AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The scent of decay filled my nose again, and I felt the oppressive presence of death breathing down my neck.
LONNIE
THE DEPLETED QUARRY, INBETWIXT
Two enormous orange, split-pupil eyes stared down at me, swaying this way and that, as the giant snake loomed. Its body was covered entirely in blue-black scales that flashed in the moonlight as it danced, more radiant on one side than the other. It had a small ring of yellow around the base of its head, like a collar, several shades lighter than the orange of its eyes.
It opened its mouth and hissed, showing me two terrifying fangs and a reddish-brown tongue, larger than my arm, that darted in and out of the flat, triangular head, as if tasting the air. Like it was savoring my scent before it sunk its teeth into my flesh, injecting venom to paralyze and poison.
It need not bother. I was already paralyzed, I realized, sitting unmoving without the snake having to do anything at all. Caught in its swaying gaze, mesmerized by its stalling, waiting to attack.
As if coming back into my body, I jolted. My breath heaved in my chest, heat and adrenaline pounding in my veins nearly as fast and erratic as my racing thoughts.
I wished I had more time to consider—to think—but I squeezed my eyes shut and dug down inside myself for that place where heat always simmered until it began to crawl up my skin. The air fizzled with electricity, and I gritted my teeth, aiming my burning hands toward the oncoming serpent.
I felt tiny pinpricks erupt on the tips of my fingers for the briefest moment—not as strong as what Bael had done, but certainly not nothing. The feeling was like a spark to my memory—a long-distant muscle, unused and nearly forgotten, buried, so often ignored it was as if I’d severed the limb altogether.
The snake bent its head, coming to loom in front of me, mere inches from my face.
I felt its breath, and my eyes snapped open. It opened its mouth wide, showing rows of tiny teeth behind its two large fangs, a gaping throat that could swallow me whole, eyes that were the size of my head. “Ssstop!”
Ice seemed to pour into my veins. I let out a startled shriek and scrambled back, the heat in my fingers dying with my rising shock.I gasped, unable to move as the snake’s putrid breath filled my nostrils. My heart pounded wildly, and I could feel the sweat trickling down my back.
But the snake was not finished.
“Ssstop, you fool,” the snake hissed. “You will only call the Wilde things that live in this forest and far beyond.”
A new wave of terror washed over me, stealing my breath, twisting my innards. Worse than before, worse than the fear of being torn apart, this was the fear of the unknown. Of the things unseen in the dark. I tried to call back the fire, and it stuttered like a wet match.
“Wh-what…” I could not find the words to express myself.What are you? Who are you? How much will it hurt when you eat me?I was paralyzed, every muscle in my body tense and frozen.
The snake let out a small sound, like a rattle, that I thought might have been a terrible laugh. “I have never enjoyed the fleshhh of a queen,” it said in a grotesque rattling hiss that I felt more than heard. “I wonder, will you taste different from other humansss?”
I hoped I tasted like ash and burned like fire on the way down.
“Wh-why not just eat me, then?” I asked, my mind stuttering as I struggled to force out every word.
“Becaussse,” it said, dragging the word out far too long. “I would rather live to enjoy my ssslumber once I have finishhhed my meal.”
“I don’t understand.”
It twisted its enormous neck, curling, a bit like how a human might cock their head. “Don’t you? Curiousss. You cannot use your magic, human queen, lesssst you doom usss all.”
It dragged out every word into horrible long hisses that made it hard to focus on what it was saying, but as the seconds ticked by and it did not strike, my mind slowly began to work again. Slowly.
Putting aside the impossibility of conversing with a snake, the high probability that I’d simply slipped on a rock and hit my head, or perhaps never come up from beneath the water of the quarry and was hallucinating as I ran out of air, the words it spoke were not unfamiliar; my mother had made it perfectly clear to me my whole life that I was never to use my…peculiarity.
Before she died, my mother had three cardinal rules:
1.Never make a bargain with a fairy.
2.Never enter the Waywoods on hunting day.
3.Never give the High Fae a reason to notice you.
She also had other rules, tacked on later, as my sister and I aged, “always lie” being the most prominent of these. Every rule, however, came back to the same purpose. Never reveal your secrets. Never use the magic, or terrible things might happen—not only to me but to the entire continent.
My mind raced with this as the tip of the snake’s tail coiled around my feet. The muscles of the serpent’s scales shifted and pulsed, its long, slithering body gleaming in the moonlight, and I could feel the heat rising in my chest again, the ice clearing as my terror turned back to anger, my frozen body beginning to thaw.Strangely, the old rules were like an anchor, a mantra, and the all-consuming terror dissipated.
