Faetal: A New Adult Fantasy Dark Prince Romance

by Deiri Di

  "I hear the Prince is making it difficult for his betrothed again," someone said behind her. "Pulled in his little human hussy."

  Mari started to turn, but Chase pushed her along, away from the people who were gossiping.

  "Ooo, I bet Lady Silvia just wants to rip her to pieces!" another voice cried out in response. "Remember that time she caught him with her handmaiden?"

  "You don't need to listen to that," Chase said, dragging her away.

  He pulled her out of earshot before she yanked her elbow out of his grasp. "Why not?" Mari said. "It isn't going to hurt me to hear that the Prince has chosen me over some spiteful elvish witch. She tried to kill me!"

  Chase sighed and took a step towards her. "I should get you back to the Palace," he said. There was no feeling in his words, just a depressed tone that weighed his voice down.

  Mari moved backward away from him, evading his grasp. "I'm not done yet!" she said. Her back bumped into what felt like solid metal bars, stopping her.

  Chase's eyes went wide, and he looked at something over her shoulder.

  "Mari," he said. "You need to come here. Right now." There was a tense note in his voice, and he held a hand out for her, eyes still fixed on something behind her.

  Mari felt a warm, foul breath on the back of her neck.

  She started to do what Chase asked, sliding her foot forward when she saw a pearl horn out of the corner of her eye, jutting out over her shoulder. She knew what that meant. Mari whirled around to see her attacker.

  "Run, Mari!" Chase shouted out over the noise of the market.

  Mari came face to face with a horse whose white skin sparkled in the sunlight. Big blue eyes stared at her, and centered above them was the horn that looked like it was made out of mother of pearl, just like her necklace. The unicorn nickered at her from its cage before reaching through the bars to nuzzle her cheek.

  "Well, aren't you pretty," Mari said. She reached up and began scratching its forehead, all around the base of its horn. The unicorn bobbed its head up and down as she scratched, loving the attention so much that it almost clobbered her with its horn in its enthusiasm.

  "Need a job?" The elven merchant said from the booth next to the cage. His booth held several smaller cages stacked on top of them, filled with exotic animals. He kept a wide berth from the unicorn's pen. "My last virgin came in this morning like nothing was wrong and got himself eaten. The fool thought he could go to a brothel and think the unicorn wouldn't notice."

  "What?" Mari said. "Eaten?" She stopped scratching the unicorn's face. It pushed its nose against her motionless hand, trying to encourage her to start up again.

  Chase stepped closer to her and grabbed her by the shoulder. "Come on, get away from-"

  The unicorn screamed a nasty bellow that sounded like it should have come from an ogre or a goblin, not a delicate equine. It opened its mouth to reveal four massive canines, teeth meant for snapping bones, not grass stems, and rows of smaller, equally pointy carnivore teeth. It snapped through the bars as Chase pulled her away. Mari could tell it wasn't trying to bite her; it had eyes only for Chase.

  "I'll give you five percent of sales profit!" the merchant said.

  "Can we move on now?" he said.

  Mari nodded, still looking at the unicorn. It wasn't what she was expecting. The beautiful horse was only beautiful on the outside; it was all teeth and meat breath on the inside. It probably used that beautiful horn to gore its prey.

  "Ten? How about ten?" the merchant yelled after them as they left.

  "Why didn't it attack me?" Mari asked. She instantly regretted the question, realizing the answer as the last word left her lips. Her cheeks burned. She wasn't stupid; she just didn't always think things through before saying them.

  "Look at these, aren't they pretty?" Chase said, the tips of his ears pink as he changed the subject. He pointed at another booth, filled with an array of swords and daggers. None of the weapons were what Mari would have described as pretty. They didn't have jewels or letters carved in the handles or blades. The majority had handles wrapped in tight leather and edges that shone, devoid of etchings on every "special" sword on the cover of a fantasy book.

  Mari laughed.

