Freya Snow Pup Trilogy

by L. C. Mawson

  “Yes, Frey?”

  “It doesn’t work as well with my name...”

  “Yeah, I’ll think of something better.”

  “Yeah...” Freya shifted her weight from side to side, a little awkwardly. “Why did you decide to stop, you know... Being mean to me?”

  “We’ve been over this. I decided that it was time to grow up.”

  That only served to bother Freya more.

  Why does that sound so familiar...

  Her blood chilled as she realised why.

  She had told Jamie to grow up.

  Her voice had done the thing that it did where it got low and made people do things.

  Can I seriously only get kissed by people that I compel? Freya wondered in an effort to lighten her dark thoughts. She had no idea how to reverse it. She’d never compelled anyone to such a fundamental degree before.

  “I...” Freya sighed, realising that there was only one moral thing to do. She had no idea how to reverse what she had done, but she could at least not take advantage of it.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking. I... Let’s just leave that kiss as that. Just one kiss.”

  Jamie looked dejected, but not surprised. “I should have known.”

  Freya raised an eyebrow. “Known what?”

  Jamie shrugged, folding her arms across her chest as she kept her gaze on the ground. “Freya, I might not have been head over heels for Damon, but it still bothered me that he loved you. Whatever it is between you two that has you convinced not to be together... He still loves you. And you love him.”

  “I-”

  Jamie cut her off. “Freya, it’s okay. I get it. In all honesty, I don’t want to be with someone who is pining over someone else. I’m not making that mistake again.”

  “Oh... Okay.” Freya didn’t know if she should be offended or thankful for how easily Jamie was taking it.

  “So, friends?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “He’s waiting for you,” Jamie told her simply before heading off, leaving Freya feeling more than a little put out.

  She trudged back over to Damon.

  “Something good?” Damon asked her as she returned.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Yeah, I guess. I mean, anything that’s not her leading the charge against me is good.” And anything other than me taking advantage of her is also good.

  “Yeah. I will be very glad to not be in the middle of that again.”

  Freya rolled her eyes at him for making it about him, but she didn’t have the energy to call him on it verbally. Her stomach was too busy twisting itself into knots. Was she really that bothered about Jamie? She hated how long it took her to process what she was feeling.

  Of course, it was a good thing in the end. If she had started to fall for Jamie, then she’d feel just as bad about lying to her as she did about lying to Damon. Of course, that logic meant that other magical beings would pretty much be her only option. And she was pretty sure that Amber would have an aneurysm (if that was even a thing that could happen to ghosts) if she let herself get so entangled in the magical world.

  “Do you ever think things would be so much easier if you were just alone forever?” Freya asked, a little surprised that she had verbalised her thoughts.

  “Yeah,” Damon admitted softly, catching her off guard. “It probably would be, wouldn’t it?”

  Freya gave him a reassuring smile. “Oh come on. Don’t join me in my pessimism. You’re the cheerful one.”

  He grinned back at her. “Well, the cheerful one thinks it’s too hot. There has to be an ice cream van around here somewhere.”

  Book Three: Wings

  “Good morning,” a sleepy voice greeted as Seph awoke.

  She mumbled some sort of contented reply, despite the fact that she was acutely aware that she had awoken on Earth. Creator, how she hated this realm. The air was all wrong and it was always either too hot or too wet. Just about the only redeemable feature was the Humans, and even then she’d grown bored with typical feeding patterns. While, intellectually, she knew that those had been dark days for her kind, she still missed her teenage years in the alternate timeline. There had been no rules and regulations then. Everyone had been in agreement that humans were food. Perhaps enemies, if you were being generous.

  She by no means agreed with her brother, who made it clear that he wanted nothing more than another war, but she was too busy to make frequent trips to Earth, and that was truly what she needed to be doing to keep her power level high enough to deal with the constant schemes of the nobility. If she could just keep a retinue of Human slaves, however, it wouldn’t be a problem.

  But no, for everyone’s safety, she had to be careful. They all had to be. Which meant that she was faced with the challenge of drawing enough energy from Humans, without drawing attention to herself. And she also had to be quick, lest she be away too long. Seph had always been known for her sharp wit and tactical mind, so this wasn’t an insurmountable problem for her - it could even be fun at times - but mostly it was just annoying and demanded time away from important matters.

  “I have to go,” the man beside her said apologetically.

  Seph sighed internally as she turned to face him. This was taking too long.

  “I have to leave town,” she told him.

  “What?” he asked with a frown.

  “I’m sorry. It’s my job, I don’t have a choice.”

  “No choice at all?”

  “I can’t lose this job, Neil. I have to leave today and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  He responded by leaning into her, his hand caressing her side as he initiated a soft and wanting kiss.

  “You could always come with me,” she said softly as he pulled away, adding just enough magic behind her words to make it seem like a good idea.

  “I... I can’t just leave my family.”

