Page 3

“Give her some damned space!” hissed Violet, newly dubbed No One, pushing Green Man back as Emerald stared down at me with horror flashing clear as daylight in her beautiful face.

Color had started to leach back in at the edges of my vision. It was slow, like molasses moving through a chilled autumn pond. Water would eventually swallow it whole, but the longer it could move as a single unit, the better. The colors that began to seep in were still muted, like watercolors thinned too far for a single brush.

Air drove itself back into my lungs, and I tightened in on myself. I had to get it together. I had to pull my shit together and push through this.

I had to fight through it. It wasn’t just me against the great big world. There were three other people that I was responsible for. If I was alone, I could curl up on these leaves and let the grass peeking out from between them swallow me whole. But I had to worry about the other three. I got them into this mess, and if I didn’t get them out of it, they were doomed. I didn’t know where the hell I was any more than they did, but since I was the one who planned this whole caper, responsibility fell on me.

The idea that these three lives depended on me drove me forward. I was somehow very sure that all on his own, Goose would find himself far more suited to this place than us. It certainly wasn’t the will to live, and it certainly wasn’t the knife my organs were arranging themselves around. No, it had to be the debt I owed them. Each one of them had helped me in one way or another while I was in the palace.

Even if they had all tried to kill me, in their own way, I owed them my life.

Leaves crunched beneath me as I screamed at myself. Get up you lazy bitch! Get up and fight. Rule #11 beat a brutal drum in my ears: Fight until the end.

When was the last time I had even thought of my rules? When was the last time I reached out and held on to them like the last candle in the darkest night? I couldn’t remember. Had it been in the room when Daróg was being eaten alive by spiders? Had it been in the Maw? Had it been down deep in the dark with that horrible spider? I had all but forgotten how they had fortified my bones in the darkest of times. I had let them and so much more slip away.

“Cr—What’s her name? Oh, I don’t care anymore. Whoever you are, there’s something in the woods,” whispered Green Man, who I had dubbed A Secret before our flight from the palace.

“There’s a lot of somethings in the woods,” bit back Violet as she crouched to meet me eye to eye. Impatience danced in between the cracks of her brows, spinning like a dervish beside concern, blending into a single emotion.

I let my gaze meet hers and borrowed strength from an account already overdrawn. These three had survived worse than I could even imagine, let alone what I had been through. I would not be the reason for their death.

Goose, seeing that I was finally rising, turned his attention to the woods and evaporated into a puff of inky smoke.

“Fuck. Bye, asshole,” I snapped at the shivering wake of black smoke that was all that was left of him.

“Never trusted that beastie anyway,” spat Violet as she went about fussing and dusting me off. As if it mattered what I looked like way out here in the middle of the woods. “Which way do we go—”

“I Don’t Know.”

“You mean to tell me you dragged us all the way out here, and you don’t know which way to go?” Green Man began to shiver, his leaves rustling and adding to the music of the quickly darkening forest.

“No. That’s my name. I Don’t Know. But also, yes. I had no idea where that viper was going to let us go so I had no plan for when and where we came out.”

Emerald was fixated on the woods, ignoring our exchange.

Violet rocked back on her tiny slippers and whistled low. “There was a time that I thought you were a clever thing, you know that? Seems like a fairy tale now, confronted with the sheer magnitude of your stupidity.”

I fixed a baleful glare on her. “Gee thanks, No One. I’ll be sure to remind the Fae next time they kidnap us, throw us into the auction pens, magically alter us and then enslave us, that it would be ever so kind of them to supply me with a map of exactly where in their magical realm they plan on shitting me out when I finally manage to find an exit plan. I’ll get right the fuck on that.”

“I’m merely saying that you’re not—”

“I Don’t Know.” Whispered Green Man.

“—all that smart. All that time you spent getting your fields plowed with Fae seed and nary a single mapsie found its way into your pocket? Seems like—”

“No One . . .”

“—you could have planned better, had your head not been tied up in catching a fairy prince. I’d say wrapped around Fae cock but we both know that boy had more sense than to experience—”

“I Don’t Know!” bellowed the living shrub next to us as he snatched Violet’s hand and began pulling her away from the edge of the small grass patch we had landed on.

“What!” I yelled at him, turning away from her to finally look in the direction Goose had disappeared, and Emerald had been fixated on.

Time shuddered to a halt, and I with it. A creature with a rotting lion's head and a man’s body, yellow-gold fur sprouting like mold, was sneaking up on us. Shadows gathered behind him, but the malicious hunger in his eyes was no less sharp than a knife to my throat.

“Run,” I whispered even though Green Man and Emerald were already retreating.

Violet shook, still stunned in fear looking at the abomination before us. “Leon Craosach.”