Page 6 of Flame and Starlight

I started to cry out of sheer panic. He sat on the wall and tugged hard on my arm to bring me to him. His fingertips dug into my flesh, and it was the only thing keeping me from fainting. “Alyssandra, you will not die. We are not technically going in the river.” I blinked at my full name. Not many people knew it was anything other than Alys.

What did he mean we weren’t technically going into the river? My eyes darted from him to the river. My breaths were fast and shallow, and I could see stars forming in my vision when I blinked away the constant flow of tears. “Please,” I said and tried to take a step away, but his hand only grasped harder.

“Little duck,” he said with his other hand suddenly grabbing my jaw and forcing me to look at him. “Shut. Up.” He lifted me with inhuman speed, and then we were falling. A scream caught in my throat as I felt the ice-cold water envelop my body and flood into my open mouth. I coughed and gripped him around his neck so hard I thought I might choke him to death if the river didn’t kill us first. The water in my mouth tasted of dirt and debris. I sucked in water through my nose and involuntarily coughed. I started to kick violently to get us back to the surface while my lungs screamed that they needed air.

“Ow! Dammit, Alyssandra, stop!” I opened my eyes at his voice, and we weren’t in the river. I gasped so deeply that a strange groan escaped my throat. We were standing. Well, he was standing. I was clinging to his neck and hanging from him while kicking like a toddler throwing a tantrum. He reached up and peeled my arms off his neck. I dropped to the ground, my legs refusing to hold me upright. He swore and bent over to rub his shins.

“Was the kicking absolutely necessary?”

I looked around, and my brain couldn’t—wouldn’t—process what had happened. We had fallen into a river, but where were we now? I pushed up on all fours, still looking around. All I could see were trees. A scream was bubbling up in my throat; I could feel it.

Oh wait. No. That’s vomit.

I grabbed my hair as best I could with one hand, noticing it was somehow dry, and emptied my stomach onto the green forest floor. I heard him sigh as he stood over me and grabbed all my hair in his fist. I tried to take a breath, but the taste of alcohol and river water had me retching again. I spat and crawled away as he released my hair.

“Where are we?” My throat was raw from being sick, so it came out as more of a whisper. I took in my surroundings. Just miles and miles of evergreens. What had happened? My mind was racing through all the books I had read since I was a kid and all the stories my mom had told me. Fantasies filled with magick portals and hidden other-realms teeming with magickal beings. Was that what had happened here? My mind was adamant that that could most definitely not be the case. But at the same time, it couldn’t come up with another reason, another excuse as to how not even five minutes ago I was sitting on a bridge falling into a river, and now I was in the middle of a forest.

The stranger squatted down in front of me, and it was the first time I got a really good look at him. His hair was so black in this moonlight it almost looked blue, and it grazed his thick eyebrows. His eyes were a pale blue, nearly grey, and sat atop strong cheekbones and full lips. His jaw was strong and sharp, and a nerve twitched there as he looked me over as well.

He had tattoos that ran down the thick column of his neck and disappeared below the collar of his shirt only to poke out again on his defined arms. And then it dawned on me. This was the same man I had run into, literally, earlier in the coffee shop. But now he was almost glowing. He had a very light dusting of pale blues and silvers over every inch of skin I could see. So faint that I had to squint to see it, but it was there.

“Who are you? What do you want with me?”

“My name is Asher. And you are in Esteria. Welcome home, Alyssandra.” I swallowed a very large lump of fear and disbelief. Home? “What I want with you—” He paused and pushed his hair back away from his face as he took a moment to think. And there were his ears, coming to a slight point at the tips. “What I want with you we can discuss at a later time when we are not so near a pool of your vomit.”

A strangled laugh bubbled up out of my mouth, and one of his eyebrows raised and disappeared under his hair. If the guy hadn’t just kidnapped me, I might have thought he was very, very handsome.

“That’s insane. This is insane. You are insane.” I stuck my finger in his face, and he shrank back from it with a look of disgust. “This kind of stuff does not exist in real life.”

