by Lilly Fang
I glared at her. “There is nothing amusing about this.”
“On the contrary,” the old woman said, striking the ground with her cane. “It was most amusing that the Huntsman was able to defy his master at all. Even more so that once the witch was dead and the Huntsman free from her control, he was able to use the life she put into him to revive you.”
“But he is dead now,” I said, tears falling down my face.
My mother took my hand in hers. “Snow, you know that I make the roses grow. But there is more to what I can do.”
“Hurry it up,” the fortuneteller—my grandmother, I suppose—said. “We’ll have a hard enough time explaining Imerine to these villagers. No need to complicate it any more with the Huntsman when we might leave him out of it entirely.”
“Very well.” My mother touched her fingertips to the Huntsman’s heart and traced a circular design that ended at his throat. A glowing line followed her fingers, and when the symbol was complete, there was a flash of light.
He breathed in a ragged gasp.
Mother frowned. “I wouldn’t normally do this, but since you intended to sacrifice yourself to save my daughter, I suppose I can make an exception.”
“What did you do?” I asked my mother, scarcely daring to believe it.
“This is true life, Snow, not the cursed servitude the witch put him under. I have not bound him to me. I can only call so much life into being, so your Huntsman should consider this a rare gift indeed.”
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes wide.
I threw my arms around Mother. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you.”
Mother placed her hand at my back, and at first I thought that it was to comfort me, but I soon felt a soft, warm glow spreading through my back and shoulders.
I pulled back and looked at my mother, questioning.
“Just fixing up this life that the Huntsman passed onto you. That witch’s work was hardly as good as mine,” Mother said with just a touch of boasting.
“If you’re all finished,” Grandmother said, thumping her cane on the ground, “the world is full of magic, and it’s past time these two young ladies took their place among it.”
I looked at Rose and gave her a small smile. She smiled back. I took her hand in mine and we both rose, the Huntsman and William in his beast form beside us. Whatever waited for us in the world of magic, we would face it together.
A Note from the Author
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this book, please leave a review!
Lilly Fang is currently working on a sequel, and can be reached at [email protected].
Now Available by Lilly Fang!
High school can be hell… or at least, it can be when the four new transfer students are actually demonic playboys sent to seduce and sacrifice virgins. No big deal, but they’re only a handful of souls away from raising hell on earth and starting the countdown to the apocalypse.
But Claire Donovan doesn’t know any of this when she meets Shawn, the leader of the demons, on her first day of high school. She only knows that he’s on his way to being the most popular guy in the school, and for some reason he’s interested in dating her…
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW!
Then it happened again. I felt that change in the world, a shift inside of myself, as Shawn Porter walked into the room. My eyes went up, and I saw again, immediately, that he was looking straight at me.
I quickly looked back down at my notebook, which was most unhelpfully blank, and uncapped my pen, recapped it, and started to chew on the end.
But even though I wasn’t looking, I still felt his progress through the room as he came closer and finally sat next to me at the big wooden table in the back.
“Hello,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Shawn. But I think you already know that.”
I looked at his hand rather than his eyes as I reached out to greet him, a blush already betraying me. He caught my hand in his and held it until I looked up at him and finally replied, “Everyone at school is talking about you and your friends. I guess the four of you know how to make an entrance. I’m Claire.”
He grinned at that. “You seem like a nice girl,” he said, his hand lowering mine to the table but not releasing it. “Have we met before? You seem… familiar. There’s something different about you.”
I couldn’t possibly imagine what he was talking about.
He glanced around at the other people talking and laughing. “You seem a little… lost. Are you new?”
Oh. That. “Not really,” I said. “I just… missed a little bit of eighth grade.”
“Is that so? I didn’t take you for a bad girl.”
“Who said anything about that?”
“There must have been a reason. Don’t tell me. Did you pull some kind of prank and get expelled? I could see you as the firecracker type. Total pyromaniac.”
A harsh laugh escaped me. “No.”
“A fight, then? You’re little, but I bet you could do some damage if you really wanted to.” He didn’t mention it, but his eyes went to the slight scar that traced the line of my jaw.
I shook my head. “I didn’t get in a fight. I was… In an accident.” The memory sobered me. The crash, the glass, my mother…
His dark eyes grew serious. “You don’t have to talk about it,” he said.
We lapsed into silence that was only broken by the start of class. Our art teacher, Mr. Noe, handed out large white sheets of paper and charcoal pencils to each table.
“We’ll start with an icebreaker,” he said as he went around the room. “Turn to the person next to you. You’ll be drawing a portrait of them.”
He went up to the board and drew a rough shape of a face, dividing it into three sections. “Eyes, nose, and mouth. Try to follow these proportions, and remember, art is supposed to be fun.”
I turned to Shawn, and he turned to me.
“Ladies first?”
I pulled the paper in front of me and regarded him. After stealing so many glances at him, there was something thrilling about looking him in the face and studying it at my leisure. His features were elegant. His eyes, sharp. Then I realized that he was watching me as I ogled him, and I quickly looked down at my paper.
