Page 58 of Fated to the Wicked King

I looked down.

My hands were fading.

No—flickering.

One heartbeat, they were solid—flesh and blood, trembling fingers dusted with powder. The next, they turned pale and translucent, the warped boards visible through them, before disappearing again. My arms followed, then my torso, my whole body phasing in and out of existence in jagged pulses.

Phasing back to normal, I stumbled back with a strangled gasp.

The fighting faltered, shock cutting through fury as faces turned toward me. Even the villagers recoiled. Sophie stared, her face white as frost. Gregory lowered his blade. Nobody else was losing their hold on existence.

“It is her,” one of the villagers cried out with a wild gesture of his arm toward me. “She’s the one the general was talking about. He says this is all her doing. They say she barely even felt anything when they crossed through the maelstrom at the river.”

“Shut up!” Tannis hissed. “Let’s get out of here.” With a shove, he leaped into the swirling mouth of the anomaly, disappearing into thin air.

But dread skittered across my skin at his words.

I was the what…?

Who the hell was this general? How could he possibly have known me?

They must have had someone monitoring the riverbanks for anyone who used their incredible machine. There was no other way anyone could possibly have known its effects on me—or rather, its ineffectiveness.

But what else did he know?

Did he actually know me?

And what fault could he possibly have been accusing me of?

Despite the alarm turning my stomach, my curiosity burned.

The light around us twisted. Shadows detached themselves from their owners. Gregory seemed suddenly twice as far away, then close enough to touch. A fallen man rose halfway through the floorboards before dropping back down as though gravity had changed its mind. With another howl, large translucent spheres bloomed into existence, shimmering with that familiar iridescent sheen.

“Those spheres.” Sophie’s eyes widened in revelation. “Like the ones from the kingdom this morning. They were created by this machine.”

Somehow, my energy drained, my knees buckling.

“Allie—” The king caught me. I hadn’t even realized he had returned to my side. With a wave of his hand, a shield of shadow and fog covered my entire body.

Bewildered, I looked up to meet his gaze. “Rabb, what is it?”

“Some type of strange aura.” His face twitched—his shadows flickering too. Whatever this energy was, it was strong. Strong enough to make the most powerful tyrant king on Wünder struggle. He lifted his hand as if to command his shadows to swallow the wild machine itself, but he grunted. “We have to get you away from here.”

Gregory waved Sophie over, and the four of us raced out of the warehouse just as a sudden wave of energy kicked back from the machine. Its hum changed frequency as the sound slowed down, before the sound got louder.

The maelstrom’s swirling was growing faster and faster, the machine’s flashing lights pulsing harder and harder—before the entire contraption exploded in bright sparks. With violent hissing, shards of metal flew outward, and debris whistled past us as we ran for cover.

Narrowly missing getting impaled, we burst out of the warehouse into a blizzard, stumbling through the lane as shouts erupted behind us. Several of the villagers had been caught up in the explosion. The entire image of the warehouse seemed to weave in and out of reality, blurring into the mountainside.

Snow kicked up beneath our boots, the cold air knifing into my lungs.

The king’s hand wrapped firmly around mine, his face set with grim focus. He shot Gregory the darkest of looks. “I leave her in your care for a moment, and she ends up bleeding, held hostage, and almost abducted again?”

Even as he ran, Gregory sneered back, “I was going to reason with the villagers before you stepped in and forced their hand.”

The king barked a mocking laugh. “So this is my fault?”

Sophie hissed chidingly. “None of us could have foreseen that.”