Fantasyland 03 Fantastical (3 page)

“No,” he gritted between his teeth,
releasing me and I stumbled back and hit his horse who moved
slightly into me like it wanted to break my fall and if that was
what it wanted, the horse got it for I didn’t fall. “She was to
sleep at your parents’ and
we
were there to get your lazy
arse out of bed.
Rosa
was not supposed to be
at your
home.
”

Hmm. I wasn’t really fond of being known as
lazy in this world. Sure, I could procrastinate with the best of
them but I wouldn’t describe myself as lazy.

“But –” I began.

“And if she
was
there, which
you
knew she was,
you
should have kept her from
seeing Dash. But you didn’t. You just stood there, gabbing at us
like a fool, you didn’t warn us she was there and when she arrived,
you let her see him.
You
know the curse.
She
did
not.”

That sounded ridiculous.

“Why did I know and she didn’t? That’s
ridiculous,” I informed him.

He glared at me a moment before he asked
quietly, “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone mad?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied because I
wasn’t certain. Everything around me felt mad but I didn’t feel
mad.

Then again, I’d never been mad. How would I
know?

Something about him changed and I watched it
with fascination. He wasn’t any less scary; he was only a different
kind.

“We’re not a love match, we both know this,
but I would never have suspected you’d do that to your sister,” he
said softly.

“We… we…” I couldn’t finish.

A love match? What was he talking about?

“You care for her, deeply, or so I thought.
And if you didn’t care about her,” his face got hard, “we both know
you care for Dash.”

Uh.
What?

He kept talking. “Your feelings for them, my
feelings for them,
that
was why we wed in the first
place.”

Uh.
What!

“Wed?” I whispered.

He glowered at me then warned, “Don’t try
me, Cora.”

“We’re… we’re… you and me… we’re…
married?
”

He leaned his face into mine again and
growled, “Don’t try me, Cora.”

Holy crap!

I was married to this guy?

“So… uh, where were you last night?” I asked
what I thought was a pertinent question, considering he was my
husband and I woke up alone, and his face got even harder.

“You’re trying me,” he stated.

Oh dear. I was trying him.

Damn.

I studied him. He was a big guy. Very big.
Very tall. Very broad. He wore black. All black. He had a scar. His
horse was enormous and powerful. He carried a knife on his belt. He
scared me just the way he could look at me and he had no problem
with shaking me so my head snapped around.

I was thinking I didn’t want to mess with
this guy.

I was also thinking that maybe I shouldn’t
tell him that I was actually not his wife but a single girl who
worked for an ad agency and lived in Seattle. I was thinking that
wouldn’t go down too well.

The problem was, I was in a fantasyland, he
was the only human being around me, I needed him to talk to me, I
needed him to get where I was coming from which was definitely not
here and I didn’t know what to tell him.

What I did know was that it appeared he
didn’t like me too much and so I figured my best bet was not
telling him anything at all.

Which meant I was screwed.

Damn!

“I… I think I need a minute to, uh… get my
head straight,” I told him the God’s honest truth.

We were just inside the mouth of the cave
and the storm and trees outside meant the light coming in was dim
but I saw his hard, glittering, dark eyes examine me, travelling
down my body. They stopped midway and his jaw clenched.

I looked down to see the thin material of
the nightgown, no matter that there was a lot of it, had gone
see-through. I was, luckily, wearing a pair of what looked like
loose, white shorts but up top, there was nothing left to the
imagination.

Double damn!

I grabbed fistfuls of the material in both
hands, pulled it around my breasts and looked back at his face to
see his eyes shoot to mine.

“Uh –” I started but stopped when he took a
step forward while dipping his shoulder. Then that shoulder was in
my stomach and I was up. I grabbed onto his shirt at the back and
shouted, “What are you doing?”

“Quiet,” he commanded.

I yanked on his shirt and kicked my feet.
“Put me down!” I yelled, panicked and wondering what he was going
to do next but thinking I wasn’t going to like it.

