Page 58 of The Alien's Vicious Starflash Manor

Part of me wished they would attack us, get it over with. I clutched the axe Fintan had given me, preparing to fight back, but I knew there was no way I could ever win.

Hauling wood and cleaning the duke’s house every day had left me stronger than I had been before Ivrael had brought me to this frozen hell—I was probably more physically fit than ever. But I’d never been taught to fight. Especially not with an axe.

So. I had a single axe with very little idea of how to use it, and there was just one of me.

Plus a raya, who, despite her ferocity, didn’t have much in the way of defensive moves

This time, the voice that came out of the darkness belonged to Ramira. “Starcaix rayas make delicious snacks. All crunch and squish—a single morsel and then gone.”

I could feel Kila’s horror through the way her wings paused and then fluttered—frantically, but also silently, as if she were trying to escape a monster that hunted by sound alone.

“Great,” I muttered, trying to lighten the mood a little.. “Now we’ve reached the taunting portion of the night. I wonder what’s next? Serenades?”

Seconds later, I wished I hadn’t given the creatures the idea when they began howling into the night sky.

Until that point, the longest night I had ever endured had been spent riding an ice horse from the Trasqo Market to Frost Manor. This one felt longer. Finally, after what seemed like centuries trapped in the darkness, the very beginning of the gray light of dawn allowed me to see more than just a couple of inches away from my face.

But when I looked toward the voices, I wished I hadn’t.

I don’t know what I had expected. I already knew they were monsters. And yet I was still surprised when I caught sight of them prowling around our hiding spot, one of them pacing back and forth directly in front of us.

At first, I thought they were your everyday, garden-variety wolves. Well—maybe not quite garden-variety. I doubted wolves could whisper in the darkness, after all.

I didn’t know how many of them there were, but many more, I suspected, than required to rip us both apart with their sharp teeth and claws.

We’d be dead in seconds.

I found myself thinking of fairy tales again—this time of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf’s answers to her implied questions.

What big ears you have.

The better to hear you with.

What big eyes you have.

The better to see you with.

What big teeth you have…

“The better to eat you with, my dear.” The wolf creature moving just outside our hollow answered my thought, and then all of them joined in a kind of lupine laughter, sounding like I imagined the sound of hyenas laughing, all yips and howls, teeth and blood, and dark desires.

Kila retreated into my own hood—At least I turned it inside out so it’s not red, I thought inanely—and then the raya pulled one of the extra tea towels I had brought with me around her shoulders, shivering against me.

“That sounds terrible,” she said as the wolves continued to howl.

The more I looked at the things, though, the less like wolves they appeared to be. Oh, they were large, rangy, with gray-and-white mottled pelts and ruffs of thicker fur around their neck. But their jaws were too heavy, their ears too big, and the way they walked was just…wrong. Their hind legs looked too long—like people attempting to scramble around on all fours rather than animals padding on their paws. It looked uncomfortable and unwieldy.

Then one of the creatures opened its mouth wide—too wide, wider than it ever should have been able to open—its tongue rolling out as that eerie voice so like Izzy’s echoed through its mouth and across the forest.

“Stay in this forest too long, and we will have you in the end.”

“I’m afraid,” Kila whispered in my ear.

“Me, too.”

It was like these wolf monsters, whatever they were, had gotten inside my head and pulled out my deepest fears and desires, as if they somehow knew all the things I couldn’t admit even to myself, and then fed them back to me.

So when the voice changed again, at first I assumed it was another one of their tricks.

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