Road To Winter (Fae's Captive Book 2)

by Lily Archer

  Beth sits next to the fire, worry in her eyes as we approach. “Is she okay? Where’s the witch? What happened?”

  “Everything’s all right, changeling. Rest.”

  “Rest?” She throws her hands up. “I woke up to find Taylor gone, and then I got frozen to the ground! I can’t rest, not when there’s an Obsidian—”

  “The witch is gone, and I have no reason to frost the ground again.” I sink to my knees on my bedroll and lay Taylor down as softly as I can. My wounds still burn, the witch’s claws perfect at slicing through skin and sinew. But, thanks to Gareth’s magic, I will be healed by morning. The next time we leave the High Mountain, I’ll be sure to bring Valen with us. His healing magic would go a long way to ease my mind when it comes to my mate’s safety. Not that I intend to expose her to danger any more than I already have. She will be safe in the winter realm.

  She moves a hand to her side, clutching something in the folds of her dress. Her breathing is low and soft, her mind already wrapped in a comfortable dream.

  Carefully, I ease my hand along hers. When my fingers graze something oddly warm to the touch, I know instinctively what it is.

  “By the Ancestors.” I can’t stop my exclamation as I pull the obsidian blade from Taylor’s dress.

  “Is that a …” Gareth kneels down next to me and touches the hewn black blade, the hilt rounded and small, perfect for Taylor’s hand.

  “An obsidian shortsword.” I hold the blade up to the moon. It sucks in the glow around it, as if devouring the light.

  “The witch did this for her.” Gareth rubs the scruff on his jaw. “I’ve never heard of an Obsidian willingly giving her hide for such a gift. Not even her promise of a boon could have encompassed this.”

  I stare at the sword, a legend. It is said that a weapon forged from the flesh of an Obsidian witch can slay any creature—no small feat—and the obsidian blade will feast on the souls of its kills.

  “Never have I seen such a blade.” Gareth peers at it with the same reverence I feel. “They say the last one ever made was lost in the Battle of the Spires eons ago.”

  “She gave it to me.” Taylor’s sleepy eyes are open just enough for me to get a glimpse of their blue depths. “Not to fulfill her promise—that was a spell to dim my shine—but because she liked me. And maybe because I almost choked on her pea.” She rolls to her side and rests her face on her folded hands. “Selene’s not so bad. You should give her a chance.” With a light sigh, she goes back to sleep.

  I don’t know what to make of any of it—neither the aura spell nor the blade. But one thing is certain, my mate is formidable enough to gain an ally from the darkest corner of our world. I stroke her hair.

  “I’ll just—” Gareth hitches a thumb over his shoulder and returns to the fire.

  I lie down next to Taylor and tenderly pull her into my arms. She doesn’t stir, simply melds into me, her body relaxed as her breath tickles along my throat. Again, my body reacts, demanding I claim her. But I tamp it down and simply enjoy holding her. Even with her safe in my arms, an oily feeling still slinks around inside me.

  I sense Gareth prowling through the woods, making one final check of our perimeter. The threat of the witch is gone, her ominous presence lifted. Fairies flit here and there, and an owl hoots its approval high above us.

  The unsettled feeling remains.

  What will happen when the next threat arises? I must protect Taylor at all costs. I should never have left her with the witch—promise or no promise. I can’t put her in harm’s way again. For her sake … and for mine. It hits me then, what the feeling is. Fear. I didn’t recognize it. The wars I’ve been through, the things I’ve done for my realm—I stopped feeling fear centuries ago. It was a waste. No point fearing death, not when it was around every corner, waiting with a dagger between its teeth. But now, I have a real reason to worry. I kiss Taylor’s hair, and she snuggles closer.

  There’s only one solution. I need to keep her so close that nothing can touch her without going through me first. I close my eyes and let myself go, my mind quieting with nothing left but thoughts of her.

  4

  Taylor

  “Psst.”

  I open my bleary eyes to find Beth close by and waving me toward her.

