Undercover Truths - Undercover Lies
Page 9
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Excerpt from PROPHECY: Elf Queen of Kiirajanna
In hindsight, I’ll admit that slugging the high priestess was probably a very bad idea.
As my feet pounded down the hall toward an escape I didn’t figure I was gonna make, my new elf shoes makin’ a ruckus on the stone floor, two thoughts came rushing at me. First, I really wished that I had my tennies on instead of the hard-soled shoes. Second, I should’ve thought about what a stupid thing it would be to hit a high priestess, and that well before I let go of my temper.
Oh, and third: Dad’s gonna be ticked at me for it. That was a new one; I hadn’t worried about my father’s opinion before. Ever.
Sprinting, I cut toward the side exit of the cathedral, my slick soles making it tough, but not impossible, to turn. The acolytes standing guard would no doubt be waiting for me, alerted by some sort of elven voodoo that I couldn’t possibly know about yet. They would be ready to catch me and send me back for whatever punishment punching their spiritual leader in the nose would bring. I didn’t know.
At that moment I really didn’t care. Yeah, I was that angry.
As I sprinted, it occurred to me to wonder how the high priestess had possibly seen it coming. My swing was epic, but she hadn’t fallen. She hadn’t even really winced. It wasn’t from a lack of trying; I could throw a punch with the best of them. I’d only had one fight in school, and once word of it had spread most of my classmates got much nicer. Tommy had just caught me in a corner I couldn’t get out of and for no apparent reason started mouthing off about stuff that shouldn’t be mouthed off about—you know, Momma, single mother, and so on. I swung a closed fist, he hit the ground with a broken nose, and everybody left me—and Momma—alone from then on.
Until I met the elves, anyway.
Thinking about all that, I missed the turn.
It was easy enough to spin back using the next pillar for leverage. Without slowing down I cupped my right hand around the back of the smooth marble, put my weight into the spin, and I was able to whirl around the column quickly. I darted the few feet back down the empty hall toward the turn I should’ve made in the first place.
The hall was empty, amazingly. Empty, I wondered? Why weren’t the acolytes chasing me? Had I somehow outdistanced them? There’d been several elves in the room when I’d snapped, lost my temper, and lashed out with a right hook, and I bet at least half of them could probably set new world records in track and field back on Earth, if they ever cared to go there and try. So why weren’t they chasing me?
You know how people always yell at teenagers to look where we’re going? They always seem to yell it at me, anyway. And I should’ve listened then, because while my head was turned back over my shoulder, I ran right smack-dab into somebody. Bam! The collision was actually hard enough that it and the grunt of whoever I’d run into echoed off of the exit door that stood, closed and probably locked, way down at the end of the hallway.
As we both tumbled to the hard stone floor, I took in some disturbing facts in the order that they came to me. First, the guy I’d collided with—and he was a guy, I knew because my head impacted right into the middle of his muscular chest—was easily a head taller than me, which was unusual because of my own height. Every time we’d had height and weight measurement days in P.E. they’d made a show of pointing out that the top of my head cleared over the six foot mark. I’d hated standing out so much, but it made the number of guys whose chest height matched my nose height really, really tiny, even among the elves of Kiirajanna.
The second, and more disturbing, fact was that he was wearing plush purple velvet robes adorned copiously with sparkling gold thread, and only one man I’d seen in the realm of the elves wore such finery.
Third, the bright golden medallion that my nose, and then my cheek, planted itself on bore an unmistakable seal with the stag and the raven. I’m surprised I don’t have a stag’s horns still imprinted on one side of my face.
Only one male elf in the realm had the authority to wear the stag and the raven: the Elf King, himself.
I tried to help him up, but he was having none of that as he rose on his own and fixed me with a powerful glare. His penetrating blue eyes asked so many wordless questions that I could only think of one thing to say.
I gave the elf king my sweetest smile, brightening my own blue eyes as much as humanly possible in the hopes of making an impact.
“Hi, Daddy. I can explain,” I said in my sweetest voice.
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