Page 67 of Queen Takes Rook
EZRA
Iwoke up with a start, unable to remember falling asleep. I had no memory of where I was. What I’d been doing. Who the fuck I even was.
I tasted blood. Not mine. There was a foulness in the blood that made me scrub my tongue on my sleeve. Something rancid had crawled into my mouth and died. That was some fucking nasty shit.
What the fuck happened?
I sat up and rubbed my eyes, trying to see. It was pitch black and I couldn’t see a fucking thing. My head throbbed like a giant icepick was drilling into my temple. It hurt badly enough that I reached up and felt for a wound, but there wasn’t any blood. I held my head as I slowly turned around, trying to sense anything. A way out. A hint of light. A breath of wind.
Something glittered in the darkness. It wasn’t bright, exactly, but it moved, and I could barely make out a shadow in the darkness.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” something whispered back.
Something that wasn’t human. Though I wasn’t human, either. I couldn’t remember what I was, exactly, but that sharp, metallic shriek wasn’t a voice.
“Wanna play?”
I scooted backward, trying to move quietly, but the glinting darkness came closer.
“Play with me, bear.”
Even while my brain was screaming to get the fuck out of here, something about the voice registered as truth. I was a bear. A grizzly bear, in fact. And my furry ass was getting the fuck out of here.
I surged to my feet and broke into a run, only to slam into an invisible wall. I fell with a shout, my wrist throbbing. My head tried to explode. I tasted blood again, but this time it was my own. Panting, I reached out and felt… nothing. But I couldn’t push my hand through, either.
Some kind of blood circle. It had to be. Only instead of keeping things out…
It was keeping me in.
Sweat poured off me, ripe with the stink of fear. I was fucking trapped with something that wanted to fucking play, that had a voice like a knife sliding down sheet metal.
Voices echoed in the distance and memory crashed into me. I recognized that voice. Shara. My queen. I was hers. She would get me the fuck out of here.
“Shara!”
“Ezra? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“Get me the fuck out of here! There’s something in here. Something that’s not… right.”
Lights flickered on, but they were blue in tone, rather than yellow. I saw my queen and alpha coming toward me, and fuck me sideways, I almost started to blubber like a baby. I didn’t know why I was so fucking scared. Every hair on my body stood up quivering with alarm, and I was a fucking bear. I had a lot of fucking hair.
I did not want to turn around and see whatever thing had spoken to me. But it was like rubbernecking a fatal car accident.
I couldn’tnotturn around.
Then I wanted to laugh, because it was just a girl. A young girl, maybe ten or twelve years old. She had bright pink ribbons braided into her hair and wore a matching frilly dress. Her skin looked a bit… sickly. She looked almost green, though that was probably the blue light turning her skin a strange color. She had a stuffed toy in her lap, but I couldn’t make out its shape.
“Mama!”
I glanced back toward Shara and my mouth fell open. Keisha Skye was with her.
We were fucked. So fucked. I couldn’t even begin to describe the many ways we were fucked.
“Hello, babydoll,” Keisha replied. “Are you being a good girl today?”
“Stop,” I barked out. “There’s some kind of blood circle here. It trapped me. I can’t get out.”
