Not exactly anyway.
That being said, there was always a strange tug inside when you got close to the borders, something inside telling you to turn back, that you weren't welcome. I hadn't felt it in too many years to count, but it was distinct. I would know it when it happened.
And this tiny little slip of a woman was looking up at me with those big green eyes, barely knowing me at all, but somehow seeming to put a vast amount of trust in me to take care of her anyway.
I couldn't let her down.
I couldn't tell her I was just as lost as she was.
For her, I would find the goddamn human realm.
I would even escort her into it myself to make sure she was safe.
I owed her that.
"Of course I do."
With that, I quickly turned, hoping she didn't see or hear the lie in my voice.
THREE
Amy
Cardio.
Definitely, definitely cardio.
Was it my fault that I was kept inside the house almost at all times and that there was literally no way for me to try to 'shape up' my body? No. But even so, when Drake had been dragging me through the woods, his long-legged pace unrelenting, his own breathing even and easy, I had been huffing for air. My lungs had felt like they were in a grip that just kept squeezing tighter. My heart, well, a part of me was worried it might explode from beating so hard and fast.
It had been, whether it was logical or not, embarrassing when he stopped and had to teach me how to even out my breathing.
The pace after our short break was nowhere near as punishing, just a brisk walk. A brisk walk through the freezing woods in a foot of snow, but a brisk walk all the same.
Even so though, around the time that night finally started to fall, I was aching in places I didn't realize could even hurt. Every single muscle in my legs, thighs, butt, back, and midsection was screaming with every step I took. My feet hurt as well, and while the good construction of my shoes seemed to have prevented blisters, each step was a stabbing sensation.
So maybe cardio and that other thing humans did - weight training.
Maybe then I could do a hike without being in crippling pain.
Drake didn't seem likewise afflicted, his steps and pace even, no tension hinting at pain. That being said, he was kept in shape doing long, grueling hours of manual labor or he risked a beating. Sometimes he got a beating even if he did the work exactly as demanded because my father's guards were terrible and simply liked inflicting pain. So his much bigger, much more chiseled body was used to being tested.
That was why I clamped my lips together hard enough to make my jaw hurt and just kept pressing on.
If he wasn't going to complain, neither was I.
I watched his back as he stepped to the edge of a steep hill, seeming to work to gauge if we could make it down without tumbling or not.
He really was a giant of a man.
While most of my family and the guards were tall, not many were quite as massive, and none were the solidly muscled sort of fit that he was. That, in my very limited experience both in The Green and in the human realm, was just not how most men were built. Except for maybe the humans who exercised excessively or the fae, like Drake, who were put to manual labor.
Inexplicably, I felt myself rather affected by it. I always had. In fact, I was suddenly glad it was winter because the heavy coat he had on at least kept those distracting muscles of his from view.
"Amethyst," his voice called, soft but firm at the same time, as though he had maybe called me more than once and I hadn't heard. You know, because I was thinking about his freaking muscles for some idiotic reason.
I jerked back, shaking my head, seeing his hand extended toward me. "Amy," I corrected, giving him a smile. "I think being on the run from our captors calls for nicknames, don't you?"
"Amy," he repeated, but doing it differently than the humans would. Where they would say A-me, he said Ammy. I found I liked his way much better. He raised a brow when I still didn't take his outstretched hand, making a strange surge of insecurity flood my system as I forced the oddly numb limb to raise and slid my much smaller hand into his massive, strong, work-hardened one. I bet if I didn't have the gloves on, I would find his palm rough, calloused, and the top scarred as well as his fingers.
What the hell?
What was wrong with me?
First his muscles.
Then his fingers.
It was the nerves, I was sure. Or, at least, I was trying to convince myself of that.
"Honey, you need some food or something?" he asked, brows furrowing more. I guess my face must have been confused, because he went on, "You seem out of it."
Maybe I did need food.
That would possibly explain why my brain was running away with itself when every thought should have been focused on escape and survival. The fact of the matter was, Drake wasn't going to be with me forever and I needed to keep an eye for threats. I wasn't sure where his land was, but I knew we were likely to come upon that before we would come upon the human realm. I needed to focus on what food sources were available in the wintertime. I knew there wouldn't be much, but maybe there were some mushrooms. Mushrooms would get me days if I ate them sparingly. And nuts. There were usually a few hanging around if you looked up in the trees.
That, though, would require hitting them out of the trees or, you know, climbing up into them. I was pretty sure I would have no skills at either task.
But, as the humans always say, desperate times call for desperate measures.
I would do what I had to do to survive, to get free, to make a life for myself that didn't have me constantly living in fear of what mood my mother might be in, in what way she might inflict it upon me simply for existing, for being in her eyesight, for, maybe, reminding her of how young she used to be, how she used to be able to use that to her advantage. She was beautiful even now, but in an icy way, in a way that said she was about as warm as a handful of snow, that said her heart was a frozen-over forest, nothing but mangled trees and frigid bodies overcome by the low temperatures.