He rolled his eyes and stood up, dragging me with him by the arm. “Did your mother really never tell you any stories of us? Of your home?”

I cried out in protest as his fingers dug into the same spots as before. My mind was racing through all the stories my mother had told me about Faeries. At the time, I would always laugh at her when she would act like they were real, as if they had happened to her.

My entire body was tender and bruised. I used my free hand to reach up and delicately touch the cut on my head where it had collided with the mirror and sink. I hissed a sharp intake of breath when my fingers came into contact with the lump forming there and came away slick with blood. I swore and fought back the tears threatening to fall. “Please take me home.” I sounded much stronger than I felt.

“Okay, enough chitchat.” He fisted my hair again, less gently this time, I noted, and forced my head to crane back so that he could see me. I reached up and gripped his forearm, hoping it would cause him to loosen his grip. Instead, he gripped tighter, and I stood on my tiptoes to try and take the pressure off my head. I winced, and a tear rolled down my cheek from the tightness in my scalp.

“You are very weak considering,” he said matter-of-factly. He leaned closer, and shadows began to pool over his shoulders and around his face. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes widened. I tried to push away from his chest and escape the vise grip tangled in my hair, but I couldn’t move. Those shadows stretched out to me like snakes coiling to bite. As they drifted closer, I could smell jasmine and a hint of cedar. One touched my cheek, cold as ice and darker than night. I screamed and, for the fourth time that night, blacked out.

CHAPTER THREE

I awoke to fractured sunlight and sore bones. I stretched as gently as I could, but my muscles screamed with every fragment of movement. I blinked slowly and tried to remember where I was. Did I black out last night? I looked at the cream linen sheets wrapped up to my chin. I didn’t recognize the sheets or the room.

“Oh good! You’re awake.” I jumped at the voice and sat upright, ready to bolt. But my head was staunchly against any type of escape and gave me a lightning bolt of pain to convince me to sit still. Everything that happened last night came crashing back into my memory. “Whoa, girl. You’re going to be sore and tired for a few days after what you went through.”

A small older woman carried over a tray filled with food. She had long grey hair that was tied off to the side in a braid. She sat the tray down at the foot of the bed, and when she came closer, I could see a slightly pointed ear that her hair was tucked behind.

“My name is Mavka, but you can call me Mav. I’m here to make sure you’re fed, bathed, and resting. I’m not a healer, but he will be here soon, and I will take care of you as best I can.”

I was frozen in place, not daring to move as she grabbed the covers and fluffed the pillows behind me. She pulled the tray piled high with food over my lap. My panicked mind was sifting through all the stories I had been told about these supposedly mythical creatures. The food wasn’t safe to eat for mortals, right? I vaguely remembered a book that talked about the food creating a drunken effect on our minds. She touched my shoulder, and suddenly, feelings that didn’t feel like my own washed over me: concern, curiosity, and a little taste of impatience. I jerked away from her.

“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you. Eat up. It’s safe, and it’ll help you heal.”

I settled back into my own panic and confusion over what was happening and looked down at the array of food in front of me. There was so much to choose from: pastries, fruit, muffins, coffee, tea, and a glass of juice. I lifted a muffin to my nose and sniffed. It smelled like sweet blueberries and nothing strange. My stomach let out a growl, demanding I eat it. I took a small bite, and it practically dissolved on my tongue. I must’ve let out a small grunt of happiness because I heard a quiet laugh come out of Mavka across the room.

“Once you’re finished, there’s a hot bath ready for you in the bathing room. That door there,” she said and pointed at the wooden door across the room. “I’ve laid out some clean clothes for you to change into next to the bath. Go ahead and change into those and get back into bed and rest until the healer comes.”

I finished the muffin as she spoke. “Why am I here?” I swallowed a drink of tea. “Who was that guy last night? Is this a dream? Like, am I on drugs and hallucinating?”

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