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twenty-seven

It felt to me like I was being dragged and pulled through holes in the ground while being paralyzed by magic I couldn’t even see—until that same magic spit me out of itself with that same strength. Like that invisible shell that had been about me had finally thrown me out.

Rune and I both hit the ground on our side, and we started rolling, though his arms weren’t on me any longer, and I could suddenly move mine. I could use them to stop rolling before I hit something with my body and broke a bone.

Eventually, I did. Eventually I stopped spinning and rolling, and I sat up because my legs were still too numb to hold me. I blinked my eyes to see better, and at first I thought I couldn’t, that I was still blinded by that magic, but then I realized it was just the darkness.

The sky was dark. The moon was far away and far too small to give off any real light, and we were no longer in Cloakwood that I could tell.

Fucking hell, we were in another place entirely.

“Rune,” I whispered, surprised that I could even speak as I took in my surroundings. There were trees, normal trees—for Verenthia—that started not thirty feet ahead of us, and then there were others far to the right that looked black . Completely black—trunk and branches and leaves and all.

Behind us were one-story buildings made out of grey bricks. The soil underneath us was dry and there was very little light coming from those buildings, white light the same as that of the bird Rune had left me with. The bird that had long since disappeared.

Rune moved.

He’d rolled a few feet away from me, and he pushed himself to sit up, eyes wide open and alert as he looked at the darkness at our sides, and the buildings at our back.

His eyes locked on mine for a heartbeat. Then he pointed his finger ahead of us, and he whispered, “ Get to those trees at whatever cost .”

He said it so slowly that I barely heard it, but when I did, my body moved like it was at his command. The normal trees that stopped abruptly where the extra dry soil began—that’s where I needed to go, and that’s where I would be going.

Rune was on his feet, and so was I, by some miracle, and then we were running. I still had no idea what the hell had happened or where we were, but we could talk later. As soon as we got to that forest, we would talk about everything.

Unfortunately for us, it wasn’t meant to be.

Something wrapped around my legs while I was still halfway to the forest and held them together as tightly as that magic had held my entire body. Before I knew it, I was falling forward.

I slammed onto the ground on the side of my face and all my lights turned off at once.

* * *

Movement. The sound of footsteps was everywhere suddenly, and then I was being picked up. Sat up. My arms were being pulled behind me, too, and then something cold and warm at the same time wrapped around my wrists.

My eyes opened. Every alarm in my head rang at the same time. Rune was beside me, eyes half-closed, blood on his left temple—and two men were behind him, holding his arms back while a third locked something around his wrists.

A thick chain with colorful electricity bursts moving on the surface of the metal that looked like tiny lightning bolts.

My heart stood perfectly still. I turned, tried to move, tried to get closer to him, but someone grabbed me from behind and stopped me.

Finally, I had no choice but to look ahead at the two men and the woman standing in front of us, watching us with ice-cold smiles on their faces.

They were possibly some of the most beautiful beings I had ever seen in my life—and their pupils were slit like a lizard’s.

Incubi.

The fear that suddenly exploded inside me emptied my lungs. My heart was trying to break through my ribcage as I tried to look for a way out, hoping against all odds that there was a place to hide, somewhere we could crawl to, somewhere we could run because I couldn’t accept the fact that we were chained and in the presence of three incubi—no, seven. The others who’d been standing behind us, chaining our hands together, came forward. Another three men and a woman.

Fuck, it was so hard to breathe. I was sweating from head-to-toe seconds in. They were absolutely gorgeous, all of them, and their smiles were made to kill, and their smooth skins could have been drawn rather than made.

I looked at Rune and he was dragging himself as well as he could closer to me, but his eyes were on them.

“What do we have here? Intruders, huh,” said one of the incubi, a tall guy wearing a leather vest with nothing underneath, so that I could see all the tattoos that marked the skin of his muscular arms. Fucking hell, how was he real? His brown hair and the diamond stud on his ear and his white teeth…

“Must be our lucky night,” one the incubi said, the one with short blonde hair and chocolate brown skin. Her body was a perfect hourglass shape and the golden dress she wore was as tight on her as a second skin. I could see her nipples peeking through, and fuck if I wasn’t getting turned on.

Please, please, please, no…

Out of all places, we had to end up here?!

“Look at that—he’s delicious,” said the other incubus as she looked at Rune. My stomach twisted. She was also gorgeous, slimmer, taller, with hair as black as the night and eyes so green they could have been made out of moss.

