Once Upon A Curse: 17 Dark Faerie Tales Page 29

  Alice struggled to be released. The more she struggled the tighter he held her, until a wave of sobs broke through. She was mortified, but she had no control. Her body heaved, and the tears soaked her face. Landon’s grip around her wrist loosened as he pulled her into his strong arms. She fought him, but it was useless. He was too strong and she needed the comfort. Even though she’d put on a façade, inside she’d been crumbling for years. Ever since she found out about having a sister, the emotions that were stirred and they were not always good. One moment she longed to have a sister to play with, and the next, she was green with envy that her sister had made it out alive.

  When her chest stopped heaving, Landon pulled away and looked down. Alice was too ashamed to meet his gaze. Finally, she glanced up and was taken aback by the intensity with which he was watching her. “Tell me the truth. Why did you want me to come with you today?”

  Alice bit the side of her mouth. She thought of a million different excuses to give him. Instead, she spoke the truth. “I wanted to be alone with you. I’ve always wanted to be alone with you, even though you can’t stand being near me. There I said it. Are you—”

  He kissed her.

  His lips were warm and gentle as they parted hers. Surprised, Alice stilled, her heart thudding in her ears. As his tongue probed, her body relaxed, she leaned into the kiss. It started out slow but soon increased in urgency. Greedily, Alice kissed him back. There was a desperation to the kiss, and their hands hungrily roamed and explored one another. His fingers sank into her hair, as if trying to pull her even closer. The intensity was almost as frightening as it was exhilarating.

  Eventually, they finally broke the kiss and pulled away to catch their breaths.

  “Sorry.” Landon ran his hand over his jaw and mouth, as if he was just as shocked as she was.

  Stunned by his apology, Alice just stood there staring at him. “You’re sorry? You didn’t mean to kiss me senseless?”

  A crooked grin spread across his face. “Senseless, huh?”

  Face flushed, Alice found herself grinning back. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Alice felt happy, giddy almost. But that quickly turned to apprehension. What if he really did regret kissing her? At least she knew he was drawn to her as she was him. That kind of passion couldn’t be faked.

  “Kiss me again,” Alice demanded.

  Landon moved towards her. “Doesn’t work that way. Not with me.” He continued stepping forward, causing Alice to retreat, until she found herself almost pressed against the trunk of a very large tree. “I’ll kiss you when I’m good and ready.” Landon dipped his head, his mouth once again covering hers. She melted into the kiss. It was even more searching than the first, as if both of them were trying to figure out what in the hell was going on. She sensed confusion in him, but also an undeniable attraction. His large hand rested on her shoulder, his thumb caressing her jaw, his mouth devouring hers. She groaned beneath his touch.

  This time when he pulled away, he said, “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.”

  Alice’s head dropped back against the tree. “Me, too.” Her voice was nearly a whisper. All this time, it had never dawned on her that Landon was attracted to her. He never gave himself away, not even a wistful glance. Every time they were near each other, he became agitated, as if he couldn’t get away from her quick enough.

  “I thought you hated me.” Alice dropped her hands from around his neck, resting one on his chest. The material of his shirt was coarse against her skin, a silent reminder of why they weren’t supposed to be together. They were from different classes. The Queen would have a fit if she knew Alice was spending time in the arms of a stable hand. Good thing Alice couldn’t care less what her mother thought.

  “Oh, I’ve hated you all right.” Landon’s calloused fingers traced the length of her neck down to her collarbone. “But I’ve hated myself even more for thinking about you all the damn time. It hadn’t occurred to me you could be interested in me. Or that I’d ever be able to feel your skin beneath my hands.”

  Alice’s chest rose and fell at his touch. In a little over two months, she was supposed to marry another. How could she possibly do that now?

  The sound of hoof beats drawing near startled them apart. Within moments, a team of guards appeared. Landon leaned against the tree and Alice walked across the greenery toward the men. “How dare you invade my privacy!”