I wasn’t wrong.

I felt the crack of his hand on my ass, it
sounded nearly as loud as when he slapped the rump of Dashiell’s
horse but since he did it to me, it hurt… a
lot
.

“Quiet,” he growled but I had already
quieted.

He hit me. He hit me, he yanked me off his
horse, he shook me, he ordered me around, he called me lazy and, I
will repeat, he hit me. So hard it hurt. A lot.

I didn’t like this guy. Not at all.

I felt the stinging in my nostrils that
heralded tears.

Oh man, I needed to get home.

Pure You

He walked me deeper into the cave, not far
but where he took me was damper and darker.

Then he bent at the waist to drop me and my
hands automatically circled his neck because I didn’t want to go
down hard on the shards of stone and he’d drop me hard, I knew
it.

Surprisingly, I needn’t have done this for
his arms curved around my thighs and waist to lighten the fall and
what he put me on was soft.

“You’ve gained weight,” he grunted as he was
straightening away from me.

Great. Just great. In this world I was fat.
Marvelous.

“I’ve got to see to Salem, get wood, find
food. I’ll be back,” he informed me then with no further ado, he
turned and left.

I lay on whatever I was on and looked at the
dim opening to the space that he’d disappeared through. I heard the
horse heave a mighty, shuddering breath through his horse lips and
decided that was his greeting to his master.

My mind was blank. So blank, I had not one
thought by the time he came back. I heard what sounded like wood
crashing to the cave floor then he left again without looking at
me. He came back three more times and there were three more wood
crashing noises. Then he moved around, I heard more wood banging
together, saw the strike of rock against rock and then there was a
weak fire. He moved to the wall of the cave, pulled something down
and went back to the fire. I watched him light a torch then take it
back to the wall and affix it to something. He did this four more
times and the torches, with the fire, meant the space was better
lit. It wasn’t exactly blazing light you could read by but at least
you could see.

And I saw that I was on hides, lots of them.
That was when I realized I was trembling violently. I rolled,
pulled a hide out, saw that under the top, dark hide there was a
bed of what looked like fluffy, cream sheepskins. I crawled in and
pulled the top hide over me and up high, wrapping its heavy weight
clumsily around me as best I could.

When my eyes went back to him, I saw he was
standing with hands on hips, watching me and he didn’t look any
happier than he had before. In fact, he looked downright peeved and
maybe a bit disgusted.

I pressed my lips together because he
freaked me right the hell out.

“Now, food,” he grunted. “If you have it in
you, don’t let the fire go out. Keep feeding it. This would, of
course, require you to move. Try it, you might not find it that
hard.”

Again with the lazy comments. What a
jerk.

Then he turned, went to the mouth of the
space, unhooked something I hadn’t noticed before and then another
heavy, wide hide fell into place behind him, covering the opening
to the space and closing me in as I heard his muted boots hit the
loose stone outside indicating he was walking away.

I took in a shaky breath and pulled my wet
hair out of my face.

“Okay, okay… think,” I whispered as I looked
around and tried to control my shivers.

The space was small. There looked to be a
makeshift table with stuff on it against the wall. There was a pile
of the wood he’d brought in on the floor next to the table (lots of
wood, apparently he could carry a heavy load or there was some
there before). There seemed to be what looked like weapons on the
wall, two swords, some others that looked like long knives and
other lethal-looking bits and pieces. There was a fire pit in the
middle of the space and I tilted my head back to look up to the
ceiling and saw a small, natural hole where the smoke could get
through. I found this curious, seeing as no rain was coming in and
I could still hear the distant thunder but whatever.

When I got control of my shaking, I pushed
the hides back and decided to explore. I noted the stone floor in
this space was smooth, not the loose rock of the outer area. I went
to the mouth of the space first and touched the hides. Cow, I would
guess. A bunch of them stitched together to make a panel wide
enough to cover the opening.

After this, I went to the table and saw a
pile of animal bones on the floor beside the table. Obviously, this
space was well-utilized and although it was unhygienic, not
discarding the bones, at least the pile indicated Noctorno was
tidy.