I had something she never would.
And she wanted to destroy that.
It had been her life's mission.
To chill the warm out of my heart, to make me a hollowed-out shell much like herself.
After all, she could use me better if my only motive in life was the same as hers - to use others to make my life better.
It was how she had justified marrying my father, how she had betrayed her own sister in doing so, how she had ripped my brother and sister from their mother before they could even know who she was, then raise them as her own. It was how she wrung any last shred of good from my father that may have been left after he had been cursed. Which, to be fair, couldn't have been much. But she stole that. Because she could. Because she liked the power. Because it never occurred to her to care what those around her might want.
Which was why I was in the middle of The Green - a place I had only toed the edges of all my life - cold, tired, scared, and, apparently, half-delusional since I was not thinking of the aforementioned coldness, tiredness, or fear, but was instead focused on things like Drake's darn muscles.
Of all things.
"Sorry," I said, shaking my head, trying to clear it. "I think I'm just a little, ah, overwhelmed with all of this is all," I admitted, it being as close to the truth as possible. "I've always known this day would come, but I guess it was somehow sudden at the same time. If that makes sense."
"Figure it makes sense since you picked the literal worst time of the year to make your escape, so something definitely pushed you into it."
"I didn't prepare enough," I added, thinking about the bags that had been slamming into my sides the entire run, making the skin beneath feel bruised and sensitive now that I could think of something other than suffocating with my own weak lungs.
"How could you? That mother of yours kept you locked up in that house for ninety-percent
of your life. I hardly ever saw you outdoors, let alone free enough to learn things like survival skills."
"It's not an excuse," I told him with a helpless shrug, somewhat uncharacteristically down on myself. "I was a coward. I could have at least tried."
"A coward?" he repeated, brows drawn low, making my attention go to his deep eyes, eyes with unusual flecks of red around the irises, something I was sure I had never seen before, was just as sure I would never see again. It must have been part of his lineage. Maybe only the Draca had eyes like that. I wouldn't know. No one would. Drake was the only living one anyone had seen in generations. "A coward would never leave, Amy. A coward would sit up in her tower, taking whatever shit her mother threw at her, thanking her for flinging it in the first place."
"Drake, I--"
"You packed bags, got into ridiculous human clothes, snuck out of that prison you had been kept in, came to my barn, freed me, and then ran away. Cowards don't do that. That is the shit of the stories I was told as a boy. That is the shit of legends. You're like one of those childhood heroes the young ones in my tribe were raised on."
He spoke more like a human than the fae I had known. He was more blunt, more crass. He used foul language you didn't often hear from the types of fae my parents associated with. Though, to be fair, you did hear the guards speaking like that when they knew they wouldn't be overheard by my mother.
I wondered, maybe for the first time, what his kind were like. The Draca. I guess it never occurred to me to think of them since fae for generations had been convinced they were the things of myth, stories the more dominant fae told their own offspring about as bedtime stories. But here was Drake, supposedly the last of his kind, talking of his kin as though they were - or had been - a thriving community.
I didn't know how old Drake was. Such things were often impossible to tell without asking directly. We weren't like humans. We didn't show the stages of life so plainly on our skin. We didn't become incapable of childbearing around the age of forty. We didn't show lines beside our eyes and mouths at fifty. We didn't go gray and wither and dry and die before eighty. It was a slower transition. Many human lifetimes were needed to paint even a single sliver of gray into our hair. There were fae I had met who looked like a human forty when they had been around for thousands of human years. Fae who didn't spend time in the human realm to age them like I had could spend two human lifetimes as a child still.
So Drake, well, he could be as young as thirty human years. Or as old as a thousand.
I could never know.
And, to be fair, he might not even know after spending so much time locked away from the world around him, making it hard - maybe even impossible - to tell the passage of time.
He definitely carried himself, presented himself, with a bit more maturity than I felt. Or maybe that was just how I was perceiving him simply because he knew more of this world than I did.
Heck, maybe he thought I was more worldly because I had spent so much time in the human realm. He certainly seemed captivated by the ideas of elephants and zombies, two things that he never would have known about if not for me.
It maybe made me feel less like a child around him to realize that.
"Well, I did kinda save you, huh?" I asked, giving him a smile, feeling a little proud of myself for that part.
"You sure did," he agreed, eyes deep, trying to show me something, but I simply didn't know him - or, to be honest, that expression - well enough to interpret it. His hand gave mine a squeeze, making me almost alarmingly aware of it again, making me think and worry about strange things. Like how I needed to keep myself from letting my fingers curl, not wanting him to think I wanted to actually hold his hand.
Which I didn't.
Right?
I mean... of course not.
I didn't even know him.
I didn't hold hands with anyone.
It simply had never been allowed.
Heck, I didn't even know what hand-holding was until I went to the human realm and saw it for the first time.
