Chapter 2 #3
Hope pulsed inside me, too, only of a different kind. The creepy ghoul didn't own me. Maybe this whole thing would still turn out okay for me somehow? Maybe someone like Mazra would get me instead? She didn’t look too bad, did she? She didn’t have any yellow flowers on her.
“Wait. Take this too.” Timur slipped the massive ring off his thumb and tossed it onto the pile of gold on the scale.
The plates moved. The scale arrow tipped, trembling, then aligned with the vertical bar, indicating the perfect balance between the plates.
“Sold!” Xavix declared, spinning his scroll over his head. “To the magnificent Timur of…” He stuck his scroll out, pointing at my new fucking owner in an invitation to introduce himself properly.
But the figure under a shroud just shook his head, the fabric of his hood swaying in front of his covered face.
“Just Timur,” he insisted, then stretched his hand out to me, clearly expecting me to get off the scales.
I didn’t take the hand he offered, jerking away from it instead.
“No…” I scrambled backwards, tripped over the edge of the plate, and fell off the scales.
Without my weight to balance it, the other plate crashed to the ground. The gold coins spilled from it, scattering over the black sand.
“Gold!” The opportunists from the crowd dove for it.
“Stay back!” Xavix shouted, frantically gesturing at his men to control the chaos that was quickly growing beyond anyone’s control.
An elegant arm decorated with strings of seashells and coral beads slinked around my middle, helping me get up.
“Come with me, sweet thing,” Mazra murmured into my ear. “I’ll take good care of you.”
Did it mean I still had a choice? I didn’t have to go with the creep who’d paid my weight in gold?
“She’s mine!” Timur’s voice boomed from the other side of the scales. Loud and demanding, it was far from calm or quiet now.
A white whip suddenly lashed across the scales, sending the plates into a wild dance, the chains rattling.
The whip looped around my waist, then yanked me out of Mazra’s grip.
I landed on top of Timur’s cloak. On…his lap?
It would be his lap if he were sitting. Was that why he appeared shorter than other fae?
The whirring sound came again, then I moved, along with the man who’d bought me.
The crowd thickened around us, rushing to get to the gold scattered over the sand.
Fights broke out. The largely outnumbered security guards could do nothing to stop them.
Screams, smacks of punches, crunches of bones, curses, and cries of pain bombarded my hearing.
Desperate to escape it all, I curled into myself, closing my eyes and slamming my hands over my ears.
Through my closed eyelids, sunlight flooded my vision with pink.
The noise of mayhem in the auction tent moved away.
The measured, swishing sound of waves replaced it.
But the tight grip around my waist didn’t ease. Sharp pain radiated from it.
I cracked my eyelids open, venturing a careful look.
The “whip” turned out to be not a rope but something that looked like a long, bare spinal column of sun-bleached bones.
Each vertebra had one wide crest on top and two short spikes on each side.
The tips of the spikes pierced through my sweater, digging into my skin.
“You’re…hurting me,” I croaked, unsure he’d care.
No reply came.
I was on the lap of the cloaked figure who must be sitting in a chair or something like it hidden under his cloak.
That explained his odd shape and what I had first thought was his short stature.
The chair moved on its own, powered by the eerie green glow that burned brightly between the black edge of his cloak and the equally black sand.
Magic was common in the Alveari Kingdom.
From the moment I came here, I’d seen smoke appearing from people’s arms and backs, people erupting into shadows, dead bodies dissolving into nothing.
I’d had a magical harness implanted into my skin that made it possible for another living being to access my emotions.
But the magic of shadow fae in the Alveari Kingdom was always gold—yellow shimmer, golden sparks.
It was the bright light against the darkness of their world.
However, the creature that bought me operated a device powered by some foreign green magic I’d never seen or heard of before.
The noose of bones around my waist loosened, forming a wider hoop around me. The pressure of the spikes and hard edges eased. The pain was gone, but the whip did not release me, keeping me in place.
We passed by the path carved in the side of the cliff, the same path that our caravan of camels had used to descend onto the Ashgate beach just a couple of hours ago.
The sun was up now, shining brightly and heating the black sand.
I’d been in direct sunlight so rarely lately that it hurt my eyes.
I kept my head down, to protect my eyes from the sun and to avoid looking at my newest captor.
He might’ve paid a lot of money for me, but he was just another captor who held my life in his hands… and my body on his lap.
I held still, afraid to move a muscle and stiff from being this close to him.
“Let me walk,” I ventured a request.
“Stay,” he commanded, as if I were a dog.
He slipped his left hand out from under his shroud and placed it on my knee to keep me in place in addition to his bone whip.
I felt the heat of his hand through the material of my dress over my knee, his hard thighs under my butt, and his wide chest next to my shoulder.
I could smell him—the warm scent of the heated sand, the hint of the ocean salt, and a trace of the sweet, musky fragrance of the male fae.
My muscles tensed, my body getting ready to flee. But his hand flexed on my knee, and the hoop of the spine moved with a rattling noise around me, reminding me who was in charge.
We rounded a small outcropping of rocks with a thin sapling of a tree struggling to survive between the rocks and sand.
There weren’t many huts at this end of the beach.
Most of them remained on the other side, past the stone path and closer to the auction tent.
Out here, I couldn’t see any people at all.
Only a few piles of rubble dotted the beach, but it was impossible to tell whether any of them were dwellings or just discarded garbage.
Timur steered us to one such contraption. Made of clay and rubble, it looked like an abandoned sandcastle about to fall apart with the next wave that would run ashore. As we stopped in front of the wooden door, the ends of Timur’s cloak moved, revealing his hands.
I’d seen the left one before, with and without the ring that had sealed my fate as Timur’s property.
At the sight of his right hand now, I sucked in a breath of shock.
It was white, the same color as the weathered bone-whip around me.
It wasn’t really a hand, but a skeletal image of it with no skin or muscles, just sun-bleached bones with sharp knuckles tipped with long, curved talons.
Frozen in horror, I curled my hands into my skirt. I was both ready to run and afraid to move a muscle at the same time.
Timur placed his nightmarish hand on the door, pushing it open. We entered the small, dark place inside, and he closed the door behind us.
“This is home,” he said gruffly. “For now, anyway.”
The loop of the spine uncurled from around me and slithered to hide under his cloak. I instantly pushed away from him with a strangled cry. I scrambled from his lap and onto the floor, crab-walking away from him until my shoulder hit the opposite wall.
The place was small and empty, save for a grass mat on the floor. The walls had no windows. With Timur sitting by the entrance door, I had no way of getting out of here.
He flicked his wrist. A wisp of green magic curled around the bronze cuff that was too wide for a bangle or a bracelet but not long enough for an armor bracer. His chair lowered all the way to the ground and the green glow disappeared. The whirring sound stopped.
In the sudden silence, the place seemed even smaller. The air in it felt too hot and suffocating, and the figure in front of me looked like a true creature of nightmares, looming over me as if waiting to snatch my soul.
He wasn’t a human. He was no ordinary fae either. He might not even be a fae at all.
“What a-are you?” I exhaled the question I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer to.