“ Mine,” said the other, and actually winked at Rune, and now I was imagining grabbing her by the hair and dragging her to another fucking country, screaming— he’s mine, bitch!

“We were transported here by an imp,” Rune finally said, his voice as composed as ever, as dark and as low. “We don’t want any trouble. If you let us go, we will leave.”

The men and women looked at one another for a moment.

Then the guy with the tattoos stepped forward, gripped Rune’s hair and turned his head to the side to look at the tattoo on his neck.

Rune’s face was right in front of mine now, his eyes on me. Dark. Expressionless.

I’m sorry, I tried to tell him with mine, though I still had no idea how in the fuck this even happened.

But then the guy let go of him and stepped back, squatted in front of us.

Even the stubble on his cheeks looked smooth as hell. “A marked fae—we certainly don’t get that every day,” he said.

Another incubus came closer, stopped behind the tattooed guy and raised on his tiptoes as he stared at Rune’s neck, smiling an awful smile. “I’ve seen something like that before. That’s not just a mark, man—that’s a seal.”

Every inch of my skin rose in goose bumps.

All of the men and women suddenly laughed and whistled, clearly surprised. Meanwhile, I had no idea what the hell that even meant.

“Are you sure?” the tattooed guy said.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure. I’ve seen it before. I know how it feels. It’s a seal, all right,” the incubus said, grinning ear to ear.

“Hmm.” The man wrapped his fingers around his chin, eyes on Rune. “How much of you did it seal, then?

“We don’t want trouble,” Rune said, again, perfectly calmly.

Me? I was just trying to get my hands to stop shaking because they were being held together by a chain with tiny lightning bolts that could potentially burn me if I touched them.

“But you found it anyway,” the incubus said, and then his eyes moved to me.

I swear my entire body stopped shaking just like that, and my stomach was twisting and turning. The way he looked at me with those strange eyes the color of whiskey would have made me blush had I not been as terrified as I was turned on.

“And what about you? Why hide that face? You sure as fuck ain’t ugly.” He leaned in and pushed down my hood, and I hadn’t even noticed I’d had it on still. I couldn’t move but at least when he came closer, I saw so much more of his eyes. I saw the colors in them, the pupils, and the raw malice that my instincts detected. It didn’t make all that arousal fade away, but at least I leaned back a little.

“Look at that. Such pretty eyes,” he said. “What are you?”

The word slipped from me: “Fomorian.”

He grinned. “And you, too, were transported here by an imp?”

An imp. I’d had no idea that’s what that tall guy was. More than that—I had no clue that an imp could transport anything to anywhere—fucking hell, what had I done?!

“Yes. We were both transported,” I choked.

“But the nearest Cloakwood town is still far away—the imp couldn’t have seen the Enclave, could he?” This from the girl with the dark hair, who had a finger between her teeth as she spoke and looked at Rune.

The fire that ignited in me at that beautiful face…

“He climbed a tree,” Rune said through gritted teeth. “He climbed a tree before he transported us. If you let us go?—”

Their laughter cut him off.

“Oh, you must have pissed someone off really badly!” said one of the other incubi.

The memory of that imp’s face was in my mind. God, if I could just get these chains off and run back to him right now, I would knock his fucking teeth out for real.

Tears pricked the back of my eyes. Regret made a mess out of my insides, not because of me, but because I’d dragged Rune into this. Because he was a damn fool and had hugged me when he could have just let me go.

“We’re going to have our fun with these two.” The tattooed man stood up. “Let’s take them back to Lorei.”

The next moment, two of them grabbed me by the arms.

An incubus put me over his shoulder and his ass was right in front of my face, but I couldn’t even scream. And the chains did sting a little when they touched my skin, so I didn’t dare even try to break my hands free.

My eyes squeezed shut and I cursed myself in my head for not standing there by those trees with my bird to wait for Rune. I could have avoided all of this. I could have spared him this fucking madness. I should have just kept my fucking mouth shut.

Typical Nilah.

How typical of me to doom anyone who got close to me with my bullshit. Anyone at all.

Now look at us.

Angry tears spilled out of my eyes, and I could only see Rune’s feet as he walked with two others beside him somewhere in front of the guy carrying me. I apologized to him a thousand times in my mind, hoping somehow he’d hear it.

Then, I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, and I got my shit together.