  “What?”

  “Shh!” She presses a finger to her lips.

  Leander slumbers beside me, one arm draped across my waist, his body tight against mine.

  Beth beckons again.

  “Fine,” I mouth and gently scoot away from Leander.

  He pulls me back to him but doesn’t wake. Beth rolls her eyes.

  I go slower this time, lifting his arm and easing away from him. Once I’m at the edge of the furs, I lay his arm down and roll away.

  Beth helps me to my feet, and, with one finger still pressed to her lips, tiptoes past Gareth who is sitting against a nearby tree, his eyes closed. I follow, taking care not to make any wrong steps. They must have been exhausted from their duel with the witch, because neither of them wake as we creep from camp.

  “Where are we going?” I whisper.

  She just waves me onward. The sun slants through the trees, the warm air caressing us as we cross the flower-strewn forest floor.

  The sound of water draws my attention, and Beth stops and points.

  Through the trees, I see a shimmering pool that reflects the bright day. I’m suddenly parched. Taking a sniff of my underarm, I wrinkle my nose.

  Beth takes off at a faster clip, shedding clothes as she goes. After a quick glance around to make sure we’re alone, I follow. The fragrant flowers grow denser, deep purple blooms dusted with morning dew. I kick off my shoes, then pull my dress over my head. It comes away easily, partly because one seam is loose from the stable fae’s attack and partly because I’ve lost a little weight since I’ve been here.

  Beth sheds her last garment, some sort of an undershirt, and I gasp. Fang marks cover her entire body, not just her arms.

  She looks over her thin shoulder and shrugs. “I told you I’d rather die than go back to being a chew toy for my master’s vampire hounds. Now you see why.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  She shrugs. “What’s done is done.” With a leap, she splashes into the clear water, cool droplets spraying my bare skin.

  I shed my panties and follow her, though not quite so jubilantly. I’ve always been modest, verging on painfully shy, so skinny dipping in the woods with a new friend—I pause at the thought. Beth is my friend. I’ve managed to do something in this new world that always evaded me back in my old one. I had study partners, sure. But an actual friend? No. Not like this.

  “Don’t just stand there, jump in!” She swipes her arm across the surface and splashes me.

  I squeak and ease into the pool, my feet tentative as I step along the sandy bottom. She submerges completely as I get to the center, the water up to my neck. It’s chilly, but I know once I get used to it, I’ll never want to leave. I’d kill for a bar of soap, but the water is enough.

  Kicking my feet up, I float a little and paddle around. Birds sing throughout the green woods, and the skitter of animals in the underbrush reassures me that nothing dangerous is nearby. Everything became so still when the witch was on our trail. Now, the forest is alive. I let out a deep, soul-cleansing sigh and dunk my hair, letting the strands twine away from me in the cool water.

  Beth finally reappears and swipes her wet hair from her face. “I’ve needed this.”

  “You can say that again.” I laugh.

  She grins and splashes me. “You don’t smell so great, yourself,” she says in fae.

  “I understood that,” I reply in the same tongue.

  Her eyebrows shoot to her hairline. “How?”

  “The witch wanted a chat.” I waggle my fingers along the surface of the water. “So she zapped the language into my brain somehow.”

  “Powerful magic.” She cocks her head at me. “And you need to give me detai
ls of what happened. But first, I would like to reiterate that we do, in fact, stink.”

  “I know.” I grimace. “I’ve been wishing for soap.”

  “Can do.” She dog paddles to the edge of the pond and swipes some of the purple flowers from their stalks.

  “What’s that?”

  “These are blumerin. They crush these up and mix them with some other ingredients to make the palace soap.”

  I take a handful from her and squeeze them. A slight bluish tint leaks from the leaves, but the scent is amazing. I’ll accept looking like a smurf if I get to smell like a blueberry tart.

  “Like this.” She rubs them between her palms. “They don’t get super sudsy, but they bubble a little.”