  It took everything she had not to roll her eyes at that. She had by no means used magic to trick him into her bed. He’d had every freedom in choosing both to marry his wife and to betray her. As far as Seph was concerned, she was doing everyone a favour.

  “Then I don’t know when we’ll see each other again. Certainly not in the near future.”

  “I... I’ll do it,” he conceded as he ran his hand through his ruffled hair.

  She rewarded him with a kiss.

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Seph felt her power restored, as she sat parked outside Neil’s house, waiting for him. Just the energy from his wife alone would be enough to sustain her for months to come. She felt bad about causing the innocent woman pain, though she knew that it was better in the long run. She deserved to know exactly who she was married to.

  “Are you okay?” she asked as Neil got back in the car. She didn’t really care, but this would be better the more she drew it out.

  “I will be,” he assured her. “So, where we going?”

  “You’ll see,” she told him simply before heading for a country road. The plan was to ditch him in the middle of nowhere, making it clear that she had never felt any real affection towards him.

  She couldn’t help but give an annoyed sigh, however, as she saw a figure in the middle of the road in front of them, causing her to swerve violently to avoid him.

  “What the hell was that?!” Neil exclaimed.

  She sighed once more as she cut the engine. “My husband,” she grumbled, “who, apparently, has no sense of timing.”

  “Your what?!”

  Neil was cut off at that point by a tall, broad man with long black hair and chalk white skin dragging him from the car.

  “What do you think you are doing with my wife?” He growled at the human front of him.

  “I... I didn’t know. She didn’t say anything.”

  “You probably want to leave,” Seph told him as she got out of the car, leaning casually on the hood. “He killed the last guy I was with, and I don’t much fancy cleaning up your entrails.”

  As soon as her husband let go
of Neil, he ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction.

  Her husband grinned at her. “Well, that was fun.”

  “Is there a reason you saw fit to interrupt my feeding?” she asked him with a raised eyebrow.

  He folded his arms. “Well, I came home to find no one there. Gregor pointed me in your direction.”

  She bristled a bit as she realised that he was unhappy with the fact that she had left. “Maybe if somebody was actually home once in a while, I wouldn’t have to be so concerned with keeping my Energy levels up.”

  “I am doing important work,” he protested. “There must always be one of Royal Blood on the throne.”

  “Which is exactly my point. You have decades, probably even centuries, to worry about an heir, but while you search, the throne is dormant. You married me because you trusted my judgement on these matters,” Creator knew that it wasn’t because he loved her, “so trust me now when I tell you that you have to stay put for a while.”

  To no one’s surprise, he shook his head. “No. I... I have to find them. Once I have then everything can go back to normal. It’ll be fine. Trust me. I just have to find them...”

  Chapter One

  Freya tried not to hyperventilate at the piece of paper in front of her.

  Maths - B

  Further Maths - B

  Chemistry - C

  Physics - C

  She felt as if she was going to throw up.

  She had never gotten below a B before. Ever. And a B was a bad thing.

  Now it was the best she had managed to scrape together.

  In the back of her mind, she could imagine Jamie’s glare.

  “A B is the best some of us can hope for,” she had finally snapped at Freya when she had worried about having missed her grades after the exams.

  She had known that she hadn’t done as well as she had wanted as soon as she’d left the exam hall.

  She had panicked in the middle of the exam and couldn’t remember anything from more than halfway through the paper. She supposed that a C was a gracious mark after that, but it didn’t feel like it.

  “Alright, I think that’s it for today,” Dr Harris, her chemistry teacher, said, pulling her attention from the slip of paper.

  Freya had picked up her marks at lunch, but she hadn’t managed to pluck up the courage to look at them until Dr Harris had started talking about the results, and what to do if you had failed.

  “Remember,” she continued, “if you didn’t get the marks you were hoping for, I want to see you after class.”

  Most people got up to leave, but Freya stayed seated, along with a collection of others she barely recognised.

  Freya wasn’t really one for paying attention to her classmates.

  “Freya?” Dr Harris asked. “I wasn’t expecting you to stay.”

  “I got a C...”

  “Ah,” she said, nodding with understanding. “Do you mind waiting for a few minutes?” she asked the others, who all shook their heads. She led Freya through to the adjoining lab. “Come on, we should talk privately.”

  Freya followed her through, but didn’t say anything. Her hand moved up to her pendant, which had once belonged to her grandmother, and started tugging at it gently, as she had become wont to do when she was stressed. Stimming, Alice had told her it was called. It was basically fidgeting, but a bit more conspicuous, as far as Freya was concerned. Though she supposed that her other habit of scratching up the insides of her forearms with her nails couldn’t exactly fall under ‘fidgeting’.

  “You were expecting an A?” Dr Harris asked.

  Freya nodded.

  “In all honesty, I was expecting that too. You’re easily one of my top students. Do you know what happened?”

  “I panicked in the middle of test...”

  Dr Harris smiled. “You’re not the first student to have this problem, Freya. Let me guess, your parents have high expectations of you and now that these exams might actually change your future, you can’t help but freak out?”

