Page 19 of The Wild Hunt (Sold to the Fae Duet #1)

“Oh, Delta! It is you!” Akari crawls from her hiding place and hurries towards where I have fallen.

She doesn’t bother helping me up; instead, she lets herself fall practically on top of me.

She clutches me like I’m a plank of floating wood in a depthless sea, and she doesn’t know how to swim.

“I am so happy to see you! Oh, you’re hurt! ”

She eases her hold on me and turns a critical eye to every scratch and scrape over me. She eyes my torn dress and her brow furrows in concern.

I shrug. “I had a run in with a Skraeming Dhevilkin,” I say casually, as if it’s something that happens every day.

“A what ?” Akari’s face is horrified as I explain the creature’s appearance.

“But the good news is, it seems to be afraid of water, and we are on the safe side of the river.” I choose not to think that there are likely Skraeming Dhevilkin on this side of the river, too. Or perhaps something worse.

Akari looks nervously around us, as if having similar thoughts.

“Let’s get back inside the rock circle,” she urges. “I’ve been here for hours and nothing has discovered me yet.”

She gets to her feet before reaching out a hand to help me up, then beckons me towards the hidey-hole. I watch her lithe figure crawl through the small space first, then follow quickly after taking another quick look around .

It’s cool within the rock circle, the tall formations blocking the rays of sunlight from reaching us.

A thick cushion of grass blankets the earth, while large, red mushrooms squat against the cracks where each rock meets in neat succession.

It almost appears as if someone planted them there deliberately. Kind of like a faery circle…

“How long do you think it’s been?” Akari asks as she settles down onto a patch of flattened grass, no doubt where she had been biding her time until I had arrived.

I drop to my ass across from her and settle back onto a rock.

“Maybe six hours?” I guess with a shrug.

I glance up at the open sky, and the sun glares back from its central position.

“I’d say it’s midday.” My stomach growls loudly, and I smirk at Akari.

I pat my belly. “Yep, that’s my stomach telling me it’s time for lunch.

I don’t suppose these mushrooms are edible? ”

Akari snorts as I poke the red shroom to my left dubiously. “I don’t think I’m willing to test that theory.”

“Yeah, me neither.” I drop my hands back to the grass and start picking the strands absentmindedly. “I found Jasmin earlier…”

Akari sits up eagerly, “Jasmin? Is she ok? Where is she?” She looks back at the entrance as if Jasmin were about to poke her innocent face through the gap.

I shake my head, and Akari’s shoulders drop.

“Oh,” she says sadly. She swipes away the single tear that falls down her cheek. “How? Was it… the Skraeming Dhevilkin?”

I shake my head again and stare dead into her eyes.

“It was an unChosen.” Akari gasps. “Bludgeoned her to death because she had the audacity to believe Jasmin’s tokens would become hers.

She thought that the males who were to chase Jasmin would take her instead.

” I shake my head, ripping a sizeable chunk of grass free in my anger.

“If the Skraeming Dhevilkin hadn’t killed her, I probably would have done it myself. ”

I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if I am even capable of murder. But at that moment, I believe I could have.

We sit in silence for a while until my stomach growls again.

“Alright, I have to find something to eat,” I announce, jumping to my feet.

Akari startles at my sudden movement, then pales as she realizes I am leaving the rock circle.

“I’ll just wander through the clearing, see if I can find any familiar-looking berries or something.

Maybe a fish will jump out of the river and cook itself for us? ”

Akari snorts but gets to her feet as well. “I’ll come with you. I don’t want to be alone again.”

I’m about to tell her to stay hidden, but decide against it. Not only because of the puppy dog eyes she sends my way, but also because I don’t want to be alone either. And two sets of eyes are better than one.

“Alright, come along then,” I tell her. “I want to climb a tree while we are out here, too. I want to find the camp.”

I drop to my knees and crawl out from the small opening. I pause with my head sticking out before I let the rest of my body follow. The clearing is silent and still.

I lend Akari a hand to help her to her feet after she crawls through behind me, then dust the dirt off my bare knees.

“Why do you want to find the camp?” Akari whispers, her eyes darting this way and that. “So we can get as far away from it as possible? ”

“Actually, I want to get as close to it as possible.”

Akari gasps, and I grin at her over my shoulder as I make my way past the tree line and back into the clearing from earlier.

“I figured, where better to hide than right under their dainty little noses?”

