Page 46 of The Demon Prince's Accidental Mate
“How did you—”
The second I heard his voice, I swung my closed fist straight for the source. I couldn’t see a thing, but the impact reverberated up my arm as my knucklescrackedagainst something hard.
I shouted in pain out of instinct, expecting my fist to light on fire, but the hurt never came. The haze faded from my eyes as I shook the cobwebs away, only to be greeted with a stunning visual.
“What the fuck?”
I was standing alone, unharmed, and somehow victorious. The minotaurs were down, in a groaning heap, one of them bleeding from a smashed nose, while the gray-clad man was crumpled over in a heap a solid body length away. Nobody was near me.
In a bit of a daze at the sudden change in circumstances, I stared at my fist. Since when had I been able to dothat? Nobody in their right mind would have ever called me strong. Even relative to my size, I was rather weak. I didn’t work out or lift. I baked. That didn’t exactly lend itself to large biceps. And yet …
The groaning of the gray-clad man snapped me back to reality. I had to get out of there and fast. Looking around wildly for the portal, I realized in dismay it was gone. I was stuck there … wherever I was. A tunnel. In the distance, I thought I could hear some roaring.
Was I back under the Falls? He’d tried to bring me there the first time, but it was different. I’d walked those tunnels before. Where I stood now was darker. Drier. Without the thunderous power of all that water. So, where was I?
Cursing wildly, I chose a direction and ran for it, legs carrying me down the tunnel. Behind me, the gray-clad man began shouting, but I didn’t slow down. Slowing meant they would capture me. If they did that, I was probably dead. Or worse.
My bare feet slapped against the rocky ground, the walls growing narrower around me. Was I running into a dead end? Fear coiled in my breast as indecision reared its ugly head. In my panic, had I chosen the wrong way and doomed myself?
“Get back here!”
A purple light followed the barked order. I ducked as it grew brighter, and a ball of light slammed into the rock, sending chips everywhere, including into my skin. I yelped in pain but kept moving forward.
Something grabbed my leg, pulling it out from me. I fell forward, putting my hands out to brace my fall. Knees and elbows, left bare by my still-wet pajamas, slapped hard onto the rough surface, leaving skin behind. I turned to try to pull away whatever was holding me down, but I knew I'd erred the instant my hand touched it. It was some sort of sticky substance.
“That will be enough from you,” the gray-clad man said as he walked up to me, while the purple sticky stuff moved under his command to snare my other ankle as well, leaving only one hand free.
I was hauled to my feet by a late-arriving minotaur, who looked at my free hand warily before grabbing it and hauling it behind my back, where he joined it with my other hand, the magic goo acting as restraints of some sort.
The gray-clad man rubbed his cheek as he glared at me furiously. I grinned, noting the bruise beginning to form already.
His hand whipped out, backhanding me hard enough to split my lips. “Worthless cur.”
Hissing at the sudden pain, I whipped my head back around, spitting on his robes. “Nice cheek. Did a girl give that to you?”
Flames danced in his eyes, and for a second, I thought he would kill me on the spot, but he didn’t. His eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“Who are you?” he pondered, snatching my chin before I could look away, twisting my head left and right. “You shouldn’t have been able to do that. Yet you did. So, either you’re not who you appear to be … or you’ve been hiding something from us. Hiding it very well, almosttoowell, as if it was planned.”
I laughed in his face. What else could I do? I had no idea how I had done it.
“Either way,” he said, snapping his fingers and pointing for me to get moving, “we have ways of finding out.”
“Nothing to find out,” I muttered as the minotaurs hauled me from my feet and began to carry me, my arms locked behind my back by the purple stuff.
“Please, keep resisting,” he chuckled. “It’sfarmore fun that way …”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lily
Any snarky reply I might have made died on my lips as I was dragged through a narrow crack in the rocks and out the other side.
Into a different world. High above, an oddly yellow sun shone down through a similar hazy sandstorm-ish sky. We were standing on a ledge high above a city of stone. The rock, the buildings, and even the air were colored a mild yellow tinge, courtesy of the weird sunlight. Wherever I was, it was clear we were no longer on Earth.
“What is this place?”
The minotaurs didn’t speak. They just hauled me along, my toes occasionally banging painfully off the ground as I bounced in their grip, my limbs immobile by the purple binding.
