by Dawn Steele
FORBIDDEN
A New Adult Paranormal Romance
By
Dawn Steele
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright 2013 by Dawn Steele
Cover art by Dawn Steele
This novel was previously titled ‘Snow White and the Alien’
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NEW ADULT ROMANCES BY DAWN STEELE
Burn
Forbidden: A New Adult Paranormal Romance
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dawn Steele is the New Adult romance pen name of a bestselling author who writes in other genres. She believes that true love will conquer all, even if the circumstances appear cagey at first glance.
CHAPTER ONE
Snow White sat cross-legged on the conservatory’s stone floor, swiping glue with a tiny paintbrush onto matchsticks. Her hair stood up in sticky tufts. She had run her gummy fingers impatiently through it many times.
Her minder, Tom Cherry, sat across from her and tried to interrupt: “Excuse me, but – ”
“Ssssh!” Snow White held a stern finger up. “This is an extremely delicate procedure and I’d rather you be silent for an hour. Preferably two.”
Tom looked irritated, and then resigned, but Snow White took no notice. She never did. Her brow was furrowed in concentration, and although her legs felt like they had merged with the diseased tree in the cracked flowerpot beside her, she persisted. Two hours straight and she hadn’t so much as taken a sip of water. Her neck muscles protested with a cramp.
A troop of large black ants waited as she laid a sticky matchstick on the floor. Six ants lifted it and scurried off in an assembly line to a small structure in the middle of the conservatory. It was a matchstick model of a building replete with chambers, passageways, stairs, windows, doors. Ants crawled around it, embedding matchsticks, while dragonflies, crickets and bees fanned the drying glue with their wings.
“Snow White,” Tom said, and before she could lambast him again, he hurriedly went on, “I’m supposed to be keeping you clean. No smudges on your face and the like, and your hands have to be lily white, like a lady’s. Last time I failed to keep you clean, Ma clobbered me in my right ear.” He pointed to it. “Still feels like it’s been dipped in molasses.”
For the first time that afternoon, Snow White peered down at herself. She wore a man’s tunic and leggings, hand-me-downs from Kurt Cherry, Tom’s older brother. Her bare toes squelched in the cold. Her hands were encrusted in grime, and her nails were chewed into a pattern that resembled the serrated edge of a saw.
“Oh,” she said airily, “it isn’t so bad. Nothing hot water wouldn’t scrub away.”
Tom stole a glance at the door.
“It isn’t scrubbing you need as much as excision.” Tom was fifteen. Although common, he took lessons along with Snow White to keep her company, a chore he looked forward to with a mixture of trepidation (because of Snow White) and relish (because he loved reading). Now and then, he proudly peppered his vocabulary with what he considered scholarly words: ‘Excision’, ‘Adhesion’, ‘Remonstration’.
Snow White sighed. “Oh, all right. The things I do for you.”
She jumped to her feet, the suddenness of the movement startling Tom, and swung to look around the chamber. Insects of all types swarmed the conservatory, mingling in a harmonious spirit rarely seen in any species, let alone families of species. Vines crept everywhere, strangling small trees.
Snow White loped to an easel where a flip chart hung.
“Back to the plan.” She tapped the first sheet with a branch. Her movements were quick, brushed with impatience – an aristocrat used to being obeyed, cajoled. Her face with all its angelic perfection was not soft.
“So,” she said, “do you think we should call it the University for Arthropod Appreciation or merely UAA?”
Tom had trouble straightening his legs. “We’ve been through this. Most people can’t pronounce ‘arthropod’, let alone know what it means. We're better off calling it the University of Bug Appreciation. Or UBA,” he added helpfully.
“The University of Arthropod Appreciation,” Snow White went on as if she hadn't heard, “shall have a grand entrance hall where our mission statement shall greet everyone who cares to be greeted. The layman’s motto again, Tom.”
Tom sighed and repeated by rote: “Insects are not adversaries to be quashed under the shoe of someone bigger.”
“From the entrance,” Snow White turned to the second page, “we enter the termite chamber, where the mastery of termite architecture shall stun the world.”
In another section of the conservatory, several tall structures resembling castles had been erected from soil. Termites scurried all over them.
Footsteps sounded outside the conservatory. Tom’s eyes rounded in fear. “I can’t remember if I’d locked the door.”
Glaring at him as if she’d like to quash him under her shoe, Snow White hissed: “Amscray Alarm One, everyone!”
The insects swarmed to hide themselves under leaves, pots, cactus arms, anything they could think of. It was a fascinating creepy-crawly hive of activity, followed by absolute stillness. From the ceiling and windows, the afternoon sun flooded in to light the entire room into a hegemony of colors and silence.
The conservatory door creaked upon. Hanna Cherry, a corpulent woman with three chins, a huge bosom that sank down to her waist, and a pathological fear of cockroaches, peeked in. Tom shrank back in fright. Snow White hid her hands, as filthy as any gravedigger’s, demurely behind her back. But her face, one that should be immortalized in paintings and hung in art galleries, was only slightly cleaner than a pig’s.
