TWIST
GENEVIEVE RAAS
Ravenwell Press
Copyright © 2017 by Genevieve Raas
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ravenwell Press.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Ravenwell Press
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-944912-10-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-944912-09-3
First Edition
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
FATE
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
TRISTAN
Chapter Two
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Three
TRISTAN
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
TRISTAN
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
TRISTAN
Chapter Four
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Five
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Six
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Seven
TRISTAN
Chapter Eight
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
LAILA
Chapter Nine
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Ten
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Eleven
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter Twelve
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by GENEVIEVE RAAS
Also by Ravenwell Press
Prologue
OR HOW ALL FAIRY TALES BEGIN
Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl locked in a dungeon by a greedy king.
This king demanded she spin straw into gold or face death at the end of a sharp blade. The girl prayed for a way to escape her fate. A mysterious stranger answered.
He offered to fix all her woes…for a price. She agreed. First she gave him a necklace, then a ring of silver. When she had nothing left to give, she offered her first born.
Seduced by gold and wealth, the king married her and she was soon with child.
When she gave birth, the girl found she couldn’t repay the stranger what she promised. She loved her son.
Instead, she defied him. Tore the contract in two. Broke the oath sealed with her own blood.
The Furies clawed down from the heavens and dragged the girl away, forcing her to leave her child behind with the stranger she came to loathe.
I was that stranger.
But that story has already been told, and now you’ve come to see how it continues.
I hated myself for what I did. What I led her to do. I was a damn fool and a vile creature. I allowed the darkness infecting my soul to blind me from the light of salvation.
The only thing I hated more than myself was the one who made me become what I was.
Fate.
I wanted his blood. His death. Anything that would help fill the gaping hole in my heart. But once my rage and shame mellowed, I came to realize vengeance against him was foolish.
After all, it was my vengeance against Edward that led me into Fate’s sweet trap from the start. I unwittingly became his pawn as the girl became mine, and I refused to be one again. Especially now I had her son to care for.
I knew Fate wanted me for some twisted plot and I was determined to never allow him the satisfaction.
This meant performing an elaborate dance. Foresight and planning. I traveled to the edges of the world, tracking down soothsayers and hedge witches. I devoured books on the craft of unraveling the future. I developed quite the skill for tarot cards and tea leaves. Any divination that would allow me that razor edge against Fate’s wish for me.
With my new tricks, I took great care plotting my future. Analyzing every step, making sure Fate’s strings on my wrists and ankles were cut. My free will was my only weapon, and I wielded it as one would a broadsword.
I loved defying him. Depriving him.
Until the tarot cards showed me nothing more. The tea leaves revealed nothing more. The clarity of the future I depended upon was erased. I was cut off. Cut out.
My skin prickled and I couldn’t shake the distinct sensation of being followed.
Watched.
Wanted.
Fear gripped me, and I knew there would be no happily ever after.
Chapter One
Twist:
verb: Turn or bend into a specified position or in a specified direction
verb: Cheat; Defraud
FATE
I waited a thousand years and I refused to miss my chance again. He was perfect. Perfect like her.
What I wanted most would finally be mine.
The clock was ticking towards a new age.
Our own.
RUMPELSTILTSKIN
“You think you’re being followed?”
“That’s the point, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m being followed, wanted, or hunted. There is only the sensation. This dark energy leering over my shoulder. I’ve ignored every chill rippling down my back, until now.”
I scrubbed my face with my hand. I wasn’t used to experiencing such a lack of knowledge. Control. It terrified me.
“Why until now?” Aldred asked.
I pulled out a deck of tarot cards from my inner pocket. Their edges were frayed and corners bent with age. I laid them out across the table of gnarled oak.
One, two horizontal across the first, three moving counter clockwise to four, five, six. To the right of the cross I placed a card at the bottom and placed three more one above the other—seven, eight, nine, ten.
Aldred stroked his beard, his thick silver rings fresh against his leathered skin.
The edges pressed into my thumb as I slid and flipped them over. Blood thrashed in my ears as I saw again what I loathed to see.
“What do you make of it?” I asked.
He leaned closer in, his eyes scanning the garden of wands, cups, and swords. The wrinkles on Aldred’s ancient face deepened with concern.
“Gibberish.”
“Precisely,” I said. “I’ve laid out these cards one hundred and two times and each time it is the same. Unreadable. Suns and towers. Hearts and ten of swords. I’ve been cut off from my own future. I rely on knowing as much as possible, especially with this spectral chill. This feeling does not come without purpose and the cards do not stop revealing without intervention.”
