Feared Fables Box Set: Dark and Twisted Fairy Tale Retellings, (Feared Fables Box Sets Book 1)
Page 1
FEARED FABLES
ANTHOLOGY SERIES
BOX SET
†۞۵
BOOKS 1-3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Content warnings
HUNTED BLURB
THE PRINCE’S PRISONER BLURB
PESTILENCE BLURB
HUNTED
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
THE PRINCE’S PRISONER
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
The WATSONS
The Mysterious Case of Lisa WATSON
Affay’s Story
Callie’s Encore
Pestilence
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 12
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 13
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
426 B.C.; Athens.
Chapter 28
365 B.C.; AUSTRALIAN COAST.
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
epilogue
HEARTS teaser.
GODS AND MONSTERS TEASER
HEARTS TEASER
GODS AND MONSTERS TEASER
Author Notes
Content warnings
Content Warnings/Possible Trigger Warnings.
HUNTED features mentions of medieval medicines with abortifacient purposes and mentions of maternal deaths.
†
Please be aware that THE PRINCE’S PRISONER as a Beauty and the Beast Retelling is served as a cautionary tale.
‘Not all beasts can be redeemed…’
Remember that.
Warnings include explicit sexual scenes, captivity, potential Stockholm Syndrome symptoms and developments, violence, forced/coerced marriage, and ‘domestic’ violence.
Also, note that this is a loose retelling of the original Beauty and the Beast, by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, and the folktales—not the Disney versions.
†
Please be aware that Pestilence is served as a cautionary tale, a twist on the old mythology of The Four Horseriders, and as such, involves graphic violence and mass-murder of humankind.
Warnings include explicit sex scenes, graphic deaths, toxic relationships, violence, and child death.
HUNTED BLURB
The villagers call her Red.
It's the colour of her lips, her cloak, and the blood that stains her when she returns from the woods.
The villagers call her Red for many reasons, but most of all, they're too afraid to call her what she really is.
Witch.
But when a wolf stalks the village, Red might be the only one who can save them from the beast...the beast who has his sights set on her already.
Red races against the three days until the full moon to uncover the wolf's identity, find out what he wants from her, and save herself. To hell with the village, Red just wants to save herself.
That's what good witches do.
THE PRINCE’S PRISONER BLURB
A dark fae prince. A stolen human girl.
And an unwanted marriage.
Not all beasts can be redeemed...
Callie doesn’t believe in fairy tales. Too bad they believe in her.
The fae whisk Callie and her friend off to be prisoners of an eternal dance. But Callie is stolen again.
Maybe the eternal dance wasn’t so bad after all…
A lethal fae has taken her as his unwilling bride, and she has to balance between life and death in his castle, while finding a way out of the dangerous fae realm. Only, she’s playing games with the Prince of War.
The Prince learns just how far Callie will go to save her friend from a lifetime of torture—and just what she will do to save herself from his clutches.
Callie must escape the wicked prince before she turns from prisoner to prey. But as the prince himself tells her, ‘Sacrifice is no noble thing in the fae realm.’
Everything in the fae realm comes at a price…
PESTILENCE BLURB
For centuries, Pestilence has tried to fall out of love with Death—the reason for her curse. But with her heart and mind at odds, humanity’s fate doesn't stand a chance in her cold, grey hands.
Pestilence and Shadow, her trusted steed, walk the earth to deliver plagues upon the humans. But when they wake to a world they don't recognise, Pestilence must learn to navigate the advanced technology of the humans and evade their interest in her.
It isn’t long until videos of her destruction are spread across the human world.
Soon, Pestilence finds herself with more than just her steed as her shadow. Now, the humans and Death are tracking her to the ends of the earth.
This mission is different. There's a new Horserider, War, whose bloodthirst can only be matched by Pestilence's, and he carries with him a past so mysterious that Pestilence suspects he hasn't come to end just the humans, but her, too.
And Death, after centuries, suddenly yearns for her again.
Something is different about this mission. Something is different about the Horseriders.
And it's something Pestilence must uncover if she's to outlive the species she loathes so much and survive whatever malevolence Death and War are brewing.
The end has come ... but for who?
HUNTED
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BOOK ONE
FEARED FABLES
KLARISSA KING
Copyright © 2019 Klarissa King
Edition 2
All rights reserved.
Hunted, Feared Fables Book 1
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission—this includes scanning and/or unauthorised distribution—except in case of brief quotations used in reviews and/or academic articles, in which case quotations are permitted.
