Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,10

its body, and then he rears up to transform back into a man. He stands there staring at the girl in my arms with an expression that looks as revolted as it does elated.

Yes, I will definitely need to keep a tight leash on him around the human.

Whitt has picked himself up, brushing grit from his clothes. He’s ogling the girl too, but in his case it’s only open amazement.

“By all that is dust. To halt the change right in the middle of it—it barely took a second—” He shakes his head with another laugh. Then something in his face shutters again. “What is she? How in the lands did Aerik find this treasure?”

“I expect we’ll get more answers from her back at the keep,” I say. “We must get the entire measure of the situation before we decide how to proceed from here.”

Kellan’s lips curl into a grin that can only be described as vicious. “I don’t give a rat’s ass what she is. There’s no way the arch-lords can dismiss a gift like this.”

August’s head jerks around. “Who says we’re offering her to the arch-lords just like that?”

I tuck the girl’s limp body over my shoulder much as he did before and raise my other hand. “We aren’t doing any offering or gifting or anything else until we understand what we’re dealing with. And for that, we need to get home. Whoever finds me a juniper first gets the last of yesterday’s roast.”

That both shuts them up and sets them stalking off in different directions. I adjust the girl in my grasp, the sap-like note of her scent teasing my nose again.

She’s a treasure, all right—a prize beyond imagining, and a complication far more immense than I’d made any preparations for.

4

Talia

The first thing I’m aware of is the drape of a soft sheet over my shoulders. My head is nestled in a fluffy pillow. Fresh summer-sweet air grazes my cheek.

The sensations are so familiar and yet not that my mind jars to a halt around one thought: it was all a dream. No, a nightmare. An excruciating, seemingly endless nightmare that I’ve finally woken up from into my actual bed in my actual bedroom, and any second now Mom will rap on the doorframe and ask whether I want waffles or French toast for Saturday breakfast, and Jamie will leap onto the bed and insist I help him with some tricky level in his latest video game, and everything will be perfectly, blissfully normal.

Then I open my eyes.

I find myself gazing up at a ceiling that’s nothing at all like my ceiling back home. It looks as if it’s made out of the kind of vibrant, polished wood you’d expect from floors in some old but posh mansion, rings and whorls showing faintly in the chestnut-brown grain.

And it’s not just the ceiling. I ease my head to the side and take in the rest of the room. The walls and, yes, the floor gleam with the same wood, other than a finely woven rug that covers a patch beside the bed.

I am lying in a bed, one with posts of a darker wood carved with intricate fern leaves, a spruce-green sheet covering me to my shoulders, a blanket in the same hue woven with silver embroidery folded at the foot. Matching curtains in a heavy fabric hang on either side of a window. Sunlight streams through it across the rug and one corner of the bed.

I blink and blink again, dizzy even though I’ve barely moved. I’m not home, but I’m not in my cage. Is this a dream? A startlingly real one that my captors will shock me out of at any moment with the clink of a glass of lukewarm water or a dish of jumbled food scraps hitting the floor? How—? Where—?

The memories of my last waking moments rush into my head in a flood. Opening the cage—the unexpected noises. The four unfamiliar men-who-aren’t-men gathering around my cage, questioning me… threatening me. Dragging me out.

Did they bring me here? Why would they put me in a room like this? Why did they want me at all? They were looking for something—something about a “tonic.” That must have been what my captors were putting my blood into. Why anyone wanted that tonic, especially enough to steal me away over it, I still have no idea.

The monsters who’ve kept me all this time won’t be happy about my disappearance. I remember how loud the leader yelled at