It is too late, Rumpelstiltskin. You can try and escape your destiny, but your choices will always mark you, Fate’s voice resonated in my memory.
The scar he had left me burned across my palm.
Tarot cards, crystal gazing, tea leaves, any form of divination were my only weapon against Fate. How I deprived him of entwining me further in whatever sick scheme he wanted. They allowed me to plan. Plot. Map out which steps to take and which to avoid. No choice would come unstudied again. Now, my path was gone. My neat and tidy bricks were left trailing into nothing but mist.
Fear cut through my core again like a blade of ice.
“This is why you sought me out,” Aldred said.
“I had nowhere else to turn,” I replied.
Aldred, the scholar. Educated by the finest universities and expert in the black arts. Though he was not an immortal being as I was, no one knew more about the craft.
“If you are being followed or hunted, what, or who, do you think it is?”
I am looking forward to what I h
ave in store for you, Fate’s voice echoed again.
I clenched my jaw. Blood rushed through my heart and terror chilled my veins. I hated this feeling of vulnerability. In my heart I wished it were the devil, or some other manner of dark creature, but I knew only one being would toy with me like this.
I only hoped what I suspected was wrong.
“Only you know of what happened all those years ago,” I said.
“You mean with the girl…”
I bit the inside of my lip, Laila’s memory still raw in my gut after all these years.
“I allowed myself to become such a fool at Fate’s hands. I can’t have it happen again. I’ve taken every precaution to rid myself of such an error,” I said.
“You believe Fate is preparing to use you to fulfill some destiny?”
I remained silent. Such a thought was abhorrent to me, but it was what I feared. And now without being able to see my future…
He cleared his throat.
“Does the boy know?”
“No.” I paced across the groaning floorboards, careful to avoid his towers of books. “I swore to his mother never to tell him the truth of what happened between her and I. It’s one of the reasons he despises me.”
He gave a pitying look.
“I’m sure it’s not come to that. You’ve raised him well all these years. The heart remembers what good has been done towards it.”
I wasn’t sure. As Tristan grew so did my guilt, and a distance took root between us. I couldn’t help but associate Tristan with loss.
I recalled how I started to crave the distance. The numbness. I journeyed farther and longer away, hunting desperate souls that would help soothe my own.
“I can bear his scorn for Laila,” I said.
He rested his hand on my shoulder.
“Perhaps this sensation is not Fate, but only a manifestation of your guilt.”
I chuckled.
“I’ve lived with my guilt so long I’m perfectly used to the sensation. No, this has Fate’s stench all over it. But without the cards, I can’t be certain.”
I shook off his hand.
“I know what you are wanting. She is too dangerous,” he said.
“I am well aware, but I have no choice. I must find her. My powers of foresight are not strong enough. Only she can tell me what I can do to avoid what I fear.”
“I’ve seen men go mad from what she told them,” he replied, urgency burning in every word. “I swore I would never tell another soul where she keeps. You must accept not knowing and adapt.”
“It is not in my nature to adapt.”
Anything that wasn’t certain garnered my suspicion.
“Oracles are precarious creatures. Their riddles only promise further burden,” he pleaded.
“That is a risk I will take. The boy is still in my care, I am bound by his mother to never allow him harm. If this is Fate moving pawns, then it won’t only affect me, it might also hurt Tristan. I will not let that happen. I need her to see what these cards are preventing me from seeing,” I said. “I need her to tell me what my future holds so I can avoid it.”
He exhaled slowly, shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, but there are times it is best to leave what will be what will be,” he said.
My stomach pitted. Aldred possessed a fierce stubborn streak. It is what I respected and detested about him.
“You refuse?”
“You must view this as an opportunity.”
Opportunity? I hated that word. I clenched my fingers into fists as heat flushed over my skin.
“I’m still a dangerous man,” I said.
He stiffened.
“I know,” he replied.
“Then you should also know I don’t want to hurt you, but if you remain standing in the way of what I want, you leave me no choice.”
“I do not fear death.”
I grimaced. His mind was too logical to dread the unknown.
“Men wise as you rarely do, which is why it pains me to do this…”
A simple twist of my wrist filled the room with his screams. Pressing his hands against his skull he tried to stop the obvious pain pounding within his brain. His face twisted and his breaths grew short.
