A Girl Named Calamity

by Danielle Lori

  “Fucking spider,” he growled before he ripped the knife out of my hand and tossed it to the side. I was over his shoulder within a second and back out in the rain. I pounded on his back while the only color rain I saw was red. He dropped me next to the trunk of the tree.

  “Stay,” he ordered.

  A sea of rage overtook me, and I couldn’t stop myself from lunging at him again. His compulsion hadn’t worked, and he cursed. He grabbed my wrist and spun me around while holding my wrists with one hand.

  He used his teeth and his other hand to rip one of my shirts to shreds. He used a piece to tie my wrists together behind my back while I cursed at him as anger boiled in my veins. He swept my legs out from under me, catching me before I hit the ground.

  He grabbed my ankles, and I kicked at him and tried to twist out of his grip, but he had me tied up within seconds.

  Expletives came out of my mouth on rapid fire as I tried to get out of the ties. I gave up after an hour of no progress, and my throat became sore from yelling.

  I fell asleep in a hot sea of red.

  * * *

  I woke with a sore throat and the sun shining through the strands of the willow tree. Confusion muddled my mind while I sat up and tried to remember where I was. I looked over and noticed Weston watching me cautiously.

  “What did you do to me?” I croaked.

  He raised a brow. “Why do you think I did something to you?”

  “Because you’re looking at me weird and I feel like I was run over by a carriage,” I said as I rubbed my sore wrists.

  “I’m sorry to break it to you. But I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Then how come I can’t remember falling asleep last night?” I looked at my wrists and noticed a red line around them. “What the hell happened to me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Yea right. Me being a queen’s more believable than those words out of his mouth.

  “I swear, Weston. If you did anything to me while I was sleeping . . . I’m going to kill you,” I growled.

  “Trust me, Princess. Nothing happened,” he said.

  “But—”

  “Quit talking, let’s go.”

  I didn’t reply.

  Because I remembered.

  But as long as he thought I didn’t, it never happened.

  I was positive that was a rule.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FOXES AND FEELINGS

  Assassins.

  You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.

  Wait . . . I don’t think that’s a saying.

  But it might as well have been because it was my life. My unfortunate situation that I didn’t think I could escape. I could leave, and most assuredly get myself into a lot of trouble, or play follow the leader around Alyria until we killed all of its people. Seemed like an easy decision to make, but fear, that nasty word ruled my life.

  What would Grandmother do? She would have found a way to survive on her own. She wouldn’t have followed a corrupt assassin across the country.

  And that was why I was scrubbing myself raw with the supposedly scent reducing soap. I was in a hurry so I didn’t get cold feet, which was just a euphemism for being scared out of my bloody mind, and I wasn’t going to acknowledge it. The knots in my stomach were only a reminder.

  I slipped on clean clothes and headed out of the bathhouse. I’d hoped that what had happened in Latent City wouldn’t have Weston tying me to him. The act I’d performed in the woods must have cooled his blood a little because he let me walk around Ulmer City.

  I wandered around until I found what I needed. Two men jousting. One had his shirt off on the ground, and I slipped over to it without them noticing. I grabbed the shirt, feeling like someone would start yelling thief. That’d be my luck. Nobody noticed my thievery, and I headed back to the inn.

  I made it around the corner before I stopped in my tracks. I stared at the square wooden building in confusion before I hesitantly walked over to it. It looked like a lot of other buildings in these cities, but there was something that drew me to it.

  I opened the door, and the bell rang while scents assailed my nose. The scents of home. That could have all been a coincidence, but the same woman could not. Her smile was neutral as she stood behind the counter.

  “Can I help you find something? Maybe a potion to help seduce a particular man?” she asked.

  I blinked. “How?”

  “How?” she repeated, her eyebrows scrunched together.

  “This.” I looked around at the exact shop I was in the city past. “It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible, dear.” She smiled. Alger was a tame city that wasn’t full of magic, and I never knew the strangeness of Alyria until this journey.

  “Do you ask every woman if she needs to seduce a man?”

  She smiled a large smile that reminded me of a cat grooming the blood off its paws after a kill. “I don’t ask other women anything. But I know what’s best for you.”

  My eyebrows pinched together. “What does that mean?”

  “Deep down, you know.”

  Her words had an alarm ringing in my head. She was probably playing games with me, like the Sylvian women, so I pushed my anxiety aside.

  “What is best for me?” I asked.

  “The potion, of course. You look like you need it.” She looked pointedly at me.

  My eyes widened. “Why?”

  “You’re a little uptight, dear.”

  “That might be because I’m a prisoner,” I sighed. Why did everyone take this lightly?

  “Oh, right. I forgot.” She pursed her lips. “Do I have something you need? Or are you ready to try my potion of desire?”

  “What does this potion do?”

  “Well, this potion is for men only. It doesn’t work on women, seems only to give them an aching head,” she said, lost in her thoughts, and I wondered when she’d tried to use it on a woman. On second thought, I didn’t want to know.

  “Go on,” I pushed.