  Of all the booths with the dragon egg and carnivorous unicorns, magic wands, and potions, the one he wanted to look at was the one with swords.

  The pink on Chase's ears became a darker shade.

  "We don't have to look at them," he snapped, turning away from the booth.

  "No, no!" Mari protested, grabbing his arm with both of her hands. "Let's go look at the knives."

  "They aren't just knives," Chase said, letting her pull him back over to the booth. "They're made by the finest blacksmith in the city!"

  Mari started laughing again, harder this time, leaning her forehead against the side of his shoulder. "You know which blacksmith is the absolute finest?" she giggled into his sleeve. Mari knew it didn't deserve that much humor, but for some reason, the thought of him obsessing over weapons made her think of just a regular teenage boy, and that tickled her funny bone. Chase didn't fit in with his family at all.

  Mari finally stopped laughing to find that Chase's arm was stiff as wood in her hands. She stopped leaning against his shoulder and looked up at him.

  His jaw clenched, and it looked as if he was tensing every muscle in his face in an attempt to keep them from moving.

  "What's wrong?" Mari asked, still keeping her grip on his arm. "Are you alright?"

  "I'm fine," Chase said, his voice not agreeing with the statement.

  Without thinking, Mari hugged his arm to her chest, an instinctual move of concern and affection. "Are you sure?" she asked. "Cause you look-"

  "I'm fine!" Chase insisted, panic in his voice. He yanked his arm free and took several steps back. "Let's go look at the bookseller. That should keep you busy so you can stop being an idiot!" Chase's voice was several pitches too high, and the tips of his ears were still not back to their normal color.

  His insult was too strained and weak to upset Mari. It sounded like he didn't mean it.

  Mari fell silent, following behind Chase as he worked his way through the crowd. He didn't turn around to look at her, just wove his way around clumps of elves, trusting that she would follow in his wake. She did. It was easier than walking next to him and letting him get a good look at the blush on her face.

  A hand covered her mouth.

  An arm wrapped around her waist, and she was dragged back into the crowd. She tried to scream, but the muffled sounds didn't attract even a side glance from the busy shoppers. Within moments her assailant pulled her out of the market and into an alley.

  A tingle ran down her spine, and the arms released her. She surged forward, a shriek pealing out of her mouth as she tried to run back to the market, back to Chase. Someone tackled her from behind, taking her down to the ground. Her face ground into the dirt of the alleyway as a knee pressed into her back, forcing the air out of her as her arms were wrenched up behind her.

  Another tingle ran through her.

  "You fool. You can't put her to sleep using magic. Remember? It's the whole point she was chosen. If it failed the first time, casting it over and over won't make a difference." A voice said, somewhere off behind her. She twisted under the weight of her captor, trying to see their faces, trying to take in enough air to scream again. The person kneeling on her back dropped one of her arms and grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling her head up. She could see people bustling in the marketplace in front of her but couldn't turn to see her assailants.

  The hand in her hair slammed her face down into the dirt again. The impact stunned her, but not as much as the pain that shot through her nose. She cried out. She didn't much like her nose, but it would look a whole lot worse if they broke it. The thought brought tears to her eyes. Here she was, attacked, about to be killed, and she was worried about her looks.

  Mari wrenched one of her hands free, trying to claw at her attacker's face.
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  "If he can't find her, he can't win," a woman said.

  "He'll know where she is," the man who held her down said, forcing her free hand down. He bent her elbow until her wrist was next to the one he held contained. He wrapped his fingers around both of them. At that moment, Mari felt genuinely helpless. Chase had been right to tell her she was weak. She couldn't even free herself when both of her arms were being held by a single hand.

  "Yes, and he'll come," said the woman. "When she gets killed in the rescue attempt, there won't be any reason to call foul. The kidnapping will be ignored, and he will lose. It will be a clean victory."

  Mari felt the weight of the man on top of her shift, and she struggled again, trying to use the change to knock him off of her.

  Instead, his fist came down into the back of her head.

