Page 414 of Flirting with Darkness

My death knell.

Gaze fixed upward, I watch as the branches sway of their own accord before each one bends downward in unison.

Directly at me.

They point at me like massive gnarled fingers, and in that moment, I know. It’s their attention that weighs on me.

I try to quiet my breathing, try to silence my racing heart, and staunch the voice in my head telling me to scream. I go still, settling even deeper into the thorns, hopeful that stillness is the cure for whatever drew the tree’s attention.

I am wrong.

Cracking, like an ax to a log, drags my gaze right over me in time to see thick vines sprout from the tree’s branches. The vines grow long with thick spiked thorns in moments. They dangle over me, stretching until they can reach into the bush and lash themselves around my wrists and ankles, wrapping themselves tighter than I ever tied my flax ropes.

Another vine, the thickest yet, loops around my middle.

I’m shaking. Not just my fingers anymore. My whole body quakes.

I don’t know what’s coming for me, but whatever it is, it wants me exactly where I am.

Please, Goddess. Mother, Maiden, and Wisened One, help me in my time of need. Pull your daughter from these weeds. In your name, so mote it be.

I recite psalms in my mind. Scripture is wrong about demons, and it may well be wrong about many other things, but praying is what I know.

And with the first mental recitation, a flash of white light blinds me through my closed lids.

I can’t turn away, can’t shield my eyes from it. All I can do is lie there and hope the brilliant light doesn’t burn my eyes away.

I crack a single lid a hairsbreadth open but all there is, all I can see, is endless white light.

“Goddess?” It’s hardly a murmur, mostly breath.

“I am no god, little bird, but you’re welcome to call me that in the bedroom if it pleases you.”

I squint through the blinding light, trying to focus on that honeyed voice.

Backlit like a holy host, the fae king looks down at me with a grin etched on his face.

“You! Why…? How?”

A question flickers in his gaze for a moment before he yanks me out of the bush by the waist.

“Hey! Ow!”

“Quiet. It didn’t hurt,” he says smugly before slinging me over his shoulder like a sack of flour.

He’s right. It didn’t hurt. The vines and thorns fell away before he touched me. But I expected pain, so my mouth complied.

“Put me down!” I yell, and he lands a firm smack across my backside.

“What have I told you about going all screechy and hysterical?”

My hands ball into fists so tight my nails cut into my palms. I bend my knee and let my foot fall with its own weight.

Right into his royal jewels.

He pitches forward, and I take the opportunity to slide off his shoulder.

“I’m not screechy or hysterical, you uncouth brute!”

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