  “Any man to ingest it becomes consumed with lust. He must sate it with whatever woman gave it to him. It’s a wicked potion, and has a high reliability rating.”

  “People are so deceitful,” I mused. She only smiled, and I imagined she was one of the most deceitful.

  “I’ll take three,” I supplied.

  Her smile was malicious like a cat who’d caught the canary.

  Maybe it did.

  * * *

  Is it deceit when someone fools the one who’s been the most deceitful? So many adjectives tacked onto my name; I didn’t want deceitful attached. But neither did I want the meaning to come true: tragedy.

  Focusing on the deceit was just a shiny veneer covering up the fox in the henhouse. Also known as feelings.

  I had no problem with what I was doing. He had more than asked for it, but the unwanted nausea I felt needed an explanation. And being deceitful was what I was going to blame as I walked up to a red-cheeked, smooth-skinned serving girl. Be thankful I picked a pretty one.

  “Can I help you, miss?” she asked.

  Her smile lit up her face, and I suddenly regretted my choice, but forced myself to reply, “A mug of ale, please.”

  She nodded her head and left while I stood uncertainly in the inn, hoping that Weston didn’t get the idea to leave his room right now. I was sure he could use his creepy senses to hear me moving around, but I really hoped that he couldn’t hear what I would say. When the girl returned, I turned around and poured the three vials into the cup. I headed towards the stairs and then turned back around.

  “I completely forgot that I need to run an errand. Can you take this up to the tall, dark-haired man upstairs?” I asked the girl.

  “The Titan?” Her eyes lit up, and the fox shuffled around the henhouse.

  “Yes, he’s the one.”

  “I would love to!”

  I’m sure you would, I grumbled internally.
/>   “Don’t leave until he drinks some, okay? And don’t say it was from me.” That might have sounded strange, but I didn’t think she was even processing what I said.

  “Sure thing, miss,” she said excitedly while the fox made a bloody mess out of my chickens. I waited a couple of minutes after she went up the stairs, really hoping that Weston would take the bait. A bitter taste filled my mouth the longer the maid was gone.

  When I realized my plan was working, I swept the dead chickens out and headed out to Gallant.

  The fly against the fox.

  Thankfully, I could fly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  INHUMAN ENCOUNTERS

  Doubt believed he had the right to host shows in my mind. And yes, doubt was a he. Because men were the reason I was uncertain. One man in particular.

  I had Gallant ready in record time, although I kept dropping things which made the worst racket in the stable. If it were possible for a heart to beat out of a chest, mine would have.

  I had braided my hair in small pieces back from my face earlier as if I were preparing for war. The biggest battle in my life at that moment was the one being fought in my head. It wouldn’t win and stop me from doing the right thing.

  Weston was only the illusion of safety.

  In the end, his selfish motives would be the only thing that mattered to him. I might have been safe in the now, but once the seal was opened, no one would be.

  Doubtful and fearful would never be words tacked onto my name. Starting now.

  “There was one mistake with your plan.”

  My stomach plummeted while I kept my back to the deep voice that should have never been such a familiar one. Why had I ever believed I could trust an assassin? They killed for a living. Most of them.

  I was sure this assassin killed for sport.

  Screaming and promising bodily harm would’ve been something I would be doing now, but that was in the past. It had gotten me nowhere, so I calmly turned around to look at him.

  “What?” I asked, but I already knew when I looked into his eyes.

  I made an awful mistake.

  I had seen Hell in his eyes when he was angry; green angry flames that made me want to run.

  But this was something I had never seen before. Something soft and yet scary. Something that made me want to listen to his every command as long as he said it in that husky voice of his.

  Something that made me to want to run, just to get caught.

  I already knew what he was going to say, but I was speechless in my revelation. If nothing else on this trip, I finally realized why that woman was running away from that man in Alger.

  “The servant wasn’t the one who gave it to me, you were,” he told me.

  I had been tricked again. The woman who sold me the potion had known my plan and yet failed to mention this important fact. I already knew the answer to my next question, but I needed a little more time to think.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” I asked, not meeting his eyes. My gaze focused on his clenched fist, and I realized that I had never asked a sillier question.

  “Come here,” he demanded roughly.

  “Weston . . .” I backed up, only putting myself further into the corner of the stable. “You said potions didn’t work on you!” I said frantically. I was grasping at straws here . . . anything to get me out of this mess.

  My stomach dropped when he walked toward me with a cloud over his eyes. Whatever feelings I’d ever had were annihilated by the fact I was only a mere human girl. A virgin girl, at that. And he was a . . . non-human man. A fact that was now physically evident.

  Scarily evident.

  Somehow I had forgotten what he really was. He looked like a human man. Seemed like a human man. But there was no way I could have forgotten now. None.

  As he reached me in a couple of long strides, and I got a close up of the two teeth that were sharper than they should have been, I did what any sane girl would have done.

  I stabbed him.

