Chapter 6 Lore
SIX
Lore
IT WAS SO dark I could barely see his light hair in front of me.
Branches and vines lashed at my arms and face like whips, brambles snagging fiercely in my hair and skirt. I couldn’t afford to slow down, not even for a moment to wipe the rain blurring my vision.
My pulse pounded violently, a frantic drumbeat of impending doom.
Any second could be my last.
Jessa Maya’s death wolf was closing the distance, and the sound of her pet from hell crashing through the forest behind us was sending my heartbeat into full panic.
I did not want to end up as her dinner.
I had all sorts of horrific images fluttering through my head—being basted on a spit with an apple stuffed in my mouth was just one scenario haunting me.
I kept my attention on the here and now.
At the base of a wide tree, the assassin abruptly stopped and swung around.
Like the supreme predator I was, I crashed into him at full speed and bounced off his chest, landing ungracefully in a bush.
I swiped a lock of wet hair from my face, wondering what I’d done in a previous life to warrant this kind of karmic retribution.
To add insult to injury, I’d probably get a black eye from smashing into that wall of hard muscle.
He hauled me up, his face an expressionless mask as he plucked a leaf from my hair. I got the feeling that if we weren’t being chased, Lord Serious might have actually cracked a smile.
“Get on my back.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
I jumped up and clung to him like a barnacle, my arms and legs locked around him in a death grip.
For a breathless second I felt the solid heat of his body under mine, strong, steady, and completely unshaken despite the circumstances. I held him a little tighter, sinking into the safety he offered.
His hands shifted just enough to anchor me against him, a fleeting, almost tender gesture that left me wondering if I’d imagined it as he took off again, moving so fast my hair whipped behind me in a gust of wind he created.
The night held no dominion over him.
He leapt over fallen logs, dodged low-hanging branches, and wove in and around saplings, moving like it was daylight and the sun was streaming down, not like it was full dark and more treacherous from the raging storm.
I had no idea what he was but was thankful for whatever made him move like a freight train.
Eventually, the sound of pursuit faded, and our pace slowed.
Instead of stopping completely, he circled a thick copse of trees.
I couldn’t see his face from my position, but judging from the way his head cocked to the side, he was analyzing the ground for any tracks we’d left.
“Hold on tightly.”
It was the only warning I got before he started climbing the largest evergreen I’d ever seen. It looked like it had eaten half the forest.
Gravity was clearly another law he enjoyed breaking.
He moved up the tree with ease, swinging from one branch to the next, then confidently letting go, undisturbed by being airborne with me still locked around his neck.
I closed my eyes, pretending like I was one of the acrobats who’d been at my village tonight, flying through the air without any fear of falling.
Gods. Had I walked into town with Fable only a few hours ago? It felt like a lifetime.
The assassin finally stopped climbing, then shimmied me off his back.
I dropped to my feet, the weight of my waterlogged cloak causing me to teeter to one side.
My boots slipped over the rounded surface of the branch, but before I went careening to my death, my unwitting hero spun around and wrapped an arm around me as he pressed my back securely against the tree.
“Move down slowly,” he commanded, “and use the trunk as a support.”
He didn’t offer soft words of comfort like “I’ll make sure you don’t fall, Lore.” Or “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” But his cool, steady gaze remained locked on mine as he offered his hand.
He wouldn’t let me die by tree tonight. Hopefully not by goblin cannibal or any other monsters either.
I gripped his hands tightly as I slid down, mindful of the bulky material pooling at my side.
My butt hit the branch, and I reluctantly let go of him.
I’d never been clumsy before and knew it was a sign of a bigger issue I’d need to address soon.
Once I was sure I wasn’t about to slip again, I tucked my chin against my chest and closed my eyes as full body shivers wracked through me.
The thick greenery helped shelter us from the worst of the storm, but I was still soaked through and freezing.
The air already felt colder than it had a few seconds ago, and if the temperature dipped any lower, the rain would turn to sleet or snow.
My teeth started to chatter, and I cursed them for making any sound that could draw attention to our perch. I doubted Jessa Maya and her demon wolf were the only beasts hunting in these woods.
