Page 36 of Did It Have To Be Gnomes?! (Carry A Faerie #1)
When Miles stepped out of my reach and looked at me, there was no recognition in his gaze at all.
His eyes were red and starting to become bloodshot, and honestly, if I wasn’t already half in love with the guy, I would’ve been screaming and running for the hills because wow . He looked freaky as fuck.
“Get out! Leave this place!” he screamed, running at me with his hands outstretched like he was planning on choking me while his familiar sort of growled in Chaos’s direction.
Miles’s gate and stick fell to the ground, and a herd of red-eyed gnomes flooded into our safe zone as I dodged my soon-to-be boyfriend so he couldn’t accidentally murder me.
There was a sentence I never thought I’d say.
More gnomes piled in, but I couldn’t pay attention to them because Miles was still screaming, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t his words he was yelling. The curse was trying to make us leave.
I shuddered.
Could a curse actually take over a person and… speak through them?
“Leave before you and your friends are killed! Leave before I turn your spirits into ghosts and your bodies into the living dead.”
My eyes widened at Miles. Holy fucking shit.
Yes. Apparently, yes, the curse could speak through people.
Before I could blink, Aeson and Lyric threw their own gates down and attacked each other.
The distraction allowed Miles to reach me, and his hands wrapped around my throat. But I wasn’t worried. My nullness would take effect any second now. He squeezed.
Any second…
I watched his irises blink several times before the red bled back into his pretty brown. He was close enough I could see flecks of gold in them. It took Miles a beat to realize what he was doing, and he gasped loudly and ripped his hands away.
The red started trickling back in, so I quickly grabbed his hands and pulled him into my chest. Sola was back to rubbing against me again, letting out a sort of whine of sorrow.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmured as he wrapped his arms around my waist. “Oh my god. I… I don’t even know what just happened. I couldn’t… I couldn’t control myself.”
I patted his back and shifted him closer to Lyric and Aeson. “It’s alright, sugar butt. You’re okay now.”
He didn’t even react to the goofy endearment, but I didn’t have time to reassure him more right now. I had to stop the other two from killing each other.
I managed to reach Lyric first, so I grabbed their shirt, yanked them closer to me, and touched their shoulder. It took them a beat to shake themself out of it and face me with their now-hazel eyes.
“Holy shit.”
“I know.” I didn’t say anything else. Instead, I reached out with my other hand and grabbed onto Aeson’s arm. Miles remained attached to my chest with Sola pressed against my shoulder.
Thank fuck.
Aeson blinked a few times, then looked at me with brown eyes before facing Lyric. “Holy crap, I’m so sorry.”
Lyric waved them away. “So am I.”
Everyone was nullified for the time being. Thank fucking god.
That had been… rough.
Now we just had about seven hundred red-eyed gnomes to worry about.
And all we could do was kick at them since I didn’t want to let go of any of my friends.
“Goddamit!” Chaos yelled. “Guys, you gotta get them off me.”
Glancing at Chaos, I winced because there were a ton of gnomes surrounding him and Clucky, and they kept taking turns jumping on the poor kid.
Clucky was snapping at them and trying to whip them with her tail, but it was difficult work because she obviously didn’t want to move from her practitioner’s shoulder.
I had to yell to be heard over all the meeping. “We need to put the baby gates around Chaos, then we can stand guard.”
“Sounds like a plan… kind of.” Aeson gestured to the baby gates that were lying flat on the ground and covered in evil gnomes.
Lyric plucked a couple of gnomes off Miles’s legs, then bent down and grabbed the edge of a baby gate. They growled as they tried to lift it, but all the gnomes were crawling over it, trying to get to Lyric since they were now the closest to them.
Aeson didn’t hesitate to reach down, grab onto the baby gate, and help Lyric lift it.
Once they had that up, I made sure to hold onto them as they carefully moved over to Chaos.
We probably looked ridiculous with two people hauling a baby gate with a trail of gnomes hanging on for the ride, me holding onto them both and following as close as I could with an entire full-grown man clinging to my chest.
Not that I would’ve complained at all when Miles was hugging me. I just sort of wished I could get a video of this little silly maneuver.
Chaos had his own gate panel, so Miles let go of me and worked on hooking them together while Lyric and Aeson retrieved the other panels.
While everyone else did that, I moved quickly between them, nullifying them for a few seconds at a time so we didn’t end up with a big brawl or something.
Chaos yelled when a gnome jumped on the top of his head, distracting him from his magical workings. Clucky, who was wrapped around his neck, tried to get it, but the gnome grabbed onto Chaos’s hair and got so tangled the cockatrice couldn’t grab it.
Miles surprised me by reaching over the gate he was fiddling with and plucking the gnome off the kid without hesitation. He threw it into the horde, then went back to fixing the gates without saying a thing, acting like he grabbed gnomes off people every day.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that his fear fled when it was a kid that needed help. If the roles had been reversed, Miles would’ve been screaming and freaking out, but the second someone else needed him…
The thought made me smile and distracted me for a moment.
“What the hell are you doing, Win?” Lyric snarled at me, making me wince.
I reached over and grabbed their arm, doing my best to push my null nature to the max so it’d go through their clothes. They shook themself out, gave me a nod, then went back to get the last panel with Aeson.
While they were pulling it up, I set my hand on the kid’s shoulder, giving him a break for a good thirty seconds before I went back to Miles.
We were working as a team, even if the others were throwing insults at each other every two seconds. But finally, we had the baby gates in a U-shape, ends pressed against the wall and wrapped around Chaos.
The necromancer was really concentrating and didn’t seem to be paying us any attention, so when he spoke, I jumped.
“It’s calling something down here… something big.”
“What?” I looked at him in shock. “What do you mean?”
Instead of answering, he waved at Aeson, and his brother spoke.
“He means the curse called on something else to stop him from breaking it, so we need to be careful. In a few seconds, gnomes aren’t gonna be the only thing we have to worry about.
” And then to make matters worse, he threw out, “Curses are made from necromancer magic… remember that.”
“What the fuck?” Miles whispered under his breath. “Is it zombies?”
At the same time, as if on the same wavelength, Lyric said, “Are we about to face motherfucking zombies?”
Zombies?
It… it… it couldn’t be…
We couldn’t possibly have to take on zombies…
Right?
No one answered, but it didn’t take long for us to see—or rather, hear—what the kids meant.
“Oooooohhhhhhhhhh!” a voice yelled from the indoor staircase, and the sound gave me chills.
Miles hissed.
“Oooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Sola squawked in alarm.
“Ooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” it said even louder.
“What is it?” I whispered to Miles.
“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Ghosts.”
“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
“Ghosts are coming.”
The chills on my arms grew, and I swallowed hard as my heartbeat picked up. Ghosts? There were ghosts coming down here? What the actual hell?
I mean, better than zombies, right?
But were they?
Ghosts were dangerous. At least the poltergeist kind. And any spirit could be turned into a poltergeist if they were angry enough.
With the way this cursed seal was angering everyone, I could only imagine how bad those poor spirits were. If the curse was sending another being to stop us, to stop Chaos, then they were going to be dangerous as hell.
“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
Fuck me.