  The soft petals are almost spongelike as I roll them around in my palms and start lathering up my neck and shoulders.

  “This is heavenly.” I scrub behind my ears and take more of the flowers Beth offers. By the time we’re done, we’ve washed our bodies and our hair.

  She douses herself with palmfuls of water one more time, then tips her head back and lets a ray of sun play across her features.

  “You’re young,” I blurt. “I mean, you’re younger than I thought you were. All that dirt made you seem older.”

  She laughs. “Thanks, I think. I’m probably about twenty-five or so?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. Our ages aren’t important. We’re either young enough to work or old enough to discard.”

  “Discard?” I pluck a piece of flower from her hair.

  “When changelings grow old, their masters throw them out.” She paddles to the edge of the pool and reaches over to grab our dirty clothes. “Send them to live on the streets until they die.”

  I hug myself. “That’s horrible.”

  “Just the way it is.” She begins scrubbing my dress in the water.

  “Changelings never try to escape?”

  “They do.” She nods. “I did but didn’t get far. But even if I had managed to get out of the palace, the Catcher would have come for me.”

  “The Catcher?”

  “A vicious fae who returns runaway changelings to their masters.” She rubs her palms on her biceps. “He’s relentless once he’s put on our trail. All changelings learn about him from the time they arrive here, and the ones he catches … they never come back the same, not after he’s had a turn with them.”

  I can’t fathom the horribleness of Beth’s history, but I know she’s strong to have survived it. “I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too, for all those he’s caught.” She clears her throat and continues washing our clothes.

  “I’ll help.” I reach for her underthings.

  “No.” She splashes me away. “I like laundry. Hate all the other chores, but laundry is my thing.”

  “Really? I hate having to load the washer in my dorm, mainly because it means I have to scrounge around for quarters to feed the machine. Oh, and half the time, someone will come along and dump my clothes out and put theirs in.”

  She peers at me. “I have no idea what you just said, but—”

  “First world problems.” I shrug. “I’ve never washed clothes the way you’re doing it.”

  She rubs the cloth against itself and adds some of the blue flowers. “This is the only way I know.”

  “At home, we have machines that do all the washing.”

  “Home.” Her chin drops a little.

  “Right.” I float over to her and rest a palm on her shoulder. “I know you don’t remember it. I’m sorry.”

  She clears her throat and shrugs off my touch. “A home doesn’t exist for me. Clean clothes, though, that’s something I can control.”

  I go through several ideas of responses, but nothing seems right, so I let it drop. But I know there’s a home for her somewhere. And I’m beginning to suspect that home might be with me.

  After a while, she asks what happened with the witch. Grateful for the reprieve from the awkward silence, I tell her the details as she washes then drapes our clothes over a low-hanging branch.

  “I’m getting pruny.” I show her my fingers.

  “We can get out.” She spins in the water, sending little ripples across the surface.

  “It’s sunny over there.” I point to a spot beyond the flowers. “Maybe we can lie there and dry off for a minute?”

  “I like it.” She climbs out of the water, the bite marks once again coming into sharp relief. Her ribs show through her skin, and I make a mental note to ensure she eats enough at every meal.

  I follow her across the flowers and to the grassy, sunny spot. We lie down, the warm sun drying the droplets along my skin. I’m exposed, but the woods are quiet, and Beth hasn’t given me a second look. We are doing this whole “we’re naked in the middle of nowhere” thing like a couple of pros.

  “Has anything ever felt this good?” I sigh and close my eyes.

  “Not that I remember, no.”

  A whisper reminding me I’m far from home tries to sneak in, but I block it out. I’m here now, safe and warm with a friend. It’s a pleasure I never had in the human world.

  The sun heats us, cutting through the chill of the lingering water and tickling along all my exposed nooks and crannies. I’ve never laid out completely nude before. It makes me feel like a bad girl, and I rather like it. “This reminds me of this stupid TV show back home. It comes on one of the reality TV channels and is called ‘Naked and Afraid’ or something like that.”