This is a work of fic
tion. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether alive or dead, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, incidents, and places are all products of the author’s imagination.
Imprint: Independently published.
HUNTED
۞
Feared Fables
Book One
1.
I draw my fur-lined hood over my head and keep my eyes on the ground beneath me.
The cold season has dusted the earth with ice that crunches under my worn boots. Stares pierce through the red cloak I use as a shield and I feel each one of them. Judgement, fear—intrigue. Some are braver than others. Children come closest to me before their mothers yank them back to the wooden posts they call home. But they all come to me eventually.
In the depths of their depression and desperation, they knock on my door after sun fall. They fear me, but they beg for only what I can give them.
Hope.
The villagers call me Red.
It’s not the name my mother gifted me before she took her last breath on the birthing table, it’s a name that follows me along the muddy lanes of the village.
Grandmother tells me the name will forever haunt me. Doesn’t ‘haunt’ suggest an unwanted presence, I wonder? It’s not entirely unwanted. As an orphaned pariah, I won’t be forced into a marriage with a repugnant village man, and I can do what I please—so long as I don’t upset Priest Peter who mostly pretends I don’t exist.
I am Red, because of the colour I wear—the colour of my cloak, the colour of my lips, and the colour smeared over me when I return from the woods.
I hunt the animals. Their blood stains my hands and face. Of that, I am proud.
Not many of the other villagers hunt. Fear traps them inside the tall wooden walls that circle our corner of the land. But I venture out each morn with my bag of traps slung over my shoulder, a knife in my boot between the leather and my stocking, and a spear in my gloved hand.
This morn is no different.
Ahead, the log-wood gates part for me before I even reach them. The village guard, Thomas, gives me a stiff smile. At least he tries, but he can’t keep the unease from crinkling the corners of his eyes.
I make to venture out into the cold woods alone. But the creak of the gates behind me doesn’t go for as long as normal. I turn around to see Abigail rush at me, her eyes wild.
Before she can ask, I glower at her from beneath my hood. My voice is firm and my eyes cold; “No.”
Thomas hesitates behind the blue-cloaked woman, but doesn’t shut the gates. He tries to listen, to suck out the hint of village-gossip that he senses.
“Please,” begs Abigail. She’s so desperate, she doesn’t bother to draw up her hood when talking to me. Others through the gates see her—they look and watch. But Abigail cares naught. “I ask only for one more—that is all, Red. I swear it, one more and I shall never darken your path again.”
I want to correct her, to tell her it’s ‘darken your doorstep’, but I catch myself. We’re not on my doorstep. We’re on my path.
Clever girl. Too clever to beg for what she thinks she needs.
“You said that last time, and the time before that,” I tell her.
Abigail cries out. She has always been this dramatic. It’s almost amusing to me until she drops to her knees and clasps her hands up at me—in prayer.
I blanch and look at the village to see if Priest Peter is watching. He isn’t, but the tension in my shoulders doesn’t unwind.
“Get up,” I bark. “Get up, Abbie. People are seeing you like this.”
Abigail cries again, but words twist her wails; “I beseech you, Red! I shall pay six shillings—you know I have it! One more, I need one more and that is all!”
I crouch before her, my brown eyes cold and sharp under the shadow of my hood. “Why? What is it you need this poison for?”
Abigail snivels. “You wouldn’t understand…You’ll never understand.”
I sigh and turn my eyes on Thomas. He inches closer, but stops when he sees my gaze on him. He gulps and slinks back to the gate.
“You are engaged to be married,” I say.
Abigail jerks her gaze up at me. “How do you know?”
“It’s what you all ask for when the wedding night approaches.” I stand and flick the bottom of my coat where snow has gathered. “Come to me tonight. After sundown.”
Abigail staggers to her feet. Behind those teary eyes sparkles hope. “You mean it?”
My gaze levels with hers. “Bring one pound.”
I ask for a lot. One pound is the most a maidservant could hope to earn in a year. But Abigail’s family own the tavern—a pound is much to them, but not too much to hurt their livelihood.
She nods, and it’s the last moment of my morn I grant her before I sweep away up the path and into the snowy forest.
The gate groans shut behind me.
Once I hear it bolt in place, I feel the familiar sharp embrace of the woods.
Of everywhere in this world, there is no place most like home than the woods. It is where I live, breathe, and I am certain where I will die.
The woods belong to me, and I belong to them.
2.