  “Pretty much...”

  “You just need to build your confidence before the exams. Do a lot of past papers. Be confident that you know the content inside and out.”

  “I... I did. Do past papers, I mean. But they keep changing the exams.”

  Dr Harris sighed and Freya knew that she didn’t have an answer. The government thought that too many people were getting good grades, so they kept changing the tests to make them harder. The difficulty Freya could handle. The unpredictability was a different matter.

  “Do you want to resit? You can pull this up without them.”

  Freya shrugged.

  “Alright. Well, think about it, okay? Don’t give yourself the stress if you don’t think it’ll help.”

  Freya nodded, unable to speak. Her frustration had drained away now to leave her feeling empty, with her eyes stinging. The last thing she needed was to cry in front of her teacher.

  Dr Harris moved back to the other lab and Freya took that as her cue to leave, hurrying as fast as she could to the common room.

  When she arrived, everyone else had already headed home, with the exception of Damon, who was sitting with one earbud in, watching something on his iPad.

  He looked up as soon as Freya entered, pulling his earbud out and standing up.

  “Hey,” he said, though his smile quickly faded as he looked her over. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. She didn’t trust herself not to cry if she opened her mouth.

  “Did you pick up your results?”

  She nodded, unable to stop a tear from escaping.

  “Bad?” he asked, though she wondered why he needed to.

  As soon as she nodded again, he stepped close to her, opening his arms a little.

  She had never really noticed before that he did that. Both of them did. They didn’t start touching each other suddenly. They just indicated that, if the other wanted it, they were there.

  She’d started doing it after she’d noticed how he flinched away at sudden touches and, she supposed, that he had done the same thing for her.

  She wrapped her arms tight around his middle, letting the soft fabric of his t-shirt absorb her tears as the combination of the rhythm of his breathing and the soft warmth of his body heat helped to calm her.

  “Margaret’s going to kill me,” she eventually managed to mumble as he brought his hands up to her back. “Or worse...”

  “She won’t kill you,” he assured her. “And we’ve been over this. If your foster parents try to send you away, you can always stay with me.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t really believe him. He always said that, but she was sure that his uncle wouldn’t really allow it. Or, even if he would, his aunt wouldn’t. Not when she was so protective of Damon to start with.

  “Come on,” Damon said, as she extracted herself from him. “My uncle’s been showing me how to use a crossbow. Fancy learning?”

  She grinned. There was nothing she liked more than shiny new weapons.

  FREYA WAS PRETTY SURE that she talked Damon’s ear off about the previous research she’d done into crossbows. She’d never got to use one before herself, but it was always helpful to know how your enemies’ weapons worked.

  Not that Damon knew that she spent her nights hunting Demons. He just knew that weapons were her Autistic special interest, which went a long way to explaining why she knew so much about them.

  By the time they reached Damon’s place, Freya was thoroughly exhausted and struggling to stifle a yawn.

  “You okay?” Damon asked her.

  She nodded. “Just drained from before, and I haven’t been sleeping all that well.”

  “Then maybe we should just watch movies or something.”

  Freya gave a groan of protest but knew that he was right. She rubbed her eyes in an effort to wake herself up, and Damon frowned at her with apparent concern.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, stepping close to her.

  H
aving Damon this close twice in one day, even when one of those times she had been crying, was pushing it for Freya. Part of why she hadn’t been sleeping well was the connection she had to the Shadow Realm.

  The Shadow Realm was a mirror of the other realms, where part of everyone’s soul resided. Nothing was supposed to happen there that wasn’t a reflection of what happened in the other realms, and yet, as Freya had found when she had been sent there by her great-uncle’s curse, she and Damon were romantically involved in that realm.

  Very involved if her dreams were anything to go by. She didn’t remember much, but ever since her first journey, she had started to remember bits and pieces every time she awoke. Either it was bloody carnage that made even her, an experienced Demon hunter, shudder, or it was her and Damon doing things that made her blush at the mere thought, and left her feeling empty and alone as she woke.

  Damon’s invasion of her personal space didn’t make her cringe, as it would have with anyone else. Instead, she felt her face flush, though she doubted it would come with a change of colour. She was so tired, she no longer thought it possible for her face to change from its now permanent shade of light grey.

  Damon moved his hand up to her cheek.

  “You’re really pale,” he noted.

  Had she had her wits about her, she would have joked that she was always pale, or point out that her jet black hair tended to wash out what little colour she did have.

  As it was, it took her several moments to say, “Careful,” as she was mindful of how close they were, and how it was causing her heart to thunder in her chest. “What would Annie say?” Her voice came out breathy, and she made no attempt to move away. In fact, she had moved subconsciously closer.

  “We broke up,” he answered, his own voice low in a way that drew her even closer to him.

  “Are you going for the world record of most girlfriends in a single year? At this rate, you’ll have gone through every girl in northern England before we finish our A-levels.”

  His eyes shined with laughter, but it was quickly replaced by a look she couldn’t decipher.