  “A show? Like a play?”

  “Sort of. But it’s on this little rectangular device and you can watch all sorts of things, look at other people’s lives, be entertained with fictional movies. They use a camera, which records everything.”

  She shoots me a perplexed glance.

  “It’s hard to explain.” It really is. There’s simply no way to put it into words, so I plow onward. “Like a painting that moves. But anyway, there’s this show where they drop two strangers off in the middle of like, a desert, or on an island, or in the deep woods, and they’re naked. The camera follows them around—it’s kind of like you’re watching through a window, and they don’t realize you’re there—and show what they do once they’re stranded. See what decisions they make, stuff like that.”

  “Why do they do this?” Her voice is low, drowsy.

  “To see if they can survive. They have to live in this isolated place with the stranger for a month or so, I think. Fighting off the elements and bugs and animals and scrounging for food. But if they realize they can’t hack it, they can call for rescue.”

  She snorts. “It sounds like my life—danger, fear, scrounging—until you got to the rescue part. No one ever came to save me from Granthos.”

  “You saved yourself, I’d say.”

  She smacks my arm. “Winding up in the dungeon wasn’t saving myself.”

  “Well, you met me in the dungeon, and your kindness is what got you saved, so I count that as you saving yourself.”

  “Kindness?” She makes a pfft noise. “I was just trying to get you to stop yelling and drawing attention.”

  “You’re deflecting.” I return her smack. “You warned me, remember? Tried to help me, even when you were in a bad situation. No matter what you’d been through, you were still kind. That’s why we’re here, lying around in the warm sun, free as can be.”

  “Naked as can be, too.” She stretches her arms over her head. “I could get used to this.” She sighs, and after a long pause, says quietly, “I’m glad I met you that day.”

  “So am I.”

  Her snore punctuates my sentiment, and I smile a little. At least she’s predictable.

  I yawn and stretch my arms out, too. The sun peeks through my eyelids and promises me the day is just as bright as ever.

  I don’t know how long I doze for, but I know what wakes me: a guttural roar that slices through my dreams with a petrifying echo.

  5

  Leander

  I wake cold and unc
omfortable. She’s gone. Gone from my bed, only her scent and the obsidian blade remaining.

  I’m on my feet immediately. “Gareth!”

  His eyes fly open and he looks around. “I fell asl—”

  “Gone.” I kick a log in the dying fire. “That changeling has kidnapped my mate!”

  “Hang on, now.” He spins, peering through the trees. “They can’t be far.”

  My heart twists, and my primal need to find Taylor is like a thorny arrow wedged in my gut. I taste the air, trying to find some trace of her.

  “This way.” Gareth takes off through the trees.

  I follow and catch the same scent that drew him. Blumerin. It grows in this cursed forest, but the smell is loud, out of place, and underneath it—I can get the faintest hint of Taylor.

  I barrel past him and draw my dagger. How could I let her leave in the night? What sort of mate am I? First the witch and now this. She keeps slipping through my fingers, no matter how hard I try to hold her close.

  A stream trickles ahead of me, a wide pool glinting in the sun. The ground is disturbed, flowers bent. She came this way. I’m wild, my body rushing before my mind can even catch up. But then I stop.

  I. Stop. Dead.

  Her eyes closed, hair damp, face peaceful, skin tantalizing, body delectable—she lies nude, her breasts offered to the sun, the pink tips soft, her stomach fair and then the slight tuft of neat hair between her thighs. My mind goes blank, and the bond snaps tight. My cock pulses and my mouth goes dry. I must claim her, must mark her as mine before any other male sees her. I will do it now.

  I step towards her.

  “What—” Gareth gasps as he catches up.

  Gareth. Gareth is looking at my incomparable mate. I turn on him and draw my sword with a roar that shakes the trees.

  He draws his blade and holds it across his body. Defensive. “Leander, the bond is turning you—”

  “She is mine!” I rush him, my sword flying with a fury that seems to infuse the metal with extra bite.