Page 5 of Bound to the Orc Warlord

CHAPTER THREE

Ashley

I fly across the heavens, suspended in brightness, part of the light. The beautiful song continues to play as I soar. My childhood memory of a simple lullaby no one else ever knew becomes a chorus of notes, richer than I ever imagined. For years, I worried I’d made up the song instead of it being a genuine memory of my mother, but as the melody continues, I remember more and more of her.

Her sweet voice hums as she holds me close, and my mother’s face sharpens from a fuzzy memory into clarity. I gasp—she looks so much like me! The same round face, the same freckles scattered across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, the same green eyes. Even the curly wave of her red hair isfamiliar. She’s plump and pretty in that girl-next-door kind of way.

She dangles the quartz necklace in front of me, a shaft of sunlight sparkling off its sides in little rainbows. I reach for it with a chubby fist, and she laughs, letting me grab it. “Don’t worry, my Ashley angel, this will be yours someday. It’s our family heirloom.”

Her voice is sweet and light, and her words are painfully true. The necklace is the only thing besides me that survived the fire that took her, and it came to me far sooner than it should have. The reports of the incident contain a lot of words like “miracle,” no one ever able to explain how I survived when fire consumed the rest of the house. Certainty fills me now. My mother saved me. I don’t know how, but I know it’s true.

Even better, I can feel her love for me, real and strong.

I’m still reeling from the heady feeling, so it takes a while to tell that I’ve stopped moving. The light drifts away from me, and the song drops in volume.

“No!” I strain upward as the last of the light swirls up into a funnel that spins ever smaller, my mother’s humming fading. It blinks out of existence with one last lingering note of haunting beauty. Then that’s gone, too.

As my eyes adjust to the sudden darkness, the tiny winking lights of stars appear overhead in a velvety dark sky. The air smells of flowers and pine trees, and a sound like the sighing of wind through leaves fills the air. I’m all alone.

“Take me with you!” I grip the quartz pendant, squeezing so tightly the edges of the crystal cut into my skin. It warms and begins to glow, shining through the cracks between my fingers. More lights wink on underneath me. I sit on a stone surface embedded with the same kind of crystals, and they glow, too.

But no matter how hard I wish, the brilliant sphere of light doesn’t return.

I scoot toward one of the crystal clusters to get a better look, and my dress rides up my thighs until the sandpaper grit of the stone scrapes my skin. With my next movement forward, my foot meets no resistance. I wobble and plop down on my butt, kicking my foot out to find purchase. It touches nothing.

Unwrapping my fingers from around the pendant, I hold it higher.

“Oh, wow!” I’m not on the ground. I’m twenty feet high in the air on top of a column of rock. It’s shocking, but heights have never bothered me. Instead, I’m fascinated and lean out to get a better look. The pillar stands in the middle of a clearing, with trees all around. Tiny blue lights flicker through the trunks, the color nothing like any firefly I’ve ever seen.

I have no idea where I am—there aren’t any larger lights in the distance to hint at buildings, so this sure can’t be Central Park. But why would I expect to still be in NYC? It’s not as if being transported out of a locked closet is what anyone would callnormal.

The sides of the rock are too regular to be natural. This pillar’s something made, but long ago, the edges worn smooth with time. It’s like someone plucked up one of the pieces of Stonehenge and plopped it down in the middle of nowhere.

All down the sides, inset crystals glow.

This time when I grab my necklace, little zips of electricity shoot through me, and the hair on my arms stands up in a tingling ripple. A certainty fills me. I’mnotstuck on this rock.

The music from before hums in my veins, pulling me to my feet. I stand at the edge of the standing stone, excitement racing through me.

My mother’s voice whispers an echo of mine as I say, “I wish I could fly!”

I half jump, half float from the top of the stone as I become weightless and soar into the sky.

A whoop escapes me as I swoop across the clearing. My dress flutters around me, the thin summer fabric of the skirt tickling my legs.

I angle upward as the pine trees get close, shooting almost straight up as the ends of their branches brush against my front.

Breaking up into clear air, I can see for miles, nothing but a dark blanket of treetops stretching out all around.

I laugh, giddy with delight, and do a little dance in the air.

This is the most amazing thing ever!

Oh. My. God. This is the worst.

I can fly. But I don’t knowhowto fly.

Even letting go of the crystal doesn’t stop things. Though that was probably a dumb thing to try when forty feet off the ground. But by then, I’d grown pretty desperate and kind of tired.

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