I sketched for a few moments and then frowned, realizing that my page was blank save for his eyes.
“Would you mind?” I asked, pointing to his eyes.
“What?”
“Would you, um, close your eyes?”
To his credit, he didn’t laugh at me, though he did grin a little and said, “Don’t tell me you’re self-conscious.”
“Fine, I won’t tell you,” I said.
His lips twitched, but he obeyed. With his eyes closed, I let my gaze linger over the rest of his face. His nose was proud. His mouth turned down in a way that made him look cruel when he wasn’t smiling.
I didn’t want to be attracted to him. I had the distinct impression that he knew how unnervingly gorgeous he was, and he delighted in making girls fall for him. I wasn’t about to be another one of his conquests. Besides, I also didn’t want to be the kind of girl that falls for an attractive guy instead of someone with a good personality.
On the other hand I didn’t have any proof yet that he didn’t have a good personality.
I knew I couldn’t do his features justice, and the fact that he was so handsome made my portrait all the poorer by comparison.
“What?” he asked, sneaking a look at me when I had been silent for too long.
“I think I’m done,” I said. It’s not getting any better, anyway. “Don’t be insulted,” I said, handing it over.
He looked at it and smiled. I tried to read his face for any signs of sarcasm, but it seemed… genuine.
“You know,” he said, leaning closer to me, “I really think you’ve captured something here.”
“Don’t. I know it’s terrible.”
“I like it,” he insisted. “I mean, the lips are all wrong, and I think you re
ally should have spent a little more time studying my nose, but the eyelids…”
I couldn’t help it. I swatted at his arm with my hand and snatched back the paper.
“My turn,” he said.
He put two fingers under my chin and turned my face first one way, then the other.
“Are you constantly blushing, or is your skin naturally rosy?” he asked.
I tried to glare at him, but he held up his hands defensively.
“I’m asking for the sake of art.”
“I’m not normally like this,” I said, and I meant it. Then again, Shawn was the first guy I’d talked to at any length since the accident…
“Is that so? Do I have some kind of effect on you?”
I scowled at him.
He shook his head. “Keep scowling like that and your portrait won’t do you justice.”
“Then I’ll blame the artist,” I shot back.
He smiled and started to sketch. His eyes grew intent as his gaze lingered first on my hair and then moved over my eyes, my nose, my lips, and finally settled on my scar.
I hated the way the scar looked, and having him scrutinize it made me feel more than naked.
“You’re uncomfortable. Why?”
“This scar isn’t exactly my best feature,” I mumbled.
“Never be ashamed of a scar,” he said. “Scars remind us who we are.”
I blinked, letting the words sink in. That was something to think about. Maybe Shawn was deeper than I’d given him credit for.
“Must’ve been bad.”
“It was,” I said flatly, and then I repeated the phrase that I’d heard so often that I’d grown to hate it: “I’m lucky just to be alive.”
“Escaping a brush with death… that’s something to brag about,” he said.
That brought me up short. I’d expected that we’d play out the same polite conversation I had with everyone, but I guess I shouldn’t have counted on Shawn for pleasantries.
“You don’t wear makeup,” he pointed out after a moment of silence had passed between us.
“My dad’s pretty strict,” I lied. It was better than explaining that my dad wouldn’t even know where to take me to buy makeup let alone how to apply it.
“Hasn’t anyone ever told you that rules are meant to be broken?” Shawn said, his eyes looking deep into mine.
“No, they aren’t. That’s kind of the point.”
Shawn laughed, as though he had never expected me to make a reasonable reply like that. “You don’t need it, anyway. Makeup. It wouldn’t suit you.”
I furrowed my brow, trying to tell if he was insulting me. “Makeup wouldn’t suit me?”
He pressed his finger to the ridge of my forehead until I relaxed. “Hiding. Hiding wouldn’t suit you.” He pulled back his hand and began sketching again. “You’re an open book, and I like that about you. No, don’t look at me like that. It’s a compliment.”
I fought the urge to frown. “I guess most girls must fall all over themselves for a compliment from you.”
“Yes, actually. They do.” He tilted his head. “But not you.”
“No.”
“How very interesting,” he mused.
I couldn’t help smirking, feeling that I’d finally stumped him.
“Ah! Hold it,” he commanded, and I froze. “That’s it… that’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
He bent over the paper in concentration, earnestly working now, his eyes darting up to study my face and then back to the paper with every stroke of his pencil.
“Aren’t you finished yet?” I asked, unnerved by his focus. I couldn’t shake the fear that this would be some kind of horrible prank where he’d hold up a hideous stick figure doodle of me.
“Patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he said in a soft, seductive voice.
It only made me angrier. “This is hardly Rome,” I said. “It’s a sketch! Let me see it.”
“Very willful. You’re different, Claire Donovan. It’s… interesting. But I’m not sure that I like it.”