Akari is silent for a moment as I scour the nearby vegetation. Nothing nearby looks edible, but I won’t give up hope just yet.

“That’s a brilliant idea,” she says. “When they try to track us, they’ll get confused by the scent of us remaining in the camp from the last couple of days. They won’t be able to find us. And then we will be free! Delta, we could go home!”

She looks a little sad at the revelation, and I don’t blame her. Her parents were so ashamed of her sexuality that they fucking sold her. A dead daughter was apparently easier to deal with than a lesbian one. Fucking homophobes.

I reach out and grip her hand firmly, smiling encouragingly.

“You could see her again.”

Akari’s eyes alight with hope, and she smiles back. I give her hand another squeeze before letting go and wandering further into the field. I spy a bunch of unfamiliar berries, but decide to give them a miss. If the fae hadn’t fed us these back at the camp, there had to be a reason for it.

“Over here!” Akari calls. She’s over by the tree line, looking up into the foliage of a tall tree.

I jog over to her and look up to see what she is pointing at.

I have to squint against the sun’s glare but sure enough, right up the very fucking top of the tree is a bunch of purple banana looking fruits.

And these had most definitely been on the menu at camp.

I remember dubiously peeling back the skin and biting into the jelly-like flesh of the fruit.

It has tasted like white chocolate, and marshmallows, and almonds, and bananas all at once.

I would die to have another taste. Literally, apparently, because this tree was not designed for climbing.

The bark was mostly smooth, with tiny fissures here and there leading up the trunk. It would not be easy, but I was sure as shit going to try.

“How do you think-” Akari stops as I kick off my slipper and set a bare foot into one of the tiny ridges. “You aren’t going to climb it, are you?”

My foot slips free immediately, so I switch tactics and grip with the tips of my toes. I haul myself off the ground and grab at another barely there edge.

“This will work,” I say with a lot more certainty than I feel. “With you guiding me from the ground, telling me where to put my toes, I’ll reach the fruit in no time!”

“Oh, I don’t know about this!”

I’m three-quarters of the way up the tree when my toes decide to slacken of their own accord.

I hug the tree tightly, like a koala bear, but that doesn’t stop me from sliding down a meter, the palms of my hands and the side of my face, which I unfortunately have pressed against the bark, painfully losing a layer or two of skin from the top.

I stop my fall pretty quickly, but fuck does it hurt.

Akari is calling frantic nothings at me from the ground as my trembling muscles cuddle the damn tree as if my life depended on it. Which it very well may. “Oh! Oh, God! Oh Delta! Hold on! Hold on, Delta!”

I take a couple of soothing breaths, then call down, “I’m alright! Let’s keep going! ”

Akari curses, but soon I find divots for my fingertips, and she is once again guiding me. Seemingly an eternity later, I throw an aching leg over a branch and pull myself up to straddle it.

I cuddle the trunk again, this time in gratitude. I fucking made it! My back and neck are uncomfortably dripping with sweat right now, but I’m too fucking exhausted to care. I just sit and hold the tree for who knows how long.

Eventually, Akari calls out.

“Delta? Are you ok? You made it, Delta. You made it!”

I throw out a half-hearted fist pump, then push myself up off the branch. Alright, hard part over. Now to pick some fruit. I shimmy away from the trunk to the first plump bunch of fruit. They smell so fucking delicious.

I groan, reaching out to pick one off to toss down to Akari, when a shrill voice makes me jump clean off the branch.

“Now that was most entertaining.”

I’m so fucking lucky I didn’t just bounce off the branch and into nothing.

One of the female pixies from earlier is lounging amongst the fruit, taking tiny nibbles from the fruity couch she lounges on.

“I thought you was a goner, I did,” another squeaky voice chimes in, and the male jumps from the fruit he’s been eating to the branch before me. “Look at your pretty face, all torn up.”

He pouts, then just as quickly winks and flits back to his bounty.

“Stop talking to it, you know it can’t understand us,” the final pixie female says, as she flies by my ear. Her teeny tiny wings send blissful, cool air across my sweat-soaked neck. I have to stop myself from grabbing her and holding her there as my personal little fan .

“Um, hi,” I say awkwardly, giving a little wave. Fuck, I was a dweeb.

Three identical squeaks fill the air, and one of the females has to catch herself as she falls right off her fruit. Her wings beat rapidly as she parks herself in front of my face. Mmm, lovely cool breeze .

“Can you… Do you understand us?” she asks.