  The main guard dipped his head. “The Queen has demanded your return to the castle.”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “Tell the Queen I have no intention of returning until nightfall.”

  “She says it’s urgent,” the guard said, his voice almost pleading.

  Alice glanced toward Landon, who shrugged.

  “Very well, I’ll return shortly.”

  “We were commanded to return with you.”

  Alice was not in the mood for her mother’s charades. But she knew very well if the guards returned without her, at least one of them would lose his head. “Fine. Ride ahead. We’ll catch up shortly.”

  The relief was evident on all of the guards’ faces.

  She turned to face Landon. “She knows,” Alice said, her words hollow.

  “What do you mean?” Landon’s eyes widened. “How could she know?”

  “She’s the Red Queen. She knows everything. But don’t worry. I will deal with this. I’m not about to give you up.”

  Landon absently rubbed the back of his neck. Alice knew he was imagining his head in the guillotine.

  “She wouldn’t dare touch you. I would scorch the realm if she even tried.”

  A smile flashed across his face before turning into a frown. “I never know when you’re joking.”

  She wasn’t joking, but knew Landon wouldn’t approve of such hostility. “I’ll take care of my mother. Can I see you tonight? We could meet at the pond where we used to catch frogs.”

  His face softened at the memory. “I’ll be there. If you can’t make it, I’ll understand. We need to talk about this, Alice. I’m not naive enough to think it can last, but I’m not stupid enough to turn you away either.”

  “Let’s just see where this goes. I have a feeling things will be very different two months from now,” Alice said, looking off into the distance. She wouldn’t lose him, even at the expense of her sister.

  Find all Julia’s books at AMAZON.

  This storyline will be continued in Down the Rabbit Hole, to be released Fall 2016. If you would like to be notified of its release, please sign up for my mailing list. http://www.juliacrane.com

  Still Red - Sabrina Locke

  The stench from a stinking hulk filled Emily’s nose, thick and deep with rot. Her throat closed and her overtaxed lungs screamed for air. She halted, panting a little while she surveyed the thing. Nature had been busy. It was hard to tell now exactly what sort of critter had decided to die on this stretch of Oregon beach. Seal probably. It was losing shape and started to liquefy. Grayish slabs of fat and flesh slid down thick yellow bones that jutted skyward like flagpoles. The smell had an overlay that was fishy and ordinary, but beneath the surface scent floated rich streamers of decay.

  Familiar scents.

  She’d learned the smells of death before she could draw her ABCs. Long ago and far away it had been, in the woods with the hunters in the time of stories. She remembered, and she was grateful for that fact. There was so much she’d forgotten, days and weeks, entire stretches of her long life had vanished into the treacherous depths of her mind.

  But not the story, never the story.

  She had lived with the story so long she’d forgotten where it ended and she began, or if there was such a thing as a borderland between story and history, between fantasy and reality. Her story was the singular constant of her lonely life, the thing that gave her purpose.

  She clung to the memory as fiercely as she gripped her walking stick. The doctors said mini-strokes were erasing her memories bit by bit, that it was only a matter
of time now before she forgot even her own name. What did they know? Doctors. They were little boys and girls in white coats who thought they could protect people with charts stuck to clipboards because science explained everything.

  Fools.

  They knew nothing of the way the world truly worked. She knew that life—the whole crazy mess of it—was made of bits and bobs of this and that, cut apart with round-tipped scissors and thrown high in the air only to settle to the tile floor where clever little hands sorted the pieces, arranged them on wide sheets of colored construction paper and pasted everything, taking care to press out each and every bubble until it was smooth and dry and flat.

  What a pretty picture, Emily! I love all the colors you used. Is that you with your doggie?

  No, bitch. Don’t you know a fucking wolf when you see one?

  No, they never did.

  That was another lesson of her long life: wolves offered death on a platter, all gleaming fangs and lethal claws. Most fools never recognized the danger until the very last second, when it was too late to do anything but scream and bleed and die. She’d seen that too often, and hated the way they bargained for their lives, all dignity abandoned in a frantic bid to save their cowardly skins. Critics could say what they wanted, but Emily had never begged—or, God forbid—blubbered.

  Never that.

  Blubbering was not only useless; it wasted precious energy. If, through sheer dumb luck, the fools managed to escape the wolf, they were still not safe because a hunter would track them down. Wolves and hunters: one followed another and that was the way of things.

  Thighs burning and her feet sinking deeper into the sand with every step, she trudged toward the rocks at the foot of a sheer basalt cliff. About twenty feet away, the beach turned shiny with hard-packed sand where the tide rolled and foamed. She wouldn’t sink there, but she’d be closer to the water, closer to danger from the sneaker waves the activities director from the home had warned them about before she’d let them get off the bus. Lectured them in that serious-but-concerned tone young people used with their elders. Like they cared.

  Emily was almost to the cliffs when she glanced over her shoulder and spotted the activities director, Becca, trotting after her, one slim arm in the air waving like she was trying to flag down a rescue helicopter. Emily’s stomach tightened. Should have moved faster. Too late now.

  “Miss Flannery, wait up!” Becca called.

  Emily halted, leaning on her walking stick, breathing a little harder than she would have liked. Becca jogged to a stop, her pretty, tanned face flushed from exertion. She propped her fists on her hips and shot Emily a look that said, you’re not behaving.

  Emily pasted a bland, and what she hoped was a slightly dotty smile on her face. “Is there a problem?”

  She watched Becca glance around the beach. The campfire with the rest of the folks from the home was far enough away to look small in the distance. A man and a woman walked together under the cliffs and big yellow dog loped around them in circles, ears flapping and tongue lolling. An older man in a baseball cap and baggy shorts stalked along the shoreline swinging a metal detector back and forth in wide sweeps. Business as usual.

  Becca looked perturbed. “Where do you think you’re going? I thought we all agreed to stay together.”

  It was the way she said it that was so irritating. As if Emily had no more of a right to independence than your average toddler with Becca standing in for Mommy. As if Emily hadn’t been a woman grown since before the birth of Becca’s own mother. As if there was anything that could happen out here that Emily couldn’t handle.

  She tightened her grip on the walking stick. “I’m just taking a little walk.”

  Becca reached and started to put an arm around Emily’s shoulders, but Emily stepped back. Becca reached for her again, but Emily stopped her with a hand. “I’m fine, really.”

  “Let me help you back to join the others. You’re missing the S’mores.”

  “I’m not ready to go back yet.” Emily gestured toward the cliffs. “I set myself a goal to walk all the way there and back. The doctors say exercise is important.”

  “You’ve made it quite a distance. Far enough to count for exercise, that’s for sure. Why not come back now?”

  Emily cranked up the wattage on her batty old lady smile. She’d been told that smile could scare small children. She’d never tested it before on twenty-somethings. “I brought my journal.”

  Mentioning the journal seemed to have worked because Becca’s expression softened. Emily’s journal was a fat thing, the pages thickened with layers of gesso, acrylic paints and all sorts of collage materials. As activities director, Becca had spent weeks encouraging the residents to draw, paint and record events and stories from their lives.

  Emily was proud of her journal because it detailed her story—the real story—not the lie she’d lived the past seventy years. She let the walking stick fall to the sand, opened the volume and flipped to the page she wanted then turned it around so Becca could see.

  The art spread across both pages and featured a drawing of a cave set into a sheer black cliff face. Just inside the mouth of the cave, a small girl sat with her knees pulled up to her chest and her long red hair streaming over her body like a cape.

  Becca’s hand drifted over the colored pencil on gesso image. “You finished that page just the other day.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, “it’s the last one.”

  Becca frowned. “Why the last one? You’ve got plenty more pages in your journal and we have four more sessions.”

  “I know, but I’ve finished my story.” There was one more step left, but explaining that would only confuse Becca. She didn’t know how the world worked.

  Emily pointed again. “Up ahead there’s a cliff that looks just like the one I drew. I’d like to go there and sit for awhile with my journal and look through it while the sun sets.” She shrugged. “I know it’s silly, but if you’ll humor an old woman, I promise I won’t stay long. I’ll be good.”

  A shout rose up from the group back by the campfire. Becca glanced over her shoulder then back at Emily and shook her finger. “One hour, no more, or I’m coming after you.”

  “One hour,” Emily echoed.

  Before she set off, Becca bent and reached toward the ground. “I’ll take this back with me.”

  “No, I need my walking stick. It helps keep me steady.”

  The muscles in Becca’s trim arms flexed as she hefted the thing, clearly unwilling to return it to Emily.

  “Please, Becca. I need it. The only way I can hurt myself with it is if I fall down. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  Becca hesitated for what felt like a long time before finally handing it over. “Don’t make me regret this.”

  Emily mumbled suitably appreciative nonsense until Becca headed back toward the group.

  It took her another fifteen minutes to reach the cave. There she found a flatish sort of rock where she sat, leaving the walking stick close at hand, and placed her journal in her lap. The sun rode low on the horizon and the tide, while still out, was beginning to turn. When her hour was up, the waves would be rolling about her ankles. The timing was a guess at best, but there was nothing left to do but hope she’d got it right.

  The wind whipped her hair and lifted her skirt.

  “I am not afraid of the dark places,” she whispered, “and I am coming for you.”

  She opened her journal and read her story for the last time.

  This is the true story of a girl named Red. In some times and places she was called Little Red or Red of the Hood. Stupid names, you ask me. Nevertheless, I am that girl; rather, I was that girl once upon a time in a land far, far away.

  Or not.

  I don’t expect you will believe my story nor do I expect you to place any trust in my words. Go ahead—call me a liar—I won’t be offended. After all, it’s only a story and a few pictures, badly drawn. Nothing more.

  I was called a liar
long before a hunter tossed a hood over my head, and I don’t care about names. Now that I am no longer young by any definition, my only allegiance is to the truth because there is no truth but the whole truth.

  So take what you will, I am still Red.

  My woodcutter mother and evil stepfather abandoned me in the woods with some hunters from whom I managed to escape.

  Eventually.

  But not before I learned things no child should ever know, the things men do in the dark, and long after I learned how a big man’s hands fit about my small neck. This is the truth I learned in the woods: vision dims and blood roars in the ears when precise pressure is applied. The little girl body goes limp until she wakes again, and he is still there with his big hands.

  These are the true things I know. This is the true story that is mine to tell, paid for in blood and pain and time.

  The important thing, however, the thing storytellers always forget or gloss over in their rush to get to the sexy part about wolves and girls is that I was never stupid enough to be fooled by a disguise. I was never a pushover, never the little ninny, tra-la-tra-la, prancing through the woods with a basket.

  I fought back. Always. Even when I was very small and my puny fists and pitiful kicks only excited the hunters.

  In time, I grew. I waited for my moment, and in time, it came.

  One night while the hunters snored, their naked bodies stacked like thick white logs, I escaped through a rip in the tent and ran through the dark woods. A dog collar flapped about my waist. Sticks and thorns tore at my feet until they bled.

  I ran and ran.

  A pack of feral trial attorneys found me and took me in. They raised me as best they could, although they really didn’t know what they were doing. They’d spent much too long in the dark woods themselves and had forgotten the ways of civilized people.

  At least, that’s what I told myself. In reality, I think they were afraid of me.

  You see, during those long nights in the tent with the hunters, I’d learned to kick and fight and scratch and bite. Later, whenever anyone tried to discipline me, I fought back no matter what the infraction. I fought back because for me, nothing had changed. It didn’t matter that I’d escaped and was no longer chained with the hounds.