  [ 10 ]

  Mari woke to blackness. At first, she thought something was covering her eyes, but as her fingers touched her face, she realized that she was in a place devoid of even the slightest bit of light. She sat up in a panic and cracked her head against something hard. Mari cradled her skull and felt around her. Cold hard rock - there was a ceiling so close that she couldn't even sit upright.

  Mari slid her hands out to the side, and before they fully extended, they met the curve of the wall as it slid up to connect with the ceiling.

  Mari crawled on her hands and knees for no more than a yard before her hands met something other than hard rock. Solid wood blocked the path in front of her. She ran her hands across it, feeling for something, anything to help her get it open. There were no handles. On one side were hinges, metal screwed into stone. It was a door of some sort, maybe her only way out.

  In the center of the small wooden door was the outline of a rectangle. She ran her hands along it, realizing what it was for. It was a way for her captors to push things into the cell without opening the door. There was no way for her to open it from her side.

  Mari turned around with some difficulty, scraping her elbows on the wall as she moved through the tight space. She crawled backward, holding one hand out in front of her as she looked for the other end of the cell. It didn't take long for her to find it, a smooth wall that closed off the end of the coffin-shaped enclosure.

  Claustrophobia closed around her, and her fingers scrambled over that back wall, looking for something, anything. What if they just decided to leave her down there? She would slowly starve to death, trapped in a space with nothing but her excrement. For the first time since she came to the Fae land did Mari think that maybe she had made a horrible mistake. She ran off with a total stranger, leaving her friends and family behind just so that she could have a storybook romance.

  Her hand started to reach up on its own, to grip at the necklace Vladmir gave her, but she forced it down. Vladmir promised her he would protect her, and instead, all he did was ignore her, leaving the job to someone else. Now she was going to die in a hole, and her father and Cathy wouldn't even know what had happened to her. They would never know any of it.

  As she dwelled on those dark thoughts, her head began to ache. Her rage and self-pity pushed past the familiar dull pain until it was nothing more than background noise.

  She felt ashamed. She had been selfish to run off like that. No matter what Vladmir meant to her, she should have taken a moment to think of her parents. Instead, she didn't. She was so upset that her mom canceled the trip, like she always did, time and time again, that Mari blamed Cathy unfairly. In blaming Cathy, she also blamed her dad for taking his chance at happiness with her instead of working day and night to win back her unreliable, poor excuse for a birth mother. If she ever made it out of this, she would owe them one heck of an apology.

  How horrible it would be not to know what happened to your daughter, have her vanish into the night, and never hear from her again. What they must be thinking! Her father would wake up every morning thinking that maybe that day the doorbell would ring and she would be there again. There would be nobody to bury, no closure when they finally gave up the last of their hope.

  Mari took a deep breath and let sobs wrack her entire body. She sat, crouched over in the tunnel, her hand pressed against the back wall, and cried, allowing the self-pity and unhappiness to work its way out of her.

  As she cried, she began to hit her hand against the back wall, hard enough to hurt. The pain distracted her, numbing the hurt she felt inside of herself. She hit her hand hard enough to bruise, trying to drive the rest of her despair away with a newer, more manageable source of agony.

  Mari collapsed to the floor, still crying. Her elbow wedged down into a depression, a hole that disrupted the smooth surface of the floor.

  Mari sat up. Wiping tears from her face, she pulled her elbow out of the small hole, scraping the skin on her arm as she did it. She felt along the hole. It was about the width of her hand, too small for her to fit through. She was about to stick her hand down into it and feel around some more when she caught a whiff of the smell rising out of it.

  She reeled back. At least they didn't expect her to sit in her filth. Even though the cell was small, cramped, and didn't allow her to stand up, it still had a slot in the door to give her food and a hole in the ground so she wouldn't have to pee in a corner. If they were going to let her die in there, why provide her with anything at all.

  Mari crawled back into the middle of the cell. She didn't allow herself to break into tears again - it wouldn't help anything. Crying wouldn't help her think.