In the distance the shrill screams of the cannibal pierced the night.
My grumpy savior pushed to his feet, standing completely still, his attention set on the forest below.
I had a thousand questions but kept them stuffed inside me.
We weren’t safe yet.
Several tense but quiet moments later, he turned to me again, squatting until our gazes were level.
I couldn’t stop myself from scanning him.
His damp hair somehow looked effortlessly stylish as an errant lock fell across his forehead. He didn’t seem impacted by the elements or his earlier run-in with the spiders at all.
If I hadn’t been with him, I would think he’d simply walked out in the storm or had just taken a refreshing bath.
His focus drifted from the top of my wet head down my convulsing body, then back up.
I guaranteed he wasn’t thinking effortless or stylish.
Rats everywhere would rejoice—my name would now be synonymous with drowned appearances.
“Do you still have the stone?” he asked, drawing me from my rodent musings.
I nodded, trembling so hard I didn’t trust I wouldn’t accidentally bite my tongue off if I tried speaking.
I needed to get out of these wet clothes and get warm, or else the murderess stalking us would be the least of my concerns.
He assessed me in that unnervingly intense way.
His expression hadn’t shifted, but I still saw the moment he’d come to the same conclusion I had.
He glanced down at the forest floor.
“I’ll scout the area for shelter.” He looked me over again, frowning a little this time. “Do you have enough strength left to not fall?”
I swallowed hard, knowing I had to be honest.
As much as I wished to be as indestructible as my favorite characters, the truth was my body felt like lead and the combination of exhaustion, cold, wet, and complete shock of traveling via shadow then running for our lives, not once but twice in short succession, had finally caught up.
I slowly shook my head.
No judgment showed on his face, only an inward shift where I could practically see the gears turning as he flipped through some mental list of options before settling on one.
A moment later, he pulled off the leather satchel, which I’d forgotten all about, wedged it between us, then undid his cloak.
He ripped a strip off at the hemline, then rummaged in the bag, removing the blanket he’d stolen, and started tying the ends together.
Once it was to his liking, he looped it around the monster-sized tree trunk and knotted it at my waist.
He tugged hard, almost knocking me clear off the damn branch, then sat back on his heels to inspect his dastardly work.
A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth as I wriggled.
Of course a sociopath would find amusement in tying someone up to a tree.
He tucked his cloak around me and arranged the hood so I could use it as a scarf to breathe into. It helped a little, but I was still shivering so hard my muscles hurt from the tension. The temperature had plummeted again.
“Don’t move.”
I arched a brow. He knew full well that would be impossible since he’d also bound my arms. Who knew Lord Stoic could be funny?
“H-hilarious.”
“I have many admirable qualities.”
He looked me over again, slowly this time, his gaze lingering far too long on my mouth.
No hero looked at a damsel in distress with that much heat.
When he dragged his attention back to mine, he stopped fighting his amusement and openly grinned at my annoyance, the smile lighting his whole face.
He really was a pretty bastard.
“I’ll be back soon, Peaches.”
I narrowed my eyes, and he winked.
Before I could curse him for his poorly timed flirtation, he stepped off the branch.
He didn’t climb down, didn’t jump to the next branch; he literally stepped aside as if the ground wasn’t a hundred feet below us and simply dropped.
I was so shocked, I stared for a long moment, unblinking, at the space he’d just occupied, straining to hear any sounds of him going splat, but there was only the soft patter of rain falling.
At least he hadn’t killed himself and left me trussed up in this tree.
My irritation replaced my moment of stunned silence.
Irksome man. Or whatever hard-to-kill male being he actually was.
While I sat there, quietly fuming and huddled into his cloak, I slowly realized what he’d done. I was no longer focused on the cold or my draining energy; I was alert and thinking of an equally vexing pet name for him.
Revenge really was an excellent motivator.
Mr. Coldly Analytical had seen how tired I’d gotten and had purposely tried to get a rise from me.
I knew it wasn’t kindness that motivated him.
It was entirely self-serving—I suspected he had his own reasons for keeping me safe.
Which made me even more wary. He must be afraid that I’d die before he could get what he wanted.
