AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She must have seen the kiss.
Killian turned, ready to run to her, but Raela shook her head and backed away, then ran back through the gate. Zalina grasped his wrist, pinning him in place as a cold sensation wrapped around his arm. “Oh no, my little princeling. You are coming with me.” Her face was marred with an inky stain that drifted from her eyes down to her cheeks. Her pupils blackened with centers that glowed red like coal. Zalina stomped onto the grass. Around her foot a circle of mushrooms burst from the ground, red on top, with white spots and billowing white eaves. Purple haze wafted around the stems.
“Killian!” Phineas roared behind him. “Let him go, Zalina! Jax!”
But it was too late, and they were too far away.
Reaching into her pocket, Zalina dropped three seeds into the center of the mushroom circle. They flared like a hot yellow fire, firing golden shoots upward like wheat before the whole bushel disappeared in a puff of purple smoke.
“The trap is set.” Zalina said with a wide grin. Her ashen gaze drifted up and down the prince as he tried to twist his arm free from her impossible hold. He could fight off Phineas more easily than this—how could he not extricate himself from her? But try as he might, her grip held fast. She smiled at him. “If you won’t choose me now, I’ll take you by force. Give you time to rethink your terrible decision.”
Her hand drifted over the mushroom circle and more purple smoke seeped from earth. This time, instead of pine, it smelled like dirt and ice. A billow of snow blew up in a swirl above the mushroom circle. “Watch your step,” she cackled as she tugged him into the circle.
They fell through the fairy circle, a portal through a blizzard-filled tunnel, until all he saw was darkness.
Chapter 13
Darkness
Raela
Shewasafool.Worse than a cub on a rotted branch dangling over the rapids of the river. She should have known better.
She had snuck past her aunties after they’d dressed her up in some long, flowing, who-knows-what-for gown and run to the forbidden gate, her heart simultaneously bursting and breaking in her rush to see his face one last time. To say goodbye. Or, if he’d only ask, to run away with him forever.
And he waskissingsomeone else.
Was this what men did? Did they have many mates? But no, he said … well, he had said many things. What was she to believe? What did she really know about him in the end? All she knew for sure was that her heart felt like it was being stripped from her chest, scraped out like honey from the hive. Dripping. Hollow.
She’d thought she was so clever, too, with her studies and her magic. But one handsome man and one soul-binding promise was all it took to sweep her away like a seedling. Her aunties were right. She should have never talked with him. Never met him. Never grown attached to him. Now, like sap stuck to her hands, she must rip herself away from him.
Why was it so hard?
The trail before her was littered with the mushrooms she had neglected over these last few weeks—weeks she had spent distracted by him. She had maintained some of the mushrooms near the meadow and others along her path from the cottage to their meeting place. She had taught him what was safe and what was poison, but so much of her time had been spent with him, learning his language, enraptured with his company, that she had clearly missed many. What a dangerous distraction. She just hoped none had completed a full circle. Up ahead, the light on the path pulsed frantically, as if trying to get her attention.
She sidestepped it, feeling bitter. “You let him in. You brought him here.”
The light flashed faster, then veered to the side, glittering off the low boughs of a tiny pine on the forest floor. The line of light led from her feet past the little tree. Pointing to something wrong. Frowning, Raela followed only to find a small, completed circle of mushrooms, only a few feet wide, with beautiful golden strands of wheat that filled the center in a small cluster. Purple haze drifted around the dried leaves and wrapped around each cluster of plump yellow seeds.
They were lovely. They glittered as if swaying in a wind she couldn’t feel. Instinctively, she reached for them, yearning to touch the golden strands. Something warm and inviting drew her closer, almost calling to her from the happy, glowing plant. The mushrooms around the bounty were red with white spots, and the bottoms of their cute umbrellas were white and billowy. Her gaze slipped to the side following the purple smokey haze and fell on a pile of flowers on the ground beside it. Now dried and stiff and scattered on the ground. Killian’s bouquet.
He had been courting her from the beginning.
If Killian had never come, she would have never neglected her work, these mushrooms would never have circled up, and this wheat would have never come. As beautiful as it was, it didn’t belong in her forest.
“Killian,” she seethed. “It’s his fault. He brought this here." She kicked at a mushroom, which fell to the side, but the wheat didn’t disappear. She kicked another and another, and then in a burst of anger, she grabbed the base of the wheat and ripped it out by its roots. The wind swept around her, responding to her passion, and the wheat whispered as each strand brushed past another in her grasp.
She should burn it. She would bring it back to toss it into the hearth.
With a final glance to be sure the circle was destroyed, she paced back to the path carrying the stalks of wheat in her hand. The heads of grain shimmered in the shadows of the pines. But the beam of light had returned and rushed before her, pulsing bright and panicked. Her brows furrowed in confusion. She had broken the circle. She had pulled out the foreign plant. Why was the light still upset?
She glanced down again. They really were beautiful. She stroked the heads of wheat, feeling the seed kernels and tickled by the tiny stiff strands that peeked out in between them.
One pricked her finger.
And then, all at once, Raela collapsed to the ground into darkness.
Killian
