Page 16 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire
Measured by hours, useless when it’s done. At odds with wind.The answer is as obvious as all the rest.
A candle.
But I don’t tell him. I merely look up, hold his gaze and shrug. “It’s notmyfault your riddles are so easy that it’s insulting to answer them. What kind of pwca are you, anyway?”
He tilts his head, his smile widening to a show of teeth. And the teeth begin to sharpen.
“The usual kind,” he says, and launches for me.
I run, but his legs are longer, longer than before and certainly longer than mine. He’s on me in seconds and the hand that locks around my neck is covered in sooty fur. I shriek and yank away, breaking from his grip. I dash ahead a few paces. I don’t get far.
The inhuman creature grabs for me again and sends me crashing to the ground.
I land on my front. I barely have time to scramble to my knees when the pwca seizes my shoulders and twists me to face him.
He’s no longer a man as he looms over me, a knee pressing down into my chest, pinning me in place. His body is like an overgrown monkey’s but his face is that of a ravenous dog. The glasses have tumbled off his snout, revealing slitted amber eyes. The face contorts, the ears prick—and the long-toothed mouth salivates over me. I kick my legs violently but a coiling black tail wraps around them and ties them tight.
“Clever girls should know not to challenge their betters,” he rasps.
If he wanted to anger me he picked the perfect words. My already bruised fist balls, as it always seems to do around mybetters, and I swing it straight under his chin, knocking his head up. The pwca’s surprise gives me a second to scramble back, but my legs are still trapped. He laughs, the manic sound echoing through the trees. Hisjaw opens slowly, then unhinges entirely. The wide chasm reveals teeth stained with blood, and hair stuck between the gaps.
I thrash against him, beating my arms and legs until I’m kicking up dry dirt and moss. If he’s going to kill me, I’m not going easily.
A spray of warm blood lands on my forehead and, for a moment, I assume it’s my own.
But the pwca has stilled.
His grip goes limp as a blade shoves its way through his long neck.
My eyes threaten to pop from my head and the blade recedes slowly, until the pwca falls upon me, his blood gushing over my face.
I lay there, chest heaving, until it hits me that a dead thing currently lies over me. I let out a squeak of disgust and shove it hard to the side, but it’s too heavy to move completely and I have to wriggle out from beneath it, staining the entire front of my coat. I push myself to my feet as fast as I can and find myself standing opposite a beautiful young man, with only a corpse between us.
“Well!” says the fairy boy with perfect freckles and moonlit hair, beaming. “That was fun!”
7
merch heb enw
(A GIRL WITH NO NAME)
“Fun?” I spit at him. “I almost died!”
The boy kneels down beside the dead pwca. He wipes his bloody sword on the creature’s black fur. The blade shines, topped with a delicate hilt of metal flowers and jewels. It looks more suited to the mantelpiece than to killing, yet the corpse between us is evidence of its lethality—and of that of its wielder.
He rises and sheathes the blade, and when he finally looks at me again, he grins. He has a dimple. “And whose fault is that? You shouldn’t have been talking to the pwca. You sounded smart at first, but you just couldn’t walk away.”
He steps toward me with a feline grace. He is long and lithe, and my pulse soars. There is something dangerous about him, something slick in the way he moves toward me. He’s rather like a snake slinking through the short grass.
And he isbeautiful. His brown eyes widen, lashes casting spider-leg shadows over his high, angular cheeks. His freckles cover his nose, just like mine—though mine have long begun spreading to my forehead and his are so careful, like an artful dusting of stars over his glass-smooth milk-white skin. They’re near human, nearly welcoming, but the perfection of their distribution is unsettling. His wavy hair is black, streaked with a gray that shines as if someone dipped a paintbrush in molten silver and ran it through his locks. He wears a black velvet dress coat, its broad epaulets embroidered with silver threads and sequins, creating stars, moons and planetsacross the fabric. It hangs open over a loose white shirt with a ruffled collar and satin trousers. I have never seen an outfit less suited to traversing the wilderness, save for, perhaps, my own, which I realize he is currently observing with the same hungry interest that I have given his.
My cheeks flush. A nightgown and an old coat aren’t appropriate attire for a girl to be seen in outside her own house. While that hasn’t bothered me so far, something about his dark, assessing gaze makes me feel completely bare.
And yet, there’s something oddly familiar about him. Like I’ve seen him before, if only for a second.
“You were watching me,” I say, my eyes raking back over the black-and-silver palette he’s carefully constructed. That flash ofsomethingat the edge of the woods returns to me and I let out a horrified breath. “You were watching me when I first entered the woods. You’ve been following me!”
He stares blankly. “Obviously.”