My gaze must have been looking at the scarred, wide back of his hand, because he finally explained, "We have to go down a steep incline. I want to make sure you don't fall."
"Oh," was about all my twisted tongue could force out, sounding airy and foreign.
"Then we're going to find a place to sit for a while. I think you need to get some food in you."
Right.
Because I was acting like such a freak.
I needed to get it together.
We weren't going to get very far if I kept getting lost in my own head.
And we had to get far.
We had to get as far as possible.
I wasn't stupid; they would come for me.
Even into the human realm my mother so looked down her nose on. For me, for what she had planned for me, yeah, she would go there. Just to drag me back. Just to ruin my life. Just to suck out the tiniest bit of hope I still had inside me.
So I needed to stop thinking about things like how scarred Drake's hand was, and focus on surviving, pushing my body harder, getting as far as possible.
"I can go for a while longer," I assured him, willing myself to believe it as well. At his dubious look, I felt my lips tipping up slightly. "If maybe we stop running so fast," I conceded.
His hand tightened, pulling me forward toward the incline that was, well, a lot steeper than I realized. My hand tightened on his this time, needing the reassurance.
"Slow is better than not at all," he told me before moving down the incline without warning, pulling me with him.
My stomach pitched even with his strong hand holding onto mine. I couldn't help but figure it was a definite possibility that if I lost my footing, catching Drake off guard, I could send us both toppling down this never-ending cliff, ending up who-knew-where. Under feet of snow. Was this cliff high enough for an avalanche? If the screaming of my thigh muscles were anything to go by, it certainly seemed possible.
"Amy," Drake's voice called, sounding amused, making my head snap to look over at him. "You can let up. We're on flat land," he informed me. And, sure enough, we were.
It was right about then that I realized my hand was aching from holding his so hard. I snatch mine away, seeing red marks from the outline of my fingers on his as I did so.
That was embarrassing.
Apparently, outside of my parents' home, I lost whatever small bit of calm and collected I had managed to hold onto in that house.
"Let's just go another mile or so," he suggested, casting a look over at me that could be called nothing other than worry. That I hadn't thought this through?
That he wasn't sure I could make it?
Or that he simply questioned my sanity?
I wasn't sure.
And maybe there were shreds of truth on all of those concerns.
I was acting a bit out of character. But then I had just escaped my prison - erhm, home - in the middle of winter without as many supplies as I should have had. It was a shock to the system. It was making a dozen different thoughts assault me at once. It was hard to continue to act completely within your wits when your wits were, well, flighty and, ah, witless.
As for having given it thought, well, that was all I had done. For years. For my entire life. Every time my mother would scold me about my manners, about my ineptness, about my utter lack of skills.
My half-brother and half-sister had them.
And my mother was supposed to be stronger than their mother.
I should have been in possession of skills that she could be proud of, that she could have used to her advantage.
She wondered if age might bring them about.
Which was why I was sent to the human realm so much, forcing me to age at the human rate instead of gracing me with the slowness of a fae life.
Not that I was complaining; I much preferred the human realm to being in her home.
But the plan proved fruitless for her anyway.
I never de
veloped skills.
I remained an utter disappointment.
So she had to come up with other plans.
I was old enough now.
For the plans that came with pretty daughters with supposedly empty heads, with subservient personalities.
All I had known in idle moments was thoughts of freedom, of a life of my own, without the fear of my mother's disappointment, or - worse still - the wickedness of her schemes made for her advantage at my expense.
"Here," Drake's voice called, snapping me out of my wayward thoughts, making my head shoot up to find his giant hand holding out a handful of nuts toward me. "Eat," he demanded when I hesitated. "It's cold. You're thin. You need the fat," he added, voice a little softer.
"I appreciate it," I told him, meaning it.
"Can I ask you something?" he asked a few moments later as I slowly crushed the hard nuts between my back teeth.
"Yeah," I agreed, turning to find him leaning back against the tree, looking very much like he could win a fight against it, even at leisure like he was then, arms crossed over his broad chest.
"Why go to the human realm?" he asked.
"I have nowhere else to go."
"Your brother. Sister. I've heard the rumors about your brother's girl too..."
Right.
That Cece was a child of both Courts, that she was bound to be more powerful than any fae in history.
"My sister is still staying with Baba Yaga," I told him, my heart crushing down a bit in my chest.
I wasn't naive.
About our kind.
About the joy many got from indulging in the most horrific of acts. Against humans, but also against fellow fae.
The weaker ones.
And the females.
I knew what happened in the dungeons beneath the home I had been raised in - the lifetimes of torment inflicted on flesh for minor deeds done. My own brother had much of the flesh of his back flayed from him there. When the night was still enough, the compound silent enough, you could hear them down there. Moaning. Screaming. Begging for mercy. Something they weren't bound to find.
And I knew what happened in the camps. The labor camps. Where the women and children were separated from the men who might try to defend them, to save them from the almost nightly gang rapes.
Escape From The Green Page 3
