Page 4 of Hell Fae Captive
Six hundred and sixty-six captives, and Camillia De la Croix was the only one who’d required my intervention. All the others had been handed over directly by their relatives or kidnapped with ease from their sleep.
But not this little dark-blonde-haired Halfling pixie of a girl.
I’d sent three Hellhounds out for her, and they’d all come back in similar shape—with a blade to the balls. Two of them had also had daggers stuck in their chests.
All silver.
From what the Hellhounds said, the metalburned.
I’d spent nearly a decade in this realm, learning how to fight and blend with Hell Fae, and I’d never seen any of them suffer the way they had after being stabbed by this female.
Payan continued to whine on the ground, proving my point. I wanted to call him weak, but I’d sent him for a reason—he’d picked up over half of the other girls without a single issue.
Yet he’d lasted all of five minutes in Camillia’s presence.
Fascinating.
It was like he’d taken one look at her breasts and forgotten his own fucking name. He’d lunged at her without any finesse, and she’d taken him down with a singular move to the family jewels.
While it hurt, that shouldn’t have kept him on the ground for long. Except for theburning.
Since when does silver burn Hellhounds?I wondered for the tenth or eleventh time this week.
Well, at least it was done now. I’d successfully brought her to the entry point. If she proved worthy, the gates would allow her inside. If not, one of Az’s minions would have the pleasure of cleaning up her corpse.
I checked my watch, then leaned against a burning thwomp tree just inside the gates. My left leg throbbed, reminding me of yesterday’s sparring session. The girl’s swift kick had aggravated it a bit, mainly because I’d nearly failed to block her mostly impressive move.
The bare limbs above me twisted in annoyance, the trunk bristling beneath my touch. It didn’t appreciate me leaning against the bark, something the tree told me by stirring up a dance of embers and smoke along the leafless branches.
“Flame me,” I drawled, not at all bothered by the thwomp’s notorious penchant for lighting itself on fire. The Midnight Fae grounds were littered with them, so it only seemed fitting that Zen—the creator and mastermind of this paradigm—had added a few to her landscape. She’d included the charcoal blades, gargoyles, stone architecture, and a sunless sky framing a solitary moon as well. A true gothic kingdom, painted forever in the darkness of the night.
Home, I thought, sighing.
But it was overrun with Hell Fae.
Now that the Quandary Bloods were allowed to live in the Midnight Fae Realm again, their former hiding place had been reformed into the prison around me.
With me as the Warden.
It was my job to keep the captives inside, not kidnap them. However, Camillia had proved to be a special case. Az and I had flipped for it—I’d lost, which meant I’d been sent to retrieve her after all my lieutenants had failed.
Pulling my wand from my cloak, I called up an enchantment that created a window of sorts for me to look through the walls of the paradigm. As I was in a somewhat alternate reality, I couldn’t exactly see what was happening outside the gates without a little spell.
Just like all Camillia would be able to see from her current vantage point was rocks for miles and miles, with two blistering suns shining overhead.
This area of the Hell Fae Realm was uninhabitable for a reason.
Except for the area protected within the paradigm.
Life existed here just fine, thanks to the Midnight Fae magic keeping it all alive.
I spun the enchanted window to the place where I’d left Camillia and found her standing with her hands on her hips.
She didn’t appear to be frightened at all, just annoyed.
That alone proved her to be a viable candidate for this unplanned trial. I hadn’t subjected any of the others to this because all they did was scream and beg us to take them home. Those candidates would probably just collapse out there in the rocky terrain and wait until someone came to retrieve them.
But not Camillia.