  It wasn’t easy. The knife didn’t just slide in like it would butter. It had taken some pressure before it was buried all the way to the hilt in his stomach. Blood seeped onto my hand, and I forced down the sick feeling as the warm liquid covered my skin. He sucked in a breath and took a step back. I didn’t think about it twice before I ran to Gallant and hopped onto his back with the grace only my instinct of flight could have managed.

  We raced down the street while people jumped out of the way and cursed at us. Part of the street was blocked off by a couple of horses, and we jumped a fruit stand to get around it. The stand knocked to the ground and fruit scattered. I barely heard the yelling that followed over the drumming of my own heart and the loud clopping of Gallant’s hooves on the stone.

  When we made it out of the city and into the woods, I pulled up on Gallant’s reins. I took the man’s shirt I had stolen out and rubbed it all over Gallant. Then I rubbed myself with it and put it on. I had dropped a piece of my worn clothes all over the city with the hope that it would confuse Weston.

  If I didn’t just kill him . . .

  The fox was making a terrible mess in the henhouse. And yet, the fly seemed to have won. My hands were still shaking from stabbing Weston when I realized I had left my knife in his stomach. The thought had cold shivers traveling down my spine as we galloped through the forest. The moon was a tiny slit in the sky, making the night a dark one, as if it didn’t want to light the way for me.

  I sighed as I thought not even the moon had faith in me.

  * * *

  Surprised was a soft word to describe what I felt as we progressed further through the forest. I had no clue what direction we were going in, but any direction further from Weston was a good one. I wouldn’t head straight away to Undaley; that would most likely be the first direction Weston would search for me. If he couldn’t smell me, that is.

  When the sun began to rise, I stopped at a nearby pond to let Gallant get a drink. I was exhausted, but my nervousness was a shroud over it, keeping it from taking over. I’d been expecting Weston to show up at least eight times by now, but I hadn’t even felt the classic hair raise on my neck that usually alerted me to his presence. And now I realized why I had felt like that; because he was a true predator.

  I kneeled by the pond and washed the dried blood off my hands while I thought about what Weston was. Titans didn’t have magic. I remember hearing it was banned in the city. Nor did Titans have fangs. It wasn’t like they were huge or anything, but only slightly longer than average. Why was I trying to justify this? The man was closer to the wolf brand on his back than human.

  I pushed all thoughts of him out of my mind. He wouldn’t have any hold on me out here. I was done with Weston.

  He could have all my chickens; I didn’t need them. Feelings only got in the way, and I wouldn’t let them destroy Alyria.

  I was horrified when I realized how far away I was from Undaley. It almost made me want to turn around and stab Weston again.

  I looked at the map longingly and wished I could just blink and be there. I sighed as I sat up and got ready to head out again. I wouldn’t get anywhere sitting by a pond. Unfortunately.

  As we strolled into a small town nestled in a valley, I received more than a few strange looks in the men’s clothes I wore, but at this point, I was only glad I didn’t end up in another Latent City.

  When I saw a woman carrying a basket of dirty clothes down to the stream, I purchased them from her. The middle-aged brunette haggled with me, telling me what material each shirt was made of, and just to shut her up, I ended up paying a fortune for a bunch of dirty clothes. Grandmother would be furious. She taught me how to haggle by age eight, but Grandmother didn’t have a non-human/assassin after her.

  I purchased a knife as well, with the hope that I wouldn’t need to use it, and loaded myself up with dirty clothes. I grimaced at the smell, but whatever kept the assassin away. And the fangs.

  I headed back out into the unknown and didn�
��t make it very far before I was abruptly stopped.

  Frozen as someone would be in a moment of complete shock, and unfortunately, physically frozen.

  Just my luck.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A VIRGIN’S BLOOD

  I thought I was done for. That I was going to be stuck here forever. The only good thing about it was that the seal would never be opened because I would surely starve in a few days.

  We were in the middle of the forest and as still as a statue. Leaves fell around us and one tickled as it skimmed my cheek. I could only blink and move my mouth to talk. I only knew that because I had been randomly shouting for some help. I only hoped the right help would come.

  I sat frozen for hours staring into the dull forest in front me, and used all that time to imagine I was some monster’s dinner and had been caught in his trap. All those times thinking about how I would die, and this had never made the list. And of course, it would have been the worst one.

  My imagination had gone wild for the past hours with nothing to do but think. When I heard the heavy crunch of sticks and leaves, a chill ran down my spine, imagining nothing else but a hungry monster.

  I never imagined what came out instead.

  A dirty-faced boy with a rabbit on his shoulder.

  Sure, the boy wouldn’t have been far-fetched. But the rabbit? It felt like Alyria was purposely messing with me at this point.

  “Well, Tink, looks like we caught something,” the boy said.

  I assumed Tink was the rabbit.

  I stared at the boy with my mouth gaping while I realized I was what he’d caught. “Excuse me, but I’ve been stuck here for hours.”

  “Ma’am, that was the point,” he said, and I could see him digging around in my saddlebag out of the corner of my eye.

  I blinked. “You did this so you could rob me?” I hadn’t thought about this either. Apparently, my imagination was too wild and kept me from thinking logically.