in his gaze. The apex predator returned.
“Did you use anything without permission?”
I opened my mouth to say no, then stopped, an eerie sense of déjà vu coming over me. “I used some alcohol on your wound.”
“That’s something that happened in the story?” he guessed.
My attention returned to the cabinet of supplies, my pulse beginning to tick faster.
In the book the main character had been left alone for days and finally took a sip of what she thought was water. She planned on refilling the bottle as soon as the winter storm had passed.
It had been a trap—Jessa Maya spiked the drink and attacked when the toxin had kicked in. She’d taken her ax and hacked her into a hundred little pieces.
“Lore. Did this happen in your book?”
I shook myself out of my growing unease. “Yes. But not exactly; there are a few similarities is all. It’s not the same plotline.”
His brows knit together. “What do you mean?”
“For starters, it’s not winter. The setting was an integral part of the book. And Jessa Maya stayed in the cabin for the first few days. Then she left during the worst of the blizzard. When she came back, that’s when the axing began.”
Instead of questioning my taste in fiction, he flung the sheet off his legs and got to his feet like the devil himself had torched his ass.
“Grab supplies and hurry.”
I watched, uncharacteristically subdued, as he retrieved his dagger from the nightstand and moved faster than any mortal could, flinging open the cabinet, inspecting jars.
He was a blur of motion, pausing only when he noticed I was still rooted to the spot where he’d left me.
I wondered if he was really that fast or if my adrenaline had finally crashed and shock had settled in, making me sluggish. Though healing from being impaled in an hour kind of indicated he wasn’t human.
It was one more thing to tuck away until I could deal with it later.
There were only so many impossible things I could reasonably handle before dinner.
“Why aren’t you packing? Are you sick? Did she make you eat or drink anything?” he demanded.
“No, I’m perfectly fine.”
He narrowed his gaze, not believing the obvious lie but not calling me on it.
“Then grab anything you can in case we need to sleep in the woods for a few days. We need to leave before she returns.”
I couldn’t believe I was about to be the voice of reason, but here we were.
“It’s only a story. And you should really rest.”
Miraculous healing aside, he’d been impaled an hour or so ago.
He looked like he was silently debating something.
The fact that he seemed more worried now than when I summarized my cannibal murder book said a lot.
He hadn’t missed a beat then.
Footsteps scraped across the stairs of the front porch.
He swore, moving again in that supernaturally fast way.
Within seconds, he snatched a blanket, a waterskin, and several other jars and stuffed them into a leather satchel.
He grabbed my hand and drew me out from around the small bed.
“This isn’t similar to the book; it is the story.”
I stared at him. “I think you need to lie down again. You’re obviously feverish.”
“I am not ill. And right now”—he paused like the next thing that came out of his mouth would cause physical pain—“right now there is a goblin cannibal about to walk through that door and I’d rather not have to fight her with my magic while I’m recovering. I suggest we discuss this after we escape.”
I was at a complete loss for words.
For starters, he’d just admitted to having magic. And even after a day of impossibilities, my skepticism went on high alert.
Or maybe it was my sense of survival. I had no way of knowing if he was luring me outside to kill me with his aforementioned powers.
“Why don’t you just kill her?”
I couldn’t believe those words left my mouth, but here we were.
His brows shot up. Wonderful, I’d shocked a sociopath.
“Goblins are immortal,” he said like this was completely normal. “I’d rather save my energy for what’s to come.”
I doubted the night could get any more terrifying than that.
A key twisted in the lock, the doorknob slowly turning.
I could slap myself for not thinking the night could get any worse. Whenever main characters did that, the plot always took offense.
My senses prickled in warning, growing so tense my hands began trembling.
The main character in the book had also been locked in the cabin.
How many coincidences needed to occur before they were no longer coincidences?
That was a philosophical question for another day.
Right now my gut said to run, and I never ignored that wise little wretch. Any reader knew that was the kiss of death.
My attention jerked up to the assassin; he gave me a patient look.
He might be out of his mind, he might have ulterior motives, but the churning sense of dread told me to trust his brand of crazy and move.
Now.
I shot across the small room, and the assassin with questionable sanity shoved the window up, using enough force to crack the stone frame, forgoing silence in favor of speed.
We’d definitely need to discuss what he ate to fuel that kind of immense power later.
I grabbed on to the ledge and hoisted myself up as the front door crashed open.
An ax flew past my head, embedding itself in the wall.
I froze. Holy gods.
Stone splintered from the force. Jessa Maya had one hell of a throwing arm.
A second ax whizzed by, skimming my ear.
“Move, Lore!”
His warning wasn’t necessary—I was already falling through the window and running as fast as I could. I slipped over the rain-soaked grass, the storm pelting down on me with a vengeance, but didn’t stop.
I charged through puddle after puddle, my boots getting soaked through.
My toes prickled uncomfortably from the icy water, but I’d worry about that later. My stockings were sopping wet and kept making a squelching noise that no amount of thunder could hide.
I never would have thought damp socks might be my undoing.
Hopefully the storm would drown out sounds of wet footwear.
The assassin easily caught up and grabbed my arm, hauling me alongside him at breakneck speed.
My feet practically floated over the ground as he lifted me higher.
A beat later, I heard the pounding of… paws?
I glanced over my shoulder and really wished I hadn’t.
Jessa Maya was riding a wolf. And not just any wolf, but something truly out of a nightmare. It was easily the size of an elephant, and its fangs looked sharp enough to rip my limbs off in one bite. That definitely hadn’t been in the original story.
The sociopath swore and yelled at me to move my ass faster.
Together we raced across the meadow and aimed for the woods, the furious Jessa Maya chasing close behind us with a bloodcurdling cry I’d never unhear.
Thunder shook the earth, the force of it powerful enough to make me stumble.
A moment later, a whip of lightning struck near us, igniting a dead sapling in a blaze of white flames.
I let go of the assassin and careened around the scorched earth before grabbing on to him again.
My cloak, now completely saturated with rainwater, added weight to my frame that was getting harder to ignore.
I wished I’d spent more time climbing the trails up the mountains in Bellington with Fable. Or hefting around heavier books.
If I survived the raging cannibal and her death wolf, I made a mental note to add strength training to my weekly schedule.
Running for one’s life wasn’t as thrilling as fiction made it seem.
I had a stitch in my side that could possibly be an early sign of a heart attack and was wheezing already.
The wolf was gaining on us, and if we didn’t make it to the woods soon to slow it down, we would die. Flashes of my parents and Fable spurred me on. I would not meet my end here.
We ran so hard my lungs squeezed painfully in my chest, and I thought I’d die if I took another breath.
While we’d been inside, the temperature had plummeted several degrees, the cold air stinging with each sharp inhalation.
Even being injured, the homicidal sociopath showed no such strain.
He moved with lethal grace while I huffed along at his side.
We finally reached the forest’s edge moments before the wolf and his screeching rider.
The assassin charged forward with the force of a battering ram, slicing through the dense, tangled greenery to create a jagged path for me to follow.
I hurled myself into the eerie woods after him, my adrenaline surging through my veins as the wolf howled in frustration and began snarling and tearing at the undergrowth, trying to rip an opening large enough for it to squeeze through.
The dense trees would only keep it at bay for so long.
I hoped the sociopath knew what he was doing, or we were doomed.
Giant spiders, shadow portals, nightmare wolf riding, immortal goblin cannibals… What was behind door number three?
I was about to find out.