Grandmother prefers the woods to the village.
Sometimes when the night is coldest and quietest, I cannot understand why. Loneliness haunts me in the village at times. Still, there are days that I understand Grandmother’s choice to be apart from the fools within the wooden walls.
Today I come across the biggest, greatest fool of all.
As I hike up the path to Grandmother’s cabin, I catch sight of his trap: A wire that hangs from a wooden pike and ends in a noose, ready to snare and strangle any rabbit that runs through it to reach the sprinkle of lettuce on the other side.
My lips pinch together as I near the trap and, with a curt glance at the trees enveloping me, I crouch down beside it.
From my boot, I fish out my knife and grab hold of the wire-noose. Before I can cut through it, I hear the crunch of his boots behind me.
“Get away from my trap, witch.”
He spits the word most of the villagers are too afraid to call me. One of the few reasons they call me Red instead. Fear. Though ‘Red’ is close to the true word that dances on their tongues, and it leaves the implications to linger.
The knife stays firm in my gloved hand; I rise and step back onto the path.
“It’s a poor trap,” I say, but it’s a lie. He knows it.
Colton might be the only villager who can out-hunt me. But what can be expected of a blacksmith? All those materials within his reach, a shop to fashion whatever he likes, and without a penny spent, too.
“The wire will rust in this weather,” I add.
It’s the only point I have to support my insult. My lashes lower to a glower. Unlike the rest of the villagers, he doesn’t so much as blink under the deadly cut of my stare.
Proud, he stands taller than me by a foot and some, and even lifts his chin in defiance. Colton wears the complexion of his Northern ancestry; a soft pallor dusted with the palest of freckles, eyes so brown that when the sun dips under the moon they resemble old tree bark. A fur hat is pressed down on his auburn waves that remind me some of rusted metal darkened by sunset-orange hues.
As I drink him in, I see the corner of pinkish lips twitch, as though he might like to snarl at me.
Colton is not afraid of me.
Still, he believes me to be a witch. And it’s what I use against him.
“I wish you good fortune today, hunter,” I say, cruelty in my smile. “Should you need such wishes.”
Colton’s snarl breaks out and his eyes turn to the pots of soil I’ve seen them become before. Yet, he is brave and takes a hard stride closer to me, axe at his side.
“These are my hunting grounds today, witch. I have marked them with my traps.” His high cheekbones grow pink from the pinch of the cold and the bite of the witch. “Off with you.”
The few hunters of the villag
e have an agreement. To put it simply, we have a ‘first to arrive, first to hunt’ deal among us. Colton was first to arrive, so I dip my head very slightly, then turn my back on him.
My boot barely presses into the snow before a hiss rushes by me, and I catch the metal gleam of a throwing knife.
His knife soared right by my hood.
Stunned, I turn on the hunter. He strides toward me, sheathed in brown leather gear and a wolf-fur coat. My cutting eyes follow him to where the knife landed.
Ah. He hadn’t missed. He hadn’t been aiming at me at all.
Colton picks up the knife by its hilt. From the point of the blade, a snake writhes. An adder snake. He doesn’t gloat as he snaps the creature’s neck.
I would have gloated plenty.
My eyes widen and I can feel the glow of them pushing through the shadow of my cloak. The urge to hold out my hand for the snake takes me, but I resist and rein in my excitement.
It’s rare to see adders this close to the village and in this time of winter, too.
As if reading my mind, Colton says, “Its nest must have been disturbed.” He turns it over in his thick, black gloves. “Female. Pregnant, it would appear.”
The urge has now heightened to outright glee, and my veins tingle beneath my fair skin. “I will dispose of it,” I tell him as dully as I can manage. “Hand it here.”
Colton drags his gaze from my outstretched hand to my face, as if he can see everything that lurks behind the cloak’s hood. The limp waves of my yellow hair, the fair skin I wear in all seasons, and the somewhat crooked nose on my face that has turned pink at the nostrils from the cold.
“You want this?” His brows arch and there it is—the cold, gloating smirk I’d anticipated. “For what? Your potions and spells?”
Silence pulls between us as I choose not to respond.
“I will give you this,” he says and steps closer, “in exchange for the woods.”
“They are not mine to give. The woods belong to nature.”
He ignores my answer and draws closer still, only stopping when he towers before me, so close that I smell the sweetness of jam on his breath and see the shadow of stubble on his strong jawline. Though it is short hair, I notice that the orange grows stronger there than on his head.