Hanna Cherry’s shriek compressed the air like a battering ram. Tom wilted, the color draining from his body onto the checkered floor, and clapped his hands to his ears. A good thing too because his mother strode across the room to box his left ear. (It was out of love that she did so because she remembered what she’d done to his right.)
“I told her so!” Tom whimpered as he cringed, cupping his left ear. He was as tall as his mother, but beside her, he was a mushroom next to a stampeding elephant. “But she wouldn’t listen. She never listens. She’s a strange one, she is. She – ”
Ignoring him, Hanna Cherry turned her ample breasts to Snow White.
“Your highness,” she said in a voice dripping with acid-laced honey. “Her Majesty has asked you for tea. But you aren’t properly dressed.”
An unfamiliar flush rose to Snow White’s cheeks. Suddenly, she seemed uncertain, much younger than her age – the five-year-old princess standing with red roses before her stepmother, who wore a puff of a wedding gown that rivaled the clouds. “She asked for me?”
“Yes, you. Come along now and we’ll get you cleaned up.”
“But she hasn’t asked for me since . . . ” Snow White racked her brains to remember. “Or do you think she read the dissertation I wrote in the Journal of Entomology where I was comparing the characteristics of different stick insects?”
Tom rolled his eyes.
With three strides, Hanna Cherry crossed the divide and grabbed Snow White’s hand, wincing when she found that it stuck.
“I can come by myself, thank you.” With difficulty, Snow White wrenched her hand away. In a gesture she imagined that was more regal than the Queen herself, she straightened her shoulders, flung back her hair – which was thankfully black enough to mask the grime – and marched out of the conservatory, passing a reproa
chful Tom Cherry who was still nursing his ear.
His expression clearly said: If they weren’t paying me to mind you, I’d rather be eating boiled toenails.
It was too late to do anything but hastily fling water onto her face and scrub whatever part of her body that wouldn’t be covered by her yellow dress. Snow White floated in a dandelion puff of taffeta. Hanna Cherry emptied a whole bottle of Egyptian perfume on her as Snow White rushed to the royal parlor, almost tripping over the hem of her dress as the vapors stung her eyes.
“Don’t be yourself!” Hanna Cherry called after her.
Snow White felt like sticking an appendage to her nanny, but the dress corseted her in.
If there was one person in the kingdom she hero-worshipped, it was her stepmother. Queen Isobel commanded respect and armies in equal measure. But Snow White saw her rarely, so her stepmother’s mystery grew with her stature and empire.
Snow White remembered standing as a child on top of the castle’s sweeping entrance when the victorious Bavarian armies marched through the city gates.
“Hungary has fallen!” cried the crowd, and Snow White beamed.
But now, she hesitated outside the parlor door. She pictured the Queen’s eyes glazing over in boredom. Oh, oh, oh, she thought, her ears thundering with her own heartbeat, what if I have nothing interesting to say?
She entered the parlor, aware that her toenails within her shoes were caked with soil. Inside, silver teapots mingled with dainty china teacups on a table. A triple-tiered silver tray groaned with iced cakes and finger sandwiches.
Queen Isobel turned to the door. “Ah, the child enters. A whole hour late, I might add.”
Snow White winced. “I was preoccupied in the conservatory, Your Majesty.”
The Queen’s turbulent blue eyes studied Snow White’s face with unsettling intensity. Snow White hung back, uncertain. It was to her chagrin that she could lord it over Tom Cherry and everyone else, but before the Queen, she was eternally that five-year-old orphaned princess.
The Queen finally spoke: “You’re far lovelier than I expected. Isn’t she, Wolfsbane?”
For the first time, Snow White noticed the other guest: a handsome man in his late thirties. Rugged with a five o’ clock shadow, he had dark brown hair and eyes. He wore a leather jerkin over his white tunic, and when Snow White peered under the table, she saw that his boots were scuffed with mud.
So much for dressing up.
“I thought you said she was a child,” drawled Wolfsbane. He had a languid air, as though nothing that happened was of much consequence to him. “She’s fairly well grown.”
The Queen shot him a sharp look. “She’s a child.”
“I’m sixteen,” Snow White retorted.
She wanted to add: ‘I don’t care to be spoken of as though I’m not in the room’, but she bit her tongue back. Disappointment made her shoulders droop. Am I expecting too much from her? Did I distort her into being someone she’s not?
“Are you really now?” said the Queen. “Which birthday did we celebrate, the one in which you asked for a cake shaped like a dung beetle?”
“That was five years ago. And it was a horned beetle.”
“She’s beautiful,” Wolfsbane murmured. “Quite a prize.”
A fleeting annoyance came over the Queen’s face. Her eyes appraised Snow White, taking in the girl’s lush lips, the fairy whiteness of her skin against the contrast of dark hair. She shot another look at Wolfsbane, who leaned back in his chair to grin. He had a predatory air that made Snow White think of female praying mantises.
“That will be all for today, Snow White,” the Queen said.
Huh? Once again, surprise made Snow White clasp the back of a chair. “But I just got here,” she said, her voice faltering.
“And?” the Queen inquired politely.
Her cheeks flaming, Snow White turned heel. With her head held high, she padded out of the parlor, the Queen’s eyes burning a hole in her back. Snow White’s heart pounded with every step – thop, thop, thop – a lead ball being struck by a mallet into the depths of her shoes.
