AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The hatch door was suspiciously heavy. It shouldn’t have weighed that much. I could remember it being nigh impossible to lift when I was trapped here, but I’d strengthened my body. It was a weapon now.
Outside of the deep pantry, I could hear the roars of ogres and other monstrous fae tearing through the castle. The sound of footsteps thundered close. I spun just in time to see an ogre step past the nearest corner and into the hall.
My breath hitched. I slapped a hand over my mouth, but that was enough to give me away. The ogre stopped and turned in my direction.
He wasn’t anything I hadn’t faced before. Bigger men had fallen to my tactics. All I had to do was unroot my feet from the floor.
The ogre threw his hands to the sides and roared before rushing me.
Move. Move.
I had to move.
My feet refused to budge. I looked down, expecting to find them bound in stone. They weren’t. It was just my body, refusing to obey me. Icy cold filled my veins. I looked up, stricken, and found the ogre bearing down on me.
No.
I wasn’t this weak!
“Delphine!” a male voice hissed in my ear.
I jerked. This was a dream. The voice came from outside. It begged me to wake up.
I pressed my eyes shut and grimaced. If I had to, I would claw my way through every layer of this nightmare to make it back to the waking world. There was no ogre, no siege, no Unseelie Queen who could keep me trapped here.
Everything beyond me fell away. The ogre tumbled into the darkness between sleep and waking. I flipped him the bird as he fell, and my terror faded. The trembling ceased, and my usual confidence flooded back in.
While I would have woken with a gasp, I was greeted with a hand over my mouth. Immediately, I twisted and slithered out from beneath the hand. I heard Arven’s faint grumble of annoyance in the dark before he yanked me back into his body.
The warmth of another person’s soft embrace scrambled my brains for a hot second. Stunned, I blinked like a beast caught in the headlights of a massive oncoming truck. Though I wanted to shove him away and yell at him, my stunned silence gave me a moment to notice the figures moving in the dark.
Someone had broken into my small studio apartment. They inched across the room rather noisily. I caught a glimpse of elven daggers in their hands and wondered if they’d come for me or for Arven. Either option was completely viable.
Planting my feet apart, I braced myself for a counterattack. Before either of us, Arven or myself, could move, another creature stepped into the room. Six massive, clawed feet scraped against the floor. The sound of water slapped the floor, and the smell of rotten murk bloomed on the air.
They brought a kelpie?
It was a rather useless creature outside of its watery domain, but it could drag me back kicking and screaming if it managed to touch me at all. Kelpies were relentless hunters. The sea-serpent like body was topped with the head of a beautiful horse so that the average passersby would think a poor creature had gotten stuck, only to get dragged under to become the creature’s next meal.
The creature tossed its head and sprayed water everywhere. I fought back the urge to flinch. This room was getting cramped with the two humanoid figures and the six-legged kelpie. This was a studio apartment after all.
Arven and I needed to escape.
No. Scratch that.
I needed to escape. I could leave Arven to deal with this on his own. If he was half the warrior that the rumors said he was, then he could easily defeat two elves and a kelpie. This would be no problem for a man like him.
Grinning, I silently maneuvered my way out of Arven’s grasp, saluted to him, and stepped in-between. Only…nothing happened.
And all eyes turned towards me.
Well, that wasn’t how I wanted that to happen.
The two elven men lunged towards me. Arven surged upwards to intercept them. He used his arm to fling them both back against the wall. That left an opening for the Kelpie. It turned its phantom green eyes on me and opened its mouth. A haunting screech rolled across its tongue. The stench of its horrid breath filled the room.
The creature rushed me. I dropped flat onto my back so that its bite caught nothing but air. The sound of its clashing teeth made my bones rattle uncomfortably. Wet spray from its movement splattered my face and made my stomach churn.
I rolled away from the creature, but it stomped the ground with its front hooves in an effort to trample me. The shoves were dangerously sharp as they caught my hair and clothes. When I managed to get away and leap to my feet, I noticed I was missing a chunk of hair.