  She wrapped her cloak tighter around her, taking comfort in the simple pleasure of not being cold. She pressed the fabric against her face. It had that heady bread smell, the pleasant scent that belonged to only one person she knew. It must have been Chase's cloak, lent to her for the excursion. Mari smiled and pulled it closer.

  Her hand reached up, and this time made it to the necklace.

  It would be better if the cloak smelled like Vladmir, her mind insisted.

  Mari ignored that thought and continued thinking. She realized that the cloak wasn't the only thing they left her. They left her with her entire outfit, including the boots. She felt down along her ankle.

  They hadn't searched her.

  Mari tucked the knife back into her boot. She was dressed in a sturdy outfit, not a flimsy dress, had good boots she could stomp on feet with, and had been left with a weapon. Now all she needed was an opportunity.

  Mari lay down in the dark close to the door, trying to think of a way she could overpower a jailer when she couldn't even stand up.

  #

  Mari woke up to the sound of metal clashing on metal, a faint sound that she could barely hear through the thick rock walls of her cell. As she blinked, she remembered where she was and started to focus on what was going on around her.

  Vladmir had come for her.

  Then she remembered what her captors said before they knocked her out. When the Prince came to rescue her, they would make sure she would die in the process. She knew she couldn't stick around long enough for that.

  She slipped the knife out of her boot. She knew it would be almost impossible for her to take the jailer by surprise. Even with a weapon, she would still be defenseless; these people lived in a more violent world than she ever dreamed of and would be able to handle a teenage girl with a knife she didn't know how to use. Mari knew she had to come up with a different plan. Heroines in her books didn't sit still and cry, so neither could she.

  She felt along the door, hoping she would find something. As her fingers stroked the hinges, she smiled. The hinges, the screws, they were all on her side of the door.

  Mari jammed the edge of her dagger into one of the screws and tried to twist it. The screw didn't budge. She put more pressure on, and the blade slipped to the side, clinking off the rock wall.

  She put it back into the groove on the screw, gritted her teeth, and twisted until every muscle in her arms and back screamed from the strain. The rusty screw gave a small fraction.

  Mari smiled, stopping
for a moment to give her arms a rest and to wipe her sweaty hands off on her pants. Then she put the dagger back and continued to twist.

  As it moved, the screw made an awful groan, rusted metal protesting abuse. Mari paused, holding her breath. She pressed her ear against the door, listening for shouts, for any indication that someone noticed the noise.

  She heard nothing.

  Four rusty screws and one duller dagger later, and Mari had the hinges disconnected from the wood of the door.

  She pushed against it, and it didn't move.

  Mari rolled on to her back, planting her feet against the door. It still didn't move.

  The self-defense book that Chase had her read had a tidbit of information that surfaced in her mind. She turned on her side. When she kicked her foot out at the door instead of kicking straight, she twisted her leg and her hips, putting the extra torque of her body into the blow.

  The door gave, scraping along rock. The side that she disconnected from the hinges had moved out, letting a slice of light into her cavern.

  Instead of kicking again, Mari moved closer to inspect. On the other side of the door, opposite the hinges, was a metal bolt that kept it attached. Her blow had bent it a little, just enough for the hinge side of the door to be peaking out into an open hallway.

  Mari planted her hands on the wood of the door and pushed it to the side. She slid the broken door, moving the bolt out of its hole as the door moved sideways at an angle out into the hallway itself. She wrapped her fingers around its side, and with one final push, it fell open.

  She was out!

  She stretched, finally able to stand in the hallway. It was lit by dim torches, but even so, it took her eyes a few moments to adjust to the sudden light. The hallway itself was carved out of stone. Wooden doors, like the one she just vanquished, no bigger than small shields, lined the hallway. They rose from the floor in three rows, coffin-like prisons stacked on top of one another. It was an efficient way to keep a large number of captives if you didn't care about their physical or mental well being.