And if a stone-cold assassin was worried about my survival, that meant I was in much worse condition than I’d thought.
I sat there, struggling to keep myself upright, focusing on what I could control. Which, to be fair, wasn’t much. I could barely wiggle my toes.
My breath misted in front of me in what I hoped wasn’t a ghostly premonition of my fate.
I didn’t want to die in this strange realm, far from my family.
Now that I was alone with my thoughts, I could admit I was afraid. Adventures in books were safe, and this was anything but.
The reality I faced was grave—I was stranded in a nightmarish world with a man who clearly wasn’t mortal and was probably more ruthless than the goblin cannibal and spiders combined.
The fact that he hadn’t left me meant he needed me.
And whether I liked it or not, I needed him to survive.
An ache that had nothing to do with the temperature built inside me—my family must be beside themselves by now.
I wished I could be there, comforting them.
I would give anything to be sitting around our crammed dining room table, talking about books and eating a meal we all made together—Mom’s freshly baked rosemary and roasted garlic flatbread, my favorite garden salad with dried cranberries, goat cheese, and toasted walnuts, Dad’s infamous herbed white beans, and Fable’s best chocolate dessert—while laughing over wine.
There would be no laughter in our household tonight, and I hated that I was the cause, intentionally or not.
I swore I felt their pain through the realms, and I vowed to return to them, no matter how impossible that seemed now.
From the time I was little I’d always been one of those wildly optimistic people who broke down impossible into I’m possible.
Hope felt like a single candle that burned in my center, and I nourished that light even on the dimmest days.
All it took was one tiny spark to banish the darkness of despair.
I applied that to most areas of my life, though I hated to admit how hard I struggled to maintain that optimism when it came to love.
Part of me feared there was something unlovable about me, something wrong that others sensed.
It wasn’t true, I knew that rationally, but logic didn’t rule the heart.
Mother encouraged me and Fable to find the silver lining in any situation because hope was one of the most powerful weapons a person had, second only to knowledge.
She’d put her rolling pin down and playfully smear flour on our noses, telling us we always had all the power we needed inside us, just like the heroes in our storybooks.
I ignored the icy claws of the rain digging into my bones and the ache in my heart, and focused on the positives.
I’d escaped death via nightmare creatures not once but twice today.
I wasn’t alone. Well, technically, I was at the moment, but I had someone I knew would come back to me, even for selfish reasons.
I had the weird portal stone the old woman had given me, but I couldn’t get it to work again. Yet.
But I bet the assassin knew other methods for us to try, and I’d find a way to get the information out of him so we could get back to Bellington. Soon.
A soft, eerie howl emerged from somewhere below, its haunting note lingering in the crisp night air, immediately followed by another, slightly more distant but equally unsettling cry.
These sounded different from the death wolf Jessa Maya had ridden.
A shiver ran down my spine like an icy finger, and I instinctively burrowed deeper into the murderer’s cloak.
The oppressive darkness of the forest seemed to close in around me.
Before long, the night was filled with the chilling, echoing calls of wolves, their mournful cries weaving through the trees and surrounding me.
I wondered if Jessa Maya’s death wolf had summoned its pack. Then I wished I wasn’t bound to the tree without a weapon.
I silently begged the ruthless assassin to hurry back.
If he protected us from what I imagined were wolves from the death wolf’s pack, he could call me Peaches as much as he liked.
I had a growing suspicion the creatures howling weren’t the ones we had to worry about the most; there were probably many scarier things creeping silently through the undergrowth.
The temperature dropped again, drastically this time. I blinked ice crystals from my lashes and tried not to panic.
A twig snapped near the base of my tree.
I closed my eyes, praying I’d simply imagined it.
Another branch cracked, this one much, much too close to ignore.
I took a deep, steadying breath.
It was time to channel my inner main character and face my fears.
With luck, maybe this was already the dark-night-of-my-soul portion of the journey.
I opened my eyes and realized immediately this wasn’t the turning point for me yet; my troubles were just getting started.
And they were getting bigger and badder by the moment.
My pulse raced as I stared into two glowing yellow orbs that gazed back.
The wolves had arrived.