She passed Tom Cherry, who opened his mouth to say something, but she silenced him with a palm like an exorcist warding off a demon.
“Bah!” he called after her in an injured tone. “You were always rude and spoilt but now you’re getting worse!”
His truthful remark ringing in her ears, she fled to her bedchamber, her pulse drumming up such a beat that she forced herself to slow down. As always, after a frenetic run, she gasped in lungfuls of air. Bright green stars zigzagged across her eyes.
She burst into her bedroom at the top of the East Tower. The walls and bed were covered with layers of red beads mottled with tiny black spots.
“Code Seven,” she said. The layers dissipated, breaking apart into thousands of ladybugs. They spilled onto the floor to reveal an elaborate corkboard map of Europe on a wall. Green darts covered massive areas of it, Hungary and Austria included. At the bottom right corner was a symbol of the Bavarian crown.
Snow White grabbed several darts off her dresser and hurled them into the map. Thuck! One struck Bavaria. Thuck! Another struck the crown, dead center.
“Arggh!” Snow White cried and flung herself onto the bed. The ladybugs scattered before her bulk could quash them against the green and purple coverlet.
She clasped her knees to her chest and rocked herself slowly, the way she used to do as a child. She mumbled, “I’m such a disappointment.”
Then she buried her head between her knees. “I’m awful, awful! It’s no wonder nobody likes me!”
After a while, she poked her head out and said with more heat: “People are such a disappointment.”
Her eyes softened as she laid her upturned palm on the bedspread. Several ladybugs climbed onto it. “That’s why I far prefer your company,” she said.
Outside, the ball of sun sank into green and yellow foothills of the only home she’d ever known. The sun’s rays lighted up a large gold beetle on her bedside table.
“Scarab, little scarab,” Snow White murmured. She gently picked it up. It was the size of her palm. Its bright wings were beaten gold wafers realistically structured with veins, and it smelled of metal and forge embers. Its multifaceted eyes stared into Snow White’s.
“It was my real mother’s,” Snow White said to the curious ladybugs. Her heart swelled with unaccustomed emotion. She felt all soft and bruised inside, an apple fallen off a cart. “There’s a curious story attached to it. See this?”
She fingered the beetle’s little stinger, a short, sharp golden needle. “This stung her, and her blood fell onto the snow as she sat by the window which had an ebony wood frame. I don’t know whether to believe if this golden beetle was alive once.”
A trail of black ants climbed from the floor to her bedspread.
“Oh, hello,” she said, a little surprised. Ants weren’t usually as forthcoming as ladybugs. They tended to be absorbed in their tasks, pretty much like herself. “Do you have something to tell me?”
The ants moved as though her bed was heated. She noticed a large cluster of them on her floor – a spectacle that would have sent Hanna Cherry leaping to the top of a closet. Her gaze followed them to where they massed, almost dripping off, on her ebony-framed, body-length mirror. The ants were avidly trying to form an image on the glass. Since the surface was smooth, some had difficulty clinging on and fell off.
“Mirror,” Snow White remarked. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me, right? Something to do with a mirror.”
From the floor, ants climbed to the corkboard map. They circled the crown symbol.
“Crown mirror.” Snow White frowned. “You’re losing me. What’s a mirror got to do with – ?” She paused. “Oh. I wonder . . . I just wonder . . . ”
She sank back into her pillows. The ants and ladybugs scurried out of her way. Her eyes wore a faraway look.
“I wonder if I shall do a little sleuthing.”
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sp; #
One of the stars that hung in the deep blue bowl of Bavarian sky was a sun to a planet called Spora.
Its surface was rocky, pitted and harsh, but pockmarked with a dazzling array of golden buildings which resembled silos. One such silo housed a very important chamber called the Redwood Room. It hosted the most precious commodity in the planet: a cut slice of a massive redwood tree.
Aein lay on his belly in the tight crawlspace of the Redwood Room’s air vent. Trepidation roiled in his belly as he raised the irregular piece of pink Rearndt crystal, as rare as trees on his barren home planet. It immortalized images frozen in time – people, places, life and laughter, sorrow and contempt.
Contempt was what he aimed for today.
He intended to immortalize the four perfectly formed Sporadeans who sat around the Table. Their wings beat in a slow, almost lazy tempo, and their bodies were blood red and perfectly muscled. The segments on their abdomen glistened, and they waved three pairs of strong, elegantly serrated legs as they rolled around in mirth. If anyone from Earth were to look upon them, they would have resembled winged insects. They were at least a head taller than a grown man.
Three of the four had no right to be there.
“Come on now,” Aein murmured softly, “nicely does it. Don’t move, you critters.”
One for the road, he thought in satisfaction as he tapped the crystal’s side. The crystal misted like the pupil of an eye clouding over, and turned ruby red. An image imprinted forever.
Desecration of the Redwood Table had its price: public flogging. It was on that very dare that these Sporadeans, Aein believed, casually placed their lowermost limbs on the Table, a major insult to everything it represented. The crystal was evidence, but Aein did not intend to use it that way.