Page 50 of Faerie Hunted

He leaned his weight into me like he sensed me getting worse and worse.

My imagination.

“It’ll be fine, Noren,” I whispered. “We’ll make it out of here. Just give me a second to figure out a plan and I’ll free you.”

He whined again and pushed into me hard enough to strain my wrist.

My arm felt like it was being stung by an entire nest of hornets. The sensation brought a wave of acid to my stomach and my mouth filled with a vile bitter taste.

I wasn’t sure how long we drove. I slipped in and out of consciousness until the drone of tires over tarmac changed to the rough crunch of gravel. Eventually, the vehicle pulled to a stop and a ring of large trees obscured any view I had of the sky.

The men came around to the back and a wave of magic had one of the walls sliding open.The brutes from the roadblock last night. The dude with the single eye glared at me before he grabbed the rope around my ankles and hauled me out.

I kicked at him, the hit lacking any real strength.

My legs turned to rubber and the rest of me jelly, neither part working in tandem with the other. Not only did my feet not make contact with the brute but I keeled over, losing my balance in the process. I listed to the side and he jerked me up.

“Get up, girl,” the man with one eye growled. “You’d think you’d never been tied up before. You can walk.”

No, I actually couldn’t. My body refused to hold me upright.

Growling in frustration, he threw me over his shoulder as though I weighed nothing at all. He barked out a command to one of the others, who then dragged a howling mad direwolf out of the back.

Every step he took jarred the breath from my lungs and sent my ribs clacking together.

Finally he set me down and grabbed my face, forcing me to stare straight ahead. “Look. What do you see?”

In front of us, a giant wall stretched as far as I could see to the right and the left. Made of tightly stacked gray stones, the wall shimmered, vacillating between airy lightness and solid matter.

What was on the other side?

Craning my head high, I looked up, up, the top of the wall nonexistent as it stretched up into the puffy clouds of dawn.

My stomach dipped and swirled in surprise. Vertigo had me tilting dangerously backward. This was crazy.

Almost too crazy to be believed, and I’d seen some insane things over the years.

“Will you stay put like a good girl?” the man whispered in his razor-edged voice, directly next to my ear.

I winced, immediately regretting it. He saw the motion anyway and chuckled.

A second later he wrenched my head back with one hand and slid a thick golden chain over my face with the other. The necklace dropped to my collarbone, and the small stone at the center, adding weight, found the natural hollow at the base of my throat.

The cool metal warmed against my skin.

“What’s this?” I croaked.

“It keeps the wall from destroying you on impact, sweetheart. Trust me. You’re going to want to keep it on.”

“Free my hands and I’ll take it off and choke you with it,” I snapped back.

He chuckled in mild amusement at my comeback and pushed me forward. There was enough give in the ropes around my ankles for me to be able to shuffle but running away would be impossible. I’d trip and fall flat on my face. A terrible whine sounded and I glanced over to see four other men hauling Noren toward the wall, each one of them the size of a heavyweight champion.

They hadn’t put a necklace on the direwolf.

Would he be okay?

I struggled against One Eye.

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