Page 4 of Sacked by the Quarterback (The Locker Room Playbooks #1)
The elf’s whisper-quiet steps should have kept him well hidden. And they would—but not from me. His long brown hair was swept back and tied out of his way. My mouth watered. What if I gave in to the urge to sink my pointed canines into his neck, dragging them down the flesh to hear him cry out? My body tensed, eager to take take take . No. It wasn’t time. But soon, he’d remember he belonged to me.
“Did you see that?” I froze, my long fingers stretched toward a low hanging bunch of nectar fruit. I gestured with my chin. “Over there.”
Vulen, my assistant, turned his gaze toward the tree line. Nothing moved, though I was certain I’d seen an unnatural shadow. “I’m sorry, Kalysin. I must have missed it.” His gray eyes swept back to me. “Perhaps you should have a drink of water. It’s been so hot and dry?—”
“I’m fine”— absolutely not hallucinating, or insane, or seeing things —“unlike these nectar fruit. They should be smooth, shiny. A vibrant green. But this whole orchard is sickly.” I touched the cluster of fruit, and half of them dropped to the ground, joining countless others. I picked up several and gave them to Vulen, who labeled and packed them away for inspection.
Lord Elmar had demanded I meet with him that morning about the crops. I’d rushed in late, meeting Vulen at the door. Lord Elmar had been in his conservatory.
“What am I giving you coin for, Kalysin, as my Overseer of Lands, if you don’t actually oversee ?” He clenched a freshly picked furry yellow fruit in his hand so hard the fruit’s skin began to split, separating from the flesh. “Consequences, Kalysin, and dire ones, if this continues—your tardiness and the deteriorating harvest. You should be able to do something since your own lands are producing. We all must make sacrifices.” He dropped the mangled fruit, and it hit the marble floor with a muffled wet thud. A servant swept in and cleaned up every trace.
I’d bowed in acquiescence, unwilling to brave Lord Elmar’s reaction if I told him the reason I was late was because his messenger had notified me at an ungodly early hour, and I’d arrived as soon as I could.
As Vulen and I finished with the nectar fruit orchard, taking a few more samples, I panicked over what to tell Lord Elmar. What were samples of crops going to show, other than the simple fact the plants weren’t getting enough water?
“We’re going to the brambleberries next?” Vulen asked, adjusting his water packs.
“Yes.” Lord Elmar had also made it clear our rate of crop monitoring was unsatisfactory. “I don’t want another meeting like this morning’s if we can help it.”
“I was afraid he would strike you,” Vulen whispered as we made our way across Lord Elmar’s vast lands to the next planted plot, our sandaled feet kicking up a plume of dust behind us as though the ground didn’t remember what it was like to be wet.
“Me too,” I admitted. “But it’s no matter. I’m fortunate Lord Elmar gave me a position other than as a servant or messenger.” Or so I kept reminding myself.
The brambleberry bushes were planted in interminably long tracts. We settled under a scrubby tree that provided some shade about halfway down one of the lines. Vulen removed the packs he carried and wiped the sweat from his forehead. I drank from my waterskin, half empty already. I swallowed, then knelt in the sandy dirt, peering under the lowest brambleberry branches. A concerning number of hard, green-white fruit. After carefully plucking two of the few ripe black ones, I offered Vulen one and popped the other in my mouth. The sweet, tangy juice rushed over my tongue, and I closed my eyes, taking brief joy in one of the few perks of my work. I hummed, transported back to my time as a youngling, raiding my mother’s brambleberry bushes with— My brows knit together. I couldn’t recall my playmate’s features, much less their name.
But the headache I had from the effort to remember was very real indeed. They’d been happening increasingly often, as were the dreams slipping through my mind like a handful of seawater as soon as I woke each morning.
“Are you well, Kalysin?” Vulen asked, his head tilted to the side.
“No. This damned heat.” I spit out a seed that had lodged in my teeth. “Let’s get this over with.”
We trudged onward, the top branches of the long, staked rows of thorny bushes repeating the same story as the lower ones with the addition of curled, sun-scorched leaves.
“Do you remember when it last rained?” I asked Vulen.
He frowned. “I—maybe late spring? Or perhaps it was early spring.” Vulen stared off in the distance, over the rolling hills and the cloudless blue sky.
“I can’t remember either,” I admitted. The rains had not come this summer to fill the streams and rivers to bursting like they had in the past, yet I’d held out hope the drought hadn’t affected the crops. Between the brambleberries, the nectar fruit earlier, and the sickly patches of spike melons we’d inspected before them, this was nothing like I’d ever seen.
The midday summer sun burned my tanned arms, but my skin prickled as though a winter chill had blown in. Someone was watching me.
Not us.
Me .