I knew he was teasing me, but there was something that felt true behind his words. There was something strange about how he had said ‘Donovan.’ How did he know my last name? I was about to ask, but then he turned the portrait around and banished every thought from my mind.
It was not like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t like a photograph. It was not accuracy that made it wonderful but the happiness that shone from the portrait. From the way my eyes crinkled and my smile glowed. I hadn’t seen myself look this way since before the accident, and for a moment, I thought that he had somehow drawn me then, before tragedy had tempered all of my expressions. But there was the scar now, a ghost along my chin.
“It wasn’t easy getting that expression out of you,” Shawn said. “You know, you really should smile more often. Scowling doesn’t suit you.”
I wanted to have a smart reply, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from what he’d drawn. It captivated me. I felt that I held in my hands a promise that I could be the girl in the sketch every day—happy, engaged, and once again alive, and not merely surviving. I looked up into his eyes, needing to know if he knew what he had captured. I saw my answer in the smug grin on Shawn’s face.
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SCHOOL FOR ADVENTURERS
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AVAILABLE NOW! The Sequel to Snow White and Rose Red: The Curse of the Huntsman!
Snow White and Rose Red: Sleeping Beauty – The Tale of Young Briar Rose and Maleficent
Chapter 1: Fire and Ice – Rose Red
I circled Snow White warily, my eyes on the sword in her hand. A slender, lithe blade, it was hollow at the center, but made of a magically treated metal that made it stronger than steel. Snow twirled it in lazy arcs, snaking the blade around and waiting for me to make my move.
“The little one doesn’t even have a weapon.”
I frowned and glanced back at the fence. A group of boys had gathered. One was taking bets.
“Two to one, then,” he said, gesturing to me.
“Focus, Rose,” Snow said, darting towards me with her sword up.
I ducked under it and skipped back, buying myself another moment to see what’s going on. “Two to one against me, though? Really? That’s insulting!”
Snow propped a hand on her hip. “This is why we don’t spar out here. You’re not focused.”
I closed my eyes. Two to one. I let the anger ripple through me. It started at my finger tips, sparks kicking up across my palms and then suddenly my hands were engulfed in flames that raced all the way up to my forearms.
This was why I didn’t fight with a weapon—we hadn’t found anything yet that wouldn’t melt.
I spared a glance back for the boys betting against me—one fell off the fence in shock, and another dropped the money he was holding.
Snow made a tsking noise—ever the older sister—and took advantage of my distraction to make her attack.
She slung her blade to the side, and I saw a glint of focus in her eyes. She gave her sword a twist and suddenly the water at the hollow center jutted out and froze in a dozen spikes of ice, making her weapon even more dangerous.
But the thing about ice is that it’s no match for fire.
I spun, my hands wide, and called up a wall of flames as Snow swung at me. As the blade passed through, the spikes melted instantly, falling in pools of water to the ground.
Snow’s free hand caught my arm above the elbow, where the flames didn’t touch, and she twirled around the wall of fire to press her sword against my back.
I tumbled forward rolling her off of me. Her sword went flying out of her hand. I heard a crackling sound, and I didn’t need to see to know that she’d called some water off the ground and into her hand, probably sharpened to a knife-
point.
I swept my hand in a circle, sending out flames to keep her at bay.
Snow dodged back, her free hand going to the dagger she kept at the small of her back. She pulled it loose, and then leapt over the flames. She hurled the ice at me, and it ran through the sleeve of my tunic, pinning me to the ground. I tried to summon the flames to melt it, but I heard whooping from the boys. That shattered my concentration, and immediately my flames vanished.
In that instant, Snow was kneeling on top of me, her finger pressed into my nose, her dagger against my throat. Of course, because it was Snow, she had the grace to avoid gloating. Instead, she only looked disappointed, which was, as it turns out, worse.
“You’re not focused, Rose. I’ve seen what you can do when you’re focused.”
Memory flared—fire engulfing me, the metal chains that had bound me melting between my fingers, and the searing anger that brought an inferno raging out of me.
“You were dead, Snow,” I reminded her. “That was kind of a unique circumstance.”
“Well, you can’t always wait around for someone to kill me before you start trying,” Snow said, tapping my nose smartly.
It didn’t hurt, but that didn’t stop me from growling at her.
Snow rolled off of me and helped me to my feet.
“You’ve been spending too much time with your wolf,” Snow told me. “Most people don’t accept growling as a form of communication.”
I sighed but couldn’t help smiling at Snow’s observation. “William isn’t a wolf,” I reminded her.
“He’s some kind of beast.”
“Only half of the time.”
A teasing grin lit up Snow’s face. “I’m just letting you know now… If you start barking at me one day…”
“Snow! William and I don’t bark at each other!” I threw my hands over my face, feeling appropriately mortified. “Just because he sometimes transforms into a beast doesn’t mean he’s any less human than your Huntsman!”