Page 11 of Bound to the Orc Hunter

Dear god, the man has a great ass.

My mouth goes dry and my fingers flex as I imagine it would feel as firm and warm as his chest.

Branikk turns back to me, and when his sharp eyes catch me looking, a knowing gleam heats them.

The flutters come back, filling my whole damned tummy until I feel like I can barely breathe. Bad flutters!

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Branikk stomps, the repetition of his movements hypnotic, full of primal power.

I’m not much of a dancer, but his dance calls to something in me, making my toes tap inside my work boots. My body starts to sway forward and join his…

I jerk myself upright. Nope. Not falling for a handsome liar ever again! And telling me we’re already married sure is one hell of a lie. It’s even more of a whopper than his green makeup and all this fantasy stuff.

Before I can get a good scowl going to remind him—and the hidden cameras—that I’m not falling for any of this, the ground beside him moves.

A clump of moss rises upward, turning into a little hat on the head of… what the hellisit?

A tiny man with light-green skin and white hair and beard rises from the earth, spinning like a ballerina doing a prolonged pirouette. He comes to a halt, facing us, his arms thrown out like a gymnast who just stuck the landing. Only two-feet high, he’s dressed in a patchwork quilt of brown, green, and blue leaves.

Then another appears from underneath a different clump of moss, a little woman this time. More swirl out of the ground all around us, each striking a pose and wearing a moss cap. No matter how small they are, they aren’t children, their stocky builds made of muscle instead of baby fat. They all have white hair, but their faces range from young to middle-aged, so it must simply be their hair color.

Branikk stops dancing. “You came.”

“You called,” one of the tiny women says. “An orc, a unicorn, and— What are you?”

As one, they all turn to look at me. “It’s an elf!” “It can’t be. Look at the ears.” “But it’s not green, and what is that hair color?”

“Hey, no!” I throw out my hands. Damn, they’re taking this whole fantasy thing to the extreme. “I’m a human, not an elf.”

The woman continues. “An orc, a unicorn, and a human have called us here. What do you have for the gnomes?”

“An offering of—” Branikk grinds to a halt, pointing to the bouncy castle and throwing me a questioning glance.

“A bouncy castle,” I say.

The gnome squints at it, her expression unimpressed, and front flips across the clearing. The rest follow her, tumbling like a troupe of acrobats, not a single one of them walking. The space where she came out of the ground is… not a hole. The removal of the moss now sitting on her head left behind an oblong patch of dark-brown dirt. I poke it with the toe of my boot—it feels solid, instead of like a trapdoor to a hiding space. So where’d she come from?

And what is she? Shelly, back at the carnival, is a person with dwarfism, but these people are way too short to be the same, even discounting the light-green skin.

Maybe they’re holograms? Actors filmed somewhere else and projected here, which means the moss hats they now wear are holograms, too. Whatever this all is, they sure seem to be spending a lot more money on special effects than I’d expect for a reality-TV program.

She touches one of the upright pillars, and the plastic surface dimples below her hand. There’s no way a hologram could do that, right?

The world seems to waver around me, or maybe I’m the one wavering. Oh, god. What if none of this is special effects? What does it mean?

“It’s soft,” the gnome says, as more of them join her in peering and poking at the inflated plastic. “What’s it for?”

“It’s for fun,” I say. For one of my first teenage jobs, I’d worked for a company supplying these to children’s birthday parties. “You go inside and jump up and down.”

She narrows her eyes at me for a second, then snaps her fingers at one of the young men and points.

He does a forward flip into the bouncy castle and makes a tentative jump. The whole thing shivers when he lands, just as ifhe weighs something. He makes a couple more jumps, bouncing higher each time, then lets out a big whoop.

The others pour inside, and in only a couple of moments, the entire bouncy castle shakes as a full mass of gnomes bounce, their laughter shrieking through the forest. There’s no way holograms could make the castle move like that unless there’s some kind of mechanism under it to make it shake.

God, this is all too fucking weird.

“The gnomes love your creation, my bride,” Branikk grins at me, eyes warm with approval.

---