I twisted my wrist again. I closed my eyes, but I wished I could have silenced my ears. I hated this part of me capable of such torture.
Another scream.
“I can make it stop if you tell me what I want,” I coaxed, hoping he would break and I could end his torment.
I opened my eyes. He slid down the wall, his fingers white from the pressure as he continued to push against his temples. His red eyes stared up at me, a beautiful flame of desperation igniting within his soul telling me all I needed to know.
He was ready.
I released my hold on him. He gasped several large breaths and leaned his head against the wall.
His fingers trembled as he pointed at a bookcase, its shelves bending from the weight of heaped books and strewn parchment. I roved across the peeling bindings until I saw what I desired.
Wedged between the chaos was an unassuming box of gray lead. Ugly thing, yet inside—absolute beauty.
A disc of gold. No. Rings of gold, I should say. Six of them in all, each fitting tightly within the other. I took it out and laid it in my palm. I’d read of its ability. Its power. But it was another thing entirely to see it. To hold such a priceless object in my hand.
I waved over it. The bands whistled and hummed as they opened like flower petals. The bands crisscrossed, forming a perfect armillary sphere.
“She…she…” Aldred gasped between large gulps of air. “She exiled herself to the Forest of Enduring Shadows. It is endless. One could spend centuries searching its vastness. The only way to find her is to use the Sphere of Asteria. She is bound to its magic. She feared the destruction her knowledge caused humanity, what men did with her prophecies. She hid herself away to stop the torment.”
I waved my hand over the sphere again and the bands fell flat into a disc. I stuffed it into my satchel.
“I take no pleasure in hurting you,” I said.
He nodded.
“Rumpelstiltskin,” he said. “It is sometimes best to accept what will be. You’ve run from destiny so long…”
I looked down at the cards that showed senseless nothings. I wondered for a heartbeat what it would be like to continue not knowing. To push forward into the mist of the future.
The hair on my neck prickled and the fear returned. The scar on my hand burned. I believed myself drowning in an ocean.
I gathered my cards and put them back into my pocket.
“I do not run from destiny. I make my own.”
TRISTAN
Blue liquid sloshed within the vial I inspected. It looked like a miniature ocean trapped inside the glass, at least what I assumed an ocean might look like. Oceans, the entire world for that matter, only existed between the pages of the books I read.
Grimacing, I placed it back among the other bottles and boxes that cluttered the shelves. Pater always added trinkets to the collection, and whenever I was alone I made it my job to investigate these new oddities. They were the only bits of the outside world I saw that weren’t in some mildewing volume.
Pater didn’t like me going outside, or doing anything that might be remotely entertaining. Dangerous is what he called it. I called it freedom.
I knew Pater wasn’t my real father. We didn’t share any features. His hair was black while mine was brown. His gray eyes were a stark contrast to my green. Even our builds were night and day. He was tall and pointed, while I was broad shouldered and an inch shorter.
I often asked him who my real parents were and what had happened to them. He would only answer the same way he always did: They died when I was a baby and he took me in.
He hated discussing the past, though I didn’t know why.
An intriguing lump of black drew my attention. It appeared spat up out of the earth, its surface porous
and uneven. Whatever it was, it lacked the thick layer of dust sheathing the other hundred items. It was new.
The rough exterior barbed my skin as I picked it up. I struggled to hold its massive weight, even though it was only the size of my palm. What the blazes would such an object be used for?
I loved when Pater explained their particular uses. Their ability to heal or harm fascinated me.
When I was a child he sat me on his knee and recounted elixirs and myths. The lines of his face would stiffen in concentration as he became lost to the legends. My mind would run away into the wild tales he spun, into a land of monsters and wizards. Though I would sometimes shiver in fear, his lips always bent into a comforting smile and I knew nothing would ever harm me.
What I loved most was being part of the world. Part of his world.
These moments only lived in my memory now. His smile had long since faded. There was only his work. His journeys. I no longer had a place in his life.
The rare times he sat with me he preferred to stare into the fire. I believed myself a stranger. Small and insignificant to whatever kept him within his own mind.
And I resented him for it.
The lump slipped from my grasp and hit the floor with a crack. My heart rushed as a large, incriminating chunk sheared off its left side. If placed back in the correct position, perhaps it wouldn’t be noticed.
Twist: A Fairy Tale Awakening (Spindlewind Trilogy Book Two) Page 1