The table had a bunch of stuff on top and a
shelf under it. The stuff on top included a long-handled frying
pan, what looked like a rough, rudimentary coffeepot or kettle, a
tin (which I picked up, opened, sniffed and happily smelled the
strong aroma of coffee grounds), a jug (upon sniffing, I noted was
water), a bottle (sniff test: whisky), a cup, a bowl and a spoon,
fork and knife.

The shelf under it held a bunch of iron
rods, their use I didn’t know.

I wandered around but except for the hides
on the floor (which, upon closer inspection, I saw were also
stitched together and the sheepskins were lying on a bed of long,
dried grass which was another reason why the whole thing was so
soft) there was nothing else to discover in the room.

I walked to the fire and stood beside it, as
close as I dared, and held out my nightgown in an attempt to dry
it.

“Right… now… what do I do?” I whispered,
moving front to back, side to side by the fire shaking my nightgown
and thinking.

I went to sleep at home. I woke up here.

Maybe I should go to sleep and I’d wake up
at home.

The problem was, I was far from sleepy.

“
I’m getting married to the man I love
today, Aggie! Isn’t that marvelous?”

Rosa’s happy voice entered my head and I
closed my eyes tight.

I’d fucked up. Big time. Of course, I had no
way of knowing it but those around me, including Noctorno, Orlando
and her beloved Dashiell (not to mention, Aggie, who I hoped was
okay) didn’t know that.

And now Rosa was gone. Disappeared with one
of those
things.

I shook my head, opened my eyes and walked
to the wood. Grabbing a stick, I moved back to the fire pit and
carefully placed the split log on it while talking to myself.

“Don’t think of that. Don’t think of Rosa,
of Aggie, of Dashiell. Think of how to get home. Think of how to
get the hell out of here.”

I went back to the hides and tucked myself
in, staring at the fire and thinking.

What could I have done? How did I get
here?

I sifted through recent memories and all I
knew about how this kind of shit happened in the movies.

I had not made a wish for a fairytale life
from a weird fortune teller vending machine at a creepy magic
store. In fact, I’d never been to a creepy magic store mainly
because they were creepy.

I had not accidentally bumped into,
therefore ticked off, anyone strange-looking, like a magician with
white gloves and a top hat or a gypsy with long hair and flowing,
jangly skirts.

I had not happened onto any object, say a
magic vase or an enchanted crystal, and taken it home.

I had not sat by the light of a full moon on
the banks of the Puget Sound and wished for a more exciting life
surrounded by angry hot guys and birds that talked.

I hadn’t done any of that.

So why was I here? This stuff didn’t happen
outside of the movies.

And yet it did because here I was, in a
cave, in a nightshirt, with no shoes and a hot guy who apparently
hated me that I didn’t like all that much either out finding us
food.

Time wore on and I kept feeding the fire as
I continued not to think of the sweet, singing Rosa being swept
away, wondering if Aggie had been hurt, maimed or even worse while
getting caught in that wind or contemplating why the Cora of this
world married someone she clearly didn’t get along with while
harboring, it would seem, a crush on her sister’s fiancé.

Instead, I wracked my brain to figure out
what to do next.

Nothing came to me.

What I did notice was that the wood Noctorno
brought in was very dry. It went up like tinder and to keep the
fire going I was using a lot of it. Not to mention, he’d been gone
a long time.

But the wood was dry, it was also split so
someone had prepared it, so he hadn’t gone out into the rain and
gathered it. And he didn’t have to go very far to get it so perhaps
there was a stash somewhere. And if he was gone much longer, the
supply he left me would be gone, the fire would go out and he’d get
pissed.

I didn’t like him pissed (which seemed to be
his only emotion) so I didn’t want to make him
more
pissed.

Therefore, since I needed something to do,
and I didn’t particularly relish freezing to death in this world
(or any world for that matter), I